Columbus, Georgia
The strip that runs outside Ft. Benning, Home of the Infantry, is called “Victory Drive.” The soldiers call it “V.D. Drive,” a reminder of what one stands to catch from spending too much time off-post. Among the chicken’n’shrimp shacks and no-tell motels, you see tomorrow’s warfighters, or, as they’re now called, peacekeepers, frequenting Tattoo Tommy’s and Ranger Rags military surplus and, on weekends, dropping into the Lucky 7 Lounge to enjoy the dance stylings of Brandi and Flame and Raven. Amidst all the low-rent squalor is a strip mall that houses Army, Navy, and Air Force recruiting stations. Their offices are scattered among a Jazzy Girlz exotic dancewear retailer and a plus-size lingerie shop. At first, the juxtaposition seems a sad joke. But on second thought, the strip-mall occupants seem to have plenty in common: They’re not afraid to abase themselves with cheap sales pitches, and they’re desperate to appear sexy.
Of all the services, the Army is the most desperate. Recruiting has not been easy in recent years, and though there are any number of plausible explanations — from the end of the Cold War and declining defense spending, to the soaring economy of the 1990s — the deeper one, everyone seems to agree, is that the Army is suffering from an identity crisis. In true bureaucratic fashion, the Army seems to have concluded that it is simultaneously too tough and too soft.
What to do? Reinvent yourself. In the new Army, training is easier and friendlier, but they pretend everyone is a warrior. Thus the decision of the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, to appropriate the black beret of the elite Army Rangers in order to share it with the rest of the troops, even the “desk molesters” in Ranger-speak. Thus the new slogan and recruiting campaign, the colossally unpopular “Army of One.” And thus the invention of programs like the one I traveled down to Ft. Benning to witness, in which non-combat lieutenants, men and women, are being rotated through infantry officer training, ostensibly to inject them with warrior spirit.
Anyone who subscribes to Elaine Donnelly’s Center for Military Readiness newsletter can give you a convincing disquisition on how the last decade saw Bill Clinton and his civilian appointees turn the Army into a Nerf version of its former self. From the assistant secretary Sara Lister, who was run out of town for calling Marines “extremist,” to former Army secretary Togo West, who launched programs like COO (“Consideration of Others Training”), the leadership saw to it that troops were sensitized as often as they got haircuts. And as recruiting got harder (the Army missed its goal three out of the last five years), the culture grew softer. Even former defense secretary William Cohen — whose military career consisted of one day in ROTC — admitted that coed basic training lacked rigor. Meanwhile, after downsizing from 18 to 10 divisions, money is still scarce. As one angry Ranger tells me, “Because you have no money, you can’t train, can’t go on deployments, can’t even afford to buy bullets. But because you have no money, you have plenty of time to do more Consideration of Others Training — because we’ve got to feel good about things. Hey, you know something?” he thunders. “The time for feeling good is over. We’ve got problems.”
It’s enough to make you pity Army recruiters, who despite resorting to $ 20,000 enlistment bonuses and free Pentium laptops have been experiencing what marketing types call brand erosion. This is why departed Army secretary Louis Caldera, as his last official act in January, unveiled the new recruiting campaign “An Army of One.” Though the Army’s 20-year-old self-actualizing paean “Be All That You Can Be” was ranked by Advertising Age as the second most memorable jingle of the century (less popular than McDonald’s “You deserve a break today,” more popular than Brylcreem’s “A little dab’ll do ya”), the slogan had long ago stopped attracting new recruits.
Two years ago, when Caldera first expressed his intent to cashier the old slogan, he criticized “Be All That You Can Be” for being “about you personally, as opposed to serving your country.” His was a spot-on critique of a pervasive military recruiting bias. Save for the few and proud Marines, who, even in a bullish economy, have met their recruiting goals for 56 straight months by selling courage and fierceness (Marine recruiting stations feature chin-up bars on which recruits can test themselves), the services have skimped on the duty-honor-country sales pitch in order to push everything from 30-day vacations to discount shopping at the commissary.
Ironically, Caldera’s solution seems to compound the old slogan’s selfishness quotient, without retaining much of its gung-ho elan. Caldera, of course, had plenty of help. The “Army of One” campaign is the product of a spate of research, everything from an Army-commissioned RAND Corporation study to focus groups conducted by the service’s new blue-chip advertising firm, Leo Burnett, which interviewed over 500 youths to find out their perceptions of Army life.
