While I’d been a yearling, my father had served as the Operations Officer (G-3) of the Third Marine Division, located in Okinawa, Japan. Call sign “Warlord.” He went a little crazy. Drank the way they used to drink back in the 1960s and 70s and kept a full-time in-house mama-san35 among many other personal indulgences. He remained one of the best operational planners in the Corps, but his time at Special Operations Command had put a serious dent into whatever commitment he’d once had for “clean living”. By himself overseas, my father degenerated into a legitimate party animal.
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| Dual Meet: Army at Harvard, 1994. |
He came home and was made a member of the Naval War College’s Strategic Studies Group (SSG), a senior field grade think-tank tasked with studying the world on an open-ended basis in order to decide how warfare would evolve in the next century. My folks settled into a beautiful bayside brick house on the War College grounds in Newport, Rhode Island, and for a while, my father and I even read some of the same authors for professional purposes. But although I think my dad enjoyed his time in the SSG, he was poorly suited to the tasks he’d been assigned.
Dad was a talented, intuitive, inspirational leader, but he had no innate interest in academia and was not particularly good at pretending that he did. As an infantry commander in the field, he had few peers. Stuck in a group of critical thinkers serving in an academic environment led by a former United States’ ambassador, however, he was well outside his comfort zone. He enjoyed traveling the world with Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces officers, meeting thought-leaders and talking shop with retired generals, but I sensed that he was ill-at-ease with the basic nature of his responsibilities. He liked to read, sure, but he didn’t much like to write, and in the SSG, he was stuck in an environment where technical papers were a core deliverable. He could hold his own in a discussion of complicated topics as part of an open-ended military briefing, but he was in no way suited to being the lead staff writer on a white paper covering those same topics, all other factors aside.
My dad could kill a man with his bare hands, but he couldn’t spell for shit.
What was worse, though, was that he returned from Okinawa a changed man. I’d rarely seen him drunk before his last tour overseas. After his return, however, he never missed a weekend of partying. My friends and I enjoyed my father’s hospitality tremendously the year that my folks were in Newport, but the changes in Dad’s personality could be jarring to those who’d known him a while. He was no longer the rock star that he’d been in the fighting part of the Marine Corps, nor was he in any way certain what he wanted to become next.
* * *
Cow year felt very different from my first two years at West Point. We were committed to the Army for a minimum of five years once we entered our first day of classes, and this could not help but inform the mindset of many cadets, myself included. What had once seemed ridiculous was now very real, a fact that had been brought home by my three weeks at Airborne School. Though Airborne was not overly rigorous when compared to life at the Academy, it was still much more like the Regular Army than West Point was day-to-day. This was especially true in the sense that Airborne School demanded competence more than spit-and-polish bullshit. Sure, Airborne instructors wanted to see a certain amount of spit-and-polish as a sign of professionalism, but what they really wanted was the attention of their students, who needed to learn to follow instructions and use life-saving equipment in a potentially lethal environment. That was serious, but then, so was the business of the Army. By contrast, the Academy often sought to make the minute and unimportant seem like it held life-and-death importance. The contrast drove me crazy, especially in my first two years. Cow year saw less of it, though, especially since the Academy itself was no longer trying to turn me into a mere soldier. Now it was now trying to make me a leader.
I felt the change most keenly on the swim team. I was conscious as a cow that there were two full classes below me, that I’d become one of the guys who needed to set the example for others of what it meant to swim at Army. My actions had to demonstrate what an Army Swimmer’s work ethic was supposed to be. I was never the fastest swimmer at the Academy, but I brought my best self to practice every day, especially in my third year. Swimming hard as an example to others meant something to me, and when some of the then-plebes followed me into History and then into Armor Branch, I felt like I’d had a positive influence.
That was the job. That was why I’d gone to West Point.
A class called “War and Its Theorists” changed my perspective on the military. Colonel Conrad Crane36 taught the class, introducing Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and others to a new generation of American warriors. For a class on theory, COL Crane kept it surprisingly down-to-Earth. We talked at length about the men whose writings we studied, and that helped us understand the conditions that had created the epiphanies their works sought to encapsulate. It turned out that Clausewitz had started his military career as a twelve-year-old drummer boy, and that his work had been informed by a lifetime of trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to defeat the French armies of Napoleon. As the semester wore on, we began to discuss the evolution of small unit tactics, finally alighting on the tactics of the First World War. We discussed the evolution of small unit infantry tactics, from massed regimental formations to fire teams moving in bursts under cover of machine gun fire. In a flash of insight, I understood why the American infantry squad was organized as a pair of four-man teams and why the Squad Automatic Weapon was such a brilliant military innovation. I realized what the previous two years had been trying to teach me about infantry tactics one drop at a time and, more importantly, why I’d needed to learn those skills in the first place. I knew—suddenly—that I was not only committed to the Army, but that I actually wanted to join. This created a strange, upside down kind of moment, and for the next few days my head spun. I cursed the last two years, feeling that I’d wasted an unrecoverable gift through poor motivation and poorer attitude. I resolved to be a better cadet and to become the kind of officer with whom my father would have wanted to serve. I knew that this was a high standard, but for the first time in my life, I found that I actually wanted to learn what the U.S. Military Academy had to teach me about the Army itself.
I couldn’t help thinking back to Brian Blaylock and the conversation we’d had on the pool deck after our last race at Easterns my yearling year. He’d been trying to explain this to me, to tell me that there were more important things in the Army-Navy rivalry than just beating Navy. This was why he could wish me the best and mean it, and it’s why I’m sure he went on to succeed in the Marines.
I’d been lucky in my life to have had a lot of very positive male role models. I hadn’t expected that one of them would turn out to be an arch-rival from Navy, but there it was. Sometimes we learn the best lessons in the damnedest places.
36. Colonel Crane would later become a noted war theorist himself, co-authoring the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine during the Surge in Iraq.
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