A lot of guys stayed in Europe following the staff ride, but I caught a flight back to Rhode Island and spent my time laying on Newport Beach with my girlfriend Marla. Alas, we didn’t have much longer as a couple. She’d decided to head to California for college. We made the most of what we had, however, and we parted without regrets. In another life, our relationship might’ve had legs. At the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, respectively, neither of us wanted anything permanent. We held tight to what we had, though, and if we parted mostly without tears, this was only possible because each of us realized that we had the rest of our lives ahead of us.
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| Leaving West Point in my green Honda Civic. This pic may not do justice to the feeling of having your own car at the Academy |
I left for Fort Drum towards the middle of July. I’d used my Firstie Car Loan to sign up with a bank, and in the process, I’d bought a bright green Honda Civic. The drive upstate took me some six hours, past Syracuse and over the lonely roads of Western New York. The area turned lush and beautifully green, but at times I would go half an hour without seeing another car. I soon realized that the area around Watertown, New York, was even more remote than my mother’s hometown of Shelbyville, Tennessee, had been.
I’d been exiled to the wilderness.
I checked in at Fort Drum and soon met my classmate Bill, one of the genuine badasses of our class, a prior service Ranger Battalion veteran who’d jumped into Panama Airport during the 1989 invasion. The Academy had intended Bill to do CTLT with an infantry company somewhere, but at the last minute his plans had changed, leaving him with whatever assignment slot remained available. This turned out to be a truck company at Fort Drum—with me.
We hit it off instantly. Neither of us had even the slightest interest in truck companies, but we both liked to run. It turned out that Bill had once been a cross-country standout in high school, though he’d not been quite fast enough to earn a scholarship and not quite well-enough-to-do to pay for college in more traditional ways. A long and winding road had brought him to West Point, and if he’d occasionally struggled with the Academy’s mathematics requirements, he’d nevertheless done well enough to expect to branch Infantry in the coming fall. We were both history majors and both eager to explore what we could of the local area. This was more than enough to form the basis of a friendship.
Our company commander turned out to be a single mother who was herself a West Point graduate—and a woman who’d never been married. I’d have thought nothing of this, but she treated the paternity of her daughter like a state secret, turning what should have been a non-event into a division-level cause célèbre. Bill and I heard various theories advanced about her one-time paramour, but as cadets, neither of us was actually required to care. The entire story was little more than an interesting factoid to me, concerning a woman I eventually came to like and respect, but it was also the most consistent piece of gossip we encountered over the course that summer. Everywhere we went, everyone wanted to know who we thought the father of our commander’s daughter was. After a while, it felt like work trying not to show my indifference.
Our new commander set the tone for the summer on the very day we arrived. She went on at some length about the various bars and nightspots located just off-post during her in-briefing, only to conclude with, “…and if you need to be, uh, serviced, the local no-tell motel brings in hookers every Saturday night. Just be sure that you’re careful.”
My mouth dropped open, and so did Bill’s. Of all the things this woman might’ve said, a specific recommendation for a local whore house was the very last I’d expected to hear. We thanked her and left, and from there on out, we knew that whatever else happened at Fort Drum, it wasn’t going to be anything overly serious.
In fairness, the assignment turned out to be a bit more interesting than I might’ve expected. Our company had deployed to Somalia the prior year, and we heard a lot from the various drivers about transportation and truck security. The drivers all talked at length about the effectiveness—or lack thereof—of the fifty caliber machine gun mounting rings that the company had put on the tops of its trucks for runs through “Indian country.” Though our particular company hadn’t experienced an overabundance of security issues during that specific deployment, the troops were none too keen on the way they operated in combat. Fifty caliber machine guns were massively heavy pieces of gear that kicked so hard when they fired that they required great seventy-pound tripods to keep them stable. Against their guns’ massive firing recoil, the company’s flimsy cab-mounted firing rings offered little resistance. The guns themselves were notoriously difficult to aim and keep on target when mounted on those little-ass rings, and worse, the company as a whole got almost no range time to hone their skills.