After coaxing and cataloguing the Ritalin generation’s perceptions, the prognosis wasn’t good. The researchers, said Caldera, “told us we didn’t have an Army brand.” Sure, the Army had won two World Wars, solidifying our country’s status as a superpower and insuring an era of unprecedented prosperity — but what has it done for us lately? The 18-24-year-old target demographic, which bears close resemblance to viewers of the WB network (where the Army of One now advertises), thought of the Army as a cold, faceless institution, filled with barking drill sergeants and other authoritarians who, like, tell you to wake up early and stuff. Worse still, the Army doesn’t allow you to express your individuality. It is, in the words of the Leo Burnett gurus, seen as something that “depowers” rather than “empowers.”
As a result of such research, faster than you could say “Yo soy el Army” (or “I am the Army,” the Spanish-language version of the ads), Caldera became the caricature he had once criticized. At the January 10 roll-out, he was no longer singing the song of selfless service, but telling reporters that kids “want to know, ‘How does the Army benefit me as an individual today?'”
With a budget of $ 150 million, the Army’s new ad campaign has received unprecedented exposure. When George Orwell noted that “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm,” he probably had no inkling that such ruffians could be rounded up with ads run in the likes of Seventeen magazine. But there are, as the campaign reminds us, “212 ways to be a soldier” — aside from the dreary business of killing people and breaking things. The new Army of One is, in fact, an Army of Fun. As Elaine Donnelly noted, while the Marines website expresses traditional militaristic sentiments such as “One must first be stripped clean. Freed of all false notions of self,” the Army’s website has a “cool stuff” link, where you can paint tanks, missiles, and other cool stuff in your choice of festive colors.
While there are several television spots, the most visible shows a corporal Richard Lovett, slogging all by his lone-some through the desert with flashing dog tags (an excellent way to attract sniper fire) as his troops head in the opposite direction. It’s not clear if he’s going AWOL or about to make a kamikaze charge. But the voiceover intones “Even though there are 1,045,690 soldiers just like me, I am my own force. . . . And I’ll be the first to tell you, the might of the U.S. Army doesn’t lie in numbers. It lies in me.”
Active-duty soldiers have decried the new campaign as being antithetical to everything they’ve had instilled in them since basic training: cohesion, teamwork, subordination of selfish interests to accomplishing the mission. In Army Times forums, soldiers almost universally pan the new campaign, going so far as to suggest replacement slogans like “Be a Man, Join the Marines!” Meanwhile, an Army Times focus group with Virginia teenagers found they largely “got” the new campaign, though one sophomore grew skittish watching Lovett haul his heavy rucksack across the desert: “I just think it’s way too physical,” he said.
Army brass brush aside such criticism, saying they’re not trying to appeal to active-duty soldiers. As a measure of their success, they point to the exponential spike in traffic to their goarmy.com website, where curious prospects can watch “webisodes” of “real” people going through “real” basic training at Ft. Jackson, S.C. (coed training that has reputedly gone so soft that critics now call it “Camp Jackson”). The webisodes, it turns out, are sillier than the ads. Trainees are informed the only way they’ll flunk the run is if they walk; they are coddled while awaiting inoculations. A drill sergeant, hoping to allay the fears of recruits who’ve endured too many Full Metal Jacket viewings, tells the camera, “We believe that it’s okay for soldiers to have fun.”
But while the website’s traffic has surged, there’s no evidence of an influx of recruits. When I call Col. Kevin Kelley of the recruiting command at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, he admits that this year, compared to the same three-month time period last year, has actually seen 200 fewer recruits. Maybe this is attributable in part to critics, both liberal and conservative, who have savaged the campaign for selling recruits a bill of goods — that the Army will reshape its ethos to conform to lax contemporary mores. These critics, however, have it exactly backwards. The campaign is scandalous not because the Army is falsely indicating that it will change, but because it is truthfully advertising that it already has.
No better evidence of this exists than a recruiting tape I secured from Ft. Jackson, which predates the Army of One campaign. The tape is intended to disabuse recruits of the notion that drill sergeants are bellicose, authoritarian figures. One two-star major general featured in the video says the Army’s old message was (sternly crossing his arms), “Prove to us that you’re good enough to be a soldier and we’ll let you in our Army.” The new message, apparently, is we want you in our Army even if you have no business being here. The video features people that look a bit like drill sergeants (they still wear the Smokey Bear campaign hats), but not like any you’ve seen in the movies. One doughy, Ranger-Rick looking fellow wears thick glasses and is about 15 pounds overweight. He tells us that “the days of overbearing abusive drill sergeants are long gone,” as drill sergeants are now “committed to [recruits’] success.” Sounding like a bad telemarketer, he adds, “Basic combat training is a positive experience that I am proud to be associated with.”
In another scene, a muscled, barking drill sergeant is following a frail recruit through the obstacle course (now called the “confidence course”). In the old Army, basic training was intended not only to transform civilians into soldiers, but to replicate, on a diminished scale, the stresses of combat. Those stresses were channeled in the form of the vociferous, semi-abusive drill sergeant. But if the Ft. Jackson video is any indication, we’d better hope that tomorrow’s enemy is more nurturing than the Nazis or North Vietnamese. Because on the confidence course, the steaming, spitting wall of menace wearing the Smokey hat is no longer screaming epithets or reprimands. Instead, he yells at the recruit, “I’m gonna take care of you! If you don’t give up on yourself, I won’t give up on you!”
Like most Army inanity, this strain can be traced to a black-and-white directive. As Stephanie Gutmann shows in her recent book The Kinder, Gentler Military, TRADOC 350-6 (the Training and Doctrine Command’s policy for initial entry training) is a recipe for handcuffing drill sergeants. Not only must every soldier be treated with “dignity and respect” (trainees must now be called soldier), but any activity that is “humiliating, oppressive, demeaning or harmful” is banned. Hemingway once said, “War is a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.” TRADOC says, “stress should be positive and oriented toward attainable goals.”
It’s enough to rankle the likes of John Hillen, a defense analyst who took leave of the Army around the time the Army started taking leave of its senses. “In their clumsy, hackneyed way,” he says, the Army continually “falls all over themselves to show they’re just like IBM in different uniforms.” After a decade or so of leadership that came of age in post-Vietnam America — the scorned-puppy era of soldiering — Hillen says, “There’s very few [leaders left who] will say, ‘Hell, yeah, I’m different, and if you can’t cut it, you can’t serve your nation and work for me.’ That’s the message the Marines get. But the Army message is ‘Gosh, I’m sure there’s a convenient meeting point halfway. We’re not gonna stress you out too much, but it’s gonna be a little different from high school — we’ll pay you for instance!'”
Even other services have taken to ridiculing the Army. When I visited the Navy recruiting station off V.D. Drive, a burly recruiter giggled until his shoulders shook. “Army of one what?” he asked. “Those who are in it for honor and killing people join the Marines. If you wanna see the world, and have a sense of adventure, you join the Navy.” And who’s joining the Army? The recruiter grins, referring me to a recent announcement that the Army might start recruiting high school dropouts. “The people the Air Force and Navy won’t take,” he says.
On a sleepy, sunny morning out in the pine barrens of Ft. Benning, I am standing in a hangar among men any service would be honored to claim. The Army’s 4th Ranger Training Battalion is producing some of the military’s fiercest warfighters, who possess the strut that comes from internalizing the Ranger creed: “A more elite soldier who arrives at the cutting edge of battle, by land, sea, or air. . . . My country expects me to move farther, faster and fight harder than any other soldier.”
As they strap on their jump gear and apply their warpaint, there is little whooping or showboating. Instead the Rangers go about their business with quiet confidence, as if every workadaddy in America spends his Saturday morning waking up, downing coffee, then stepping off a C-140 to drop 1,300 feet onto the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River. Since the mid-1970s, the Rangers’ distinguishing symbol when in garrison has been the black beret. While Airborne wore maroon berets and Special Forces green, the black beret for three decades has been the Rangers’ alone.
To those outside the brotherhood, it may seem a silly hat. But it is part of the reward system that is the coin of the realm in what author and former Navy secretary James Webb calls “the socialist meritocracy” that is the military. Hillen explains it like this: “Your average Ranger makes about one-third what a dental assistant makes, under a lot worse conditions. But for that sacrifice, you’re supposed to get the berets, the ribbons, the greater glory, and the nation’s profound gratitude. We don’t shower accolades on the REMFs [rear echelon m — f –]. That’s how you get paid; your lid is your payment. But if everybody gets one — what the hell? I might as well be a dental assistant and sleep in a bed every night. This is the bargain, the contract, the covenant between you and your country. And now, with the dumbing down of martial qualities in the military, the covenant is being violated.”
In no instance more so than with Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki’s announcement last October. To boost morale and to signify the transformation of the Army into a lighter, more lethal fighting force, the entire Army — even the desk molesters, he decided — were now going to wear the black beret. To add insult, Shinseki’s deadline of June 14 (the anniversary of the Army’s founding) meant that American manufacturers couldn’t meet demand, so the berets would be manufactured in part by factories in China.
The blowback was fierce. Retired Rangers marched to Washington and filled the Internet with flame. A bipartisan outcry went up on the Hill; Dan Burton promised hearings into the Chinese connection; George W. Bush threw chin music to Shinseki, indicating he should rethink his decision. But hardly a peep was heard from active-duty Rangers — partly because a gag order was issued by their commanders, partly because they are good soldiers. As one told me: “If the chief of staff told me to wear a clown hat, that’s what I’m gonna wear.”