The concerns those troops raised about the way they operated in relation to the division’s security apparatus served as a harbinger of issues that would become quite serious in future conflicts40. To all appearances, however, no one in the Army-at-large cared at all about truck companies so long as the trucks themselves continued to roll. After all, they’d assigned me there, and I was arguably the worst military cadet in our entire class. Moreover, our truck company’s metrics all derived from equipment availability rates. The company’s leadership therefore focused exclusively on making sure that all of their equipment stayed in good working order. This was laudable, but it left potential security issues utterly unaddressed, issues that the company’s drivers had long since identified as a going concern. With availability as our watchword, Bill and I spent our first weeks learning about the vehicle commitment and dispatch process, working in the motor pool with the drivers, and riding on a few runs to deliver parts and other logistical supplies to units out in the field. We got that stuff down fairly quickly, though, and afterwards our assignment turned into something like an extended vacation.
Fort Drum was not considered a plum assignment in the Army of the 1990s. Long, brutal winters, a remote and supremely rural location, and a super-light table of organization and equipment gave Fort Drum’s 10th Mountain Division everything that the soldier of the 1990s generally tried to avoid. While the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Air Assault divisions retained something like elite status due to their airborne/air assault designations and their affiliation with the 18th Airborne Corps, the 10th Mountain had long since lost its own unique mission significance, though it too was part of the 18th Airborne Corps.
Originally created for mountain warfare operations during World War II, the 10th Mountain served with distinction in the campaign to liberate Italy, accomplishing missions that no other unit in the Army could have even attempted. The division’s modern location, though, put it far from the mountains, leaving it without a true raison d’etre. It retained its familiarity with cold weather operations thanks to its being based in Upstate New York, and this might have given it enhanced significance in a long-duration campaign fought in rugged, wintertime conditions. Such a campaign was certainly possible. However, recent history had made little use of the division’s particular specialization. Where entire operational theaters had been covered with snow and ice during World War II, America’s more recent wars had--as of the mid-1990s--all occurred in far hotter climates.
The division’s assignment to Somalia was exactly the kind of open-ended, off-mission commitment that might theoretically have driven its commanders crazy. The 10th Mountain was deployed solely because it was deployable. The mission itself required none of the division’s unique core competencies, save that it was manned by a bunch of dismounted infantrymen, soldiers who didn’t have a lot of stuff they needed to put on a boat before heading off to war.
Bill and I were lucky in that we were only at Fort Drum for six weeks during one particular summer. Northern New York has always been gorgeous in the summertime. Temperate climates and endless fields of green made the place something like paradise. With at most light duty with our truck company, we—and most of the rest of the cadets on CTLT with us—spent much of our time exploring what we could of the local area.
We started in Watertown, but quickly drove out to Kingston, Canada, and eventually made it as far afield as Toronto and even Montreal. We hit the Hard Rock Cafe in Montreal’s French Quarter before wandering the streets with whatever French I could conjure from the three years I’d taken back in high school and the odds bits I’d used to decipher historical texts as a European History major. We took in a Blue Jays game in Toronto and saw every one of the considerable collection of dance and strip clubs hidden away on the backstreets of Kingston. We even toured Kingston’s Revolutionary War-era fort, talking in historical terms about its design and overall strategic significance. Later, we wound up at a house party on Lake George, and late that summer we met girls at an open air bar back in Newport on a long weekend visit to see my dad.
In all but military terms, that summer was magical.
I somehow walked away from CTLT with a B+ military grade. Thus began the long, slow climb out of West Point’s military basement. By the time I got back to the Academy, I was tanned, rested, and ready to tackle my last Academic Year.
40. My classmate Ray, permanent professor of History and Mentorship at West Point, recommends the 2003 case of PFC Jessica Lynch as an example of the kinds of security issues that worried the soldiers of our truck company back in 1994. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Lynch
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