The matter seems to have been settled in March when their regimental commander, Col. P. K. Keen, announced that the Rangers would gladly switch from their traditional black to a new, tan beret. Says a civilian source with knowledge of the delicate negotiations, “The Army called and begged Keen to save their butts. He could’ve stayed out of it and let them get decapitated. Or he could do what Rangers do, step in front of a bullet intended for Shinseki.”
As a result, Sgt. Major Jack Tilley, the highest-ranking enlisted man in the Army, has announced that new battalions of black beret wearers, instead of possessing near heroic warfighting capabilities, or enduring grueling, year-long training regimens, will merely have to pass a “rites of passage” test. What the test entails isn’t clear. When I called Tilley’s spokesman, Master Sgt. David Schad, he said it will include a written test on the history of the Army and “likely more,” though he’s not exactly sure what. When asked what will happen if soldiers don’t pass the test, he says, “They’ll be re-tested.” And if they don’t pass the re-test? “We’re not talking about graduate-school level sorts of things,” he says.
Talking to the Rangers at the Saturday morning jump, with a public affairs shadow on my arm, I hear mostly affected nonchalance over the beret controversy. “We’ll be proud as always,” shrugs Raphael Colondres, Command Sgt. Major of the 4th Ranger Training Battalion. “It’s not in a piece of cloth,” he says, pounding his chest. “It’s what’s in here.” But given the cover of anonymity (“Don’t use my name, they’ll send me to Korea”), other Rangers seethe.
While Shinseki is willing to spend $ 26.6 million on feel-good hats, the Army is coming off at the wheels. As the Washington Times’s Rowan Scarborough discovered in a leaked memo, 12 of the Army’s 20 combat schools were graded as being at the lowest possible readiness levels. Ft. Benning, like most bases, is a wheezing ghost of its former self. In the base’s shabby Infantry Hall, tiles periodically pop off the ceiling, and employees bring in vacuums from home because they can’t afford the janitorial service enjoyed by third-tier elementary schools. Even the elite Rangers get enlisted into self-help construction projects for which they use their own tools. For their troubles, they’re rewarded at “excellence ceremonies” — with commemorative coasters. “Quite honestly,” says one, “we’re broke.”
Another active-duty Ranger, who meets me off-base, resembles Orwell’s fabled rough men, a cinder block on legs with a high-and-tight haircut. Like many Rangers, he is upset over the berets. “You don’t stick hats and badges and all this crap on people. The way you make people better is you force them to become better. You put them in situations that are hard and tough.” While the Rangers haven’t engaged in public debate, the source says of his buddies, “They earned this thing. They fought for it on the beaches of Normandy, through the jungles of Burma, and here we’re ready to give it . . . to Joe E. Bagofdonuts. That hat means lives.” Shinseki’s beret directive, says the Ranger, is symptomatic of a larger breakdown of the warrior culture. Call it warrior-norming, where tip-of-the-spear soldiers are devalued, and their lessers are elevated to equal status. “We get these kids now that say, Sergeant, you can’t do this, it’s against my rights. . . . This garbage has got to stop. You take a hood ornament off a Cadillac and put it on a Pinto, it’s still a Pinto.”
Though the “Army of One” and beret flaps have caused great consternation, a quieter, more alarming experiment is being conducted at Ft. Benning’s infantry officer training. The Infantry Officer Basic Course (IOBC) is one of the Army’s most important, training lieutenants with little experience to lead platoons in combat. (Not for nothing do seasoned platoon sergeants say, “There’s nothing more dangerous than a 2nd Lieutenant.”) Ft. Benning, which is also the home of Airborne and Ranger schools, provides what’s generally considered the most rigorous training in the Army. Benning’s combat-arms status means women, prohibited from serving in the infantry, aren’t around to prompt the relaxing of standards that the rest of the Army has seen since basic training went coed in 1993.
But the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command has nonetheless selected Ft. Benning for the incubation of another hare-brained scheme. At first blush, it seems harmless. TRADOC has decided to carve out the first 7 weeks of the 17-week Infantry Officer Basic Course and call it the Basic Officer Leader Course. In this “pilot program” (which one high-placed source assures is “not just a test, it’s the future”), non-infantry soldiers, everyone from quarter-masters to finance officers, including women, will mix it up with infantry officers. After seven weeks, non-infantry types will take off to their other military occupational specialty schools, with infantry officers resuming IOBC. In the meantime, the non-groundpounders will supposedly pick up leadership qualities, get shot full of hooah, and happily develop into the new “Army of One.”
It could be argued that it’s not a bad thing for combat-support types to be introduced to those they’re supporting, in the hopes that the warrior ethos will rub off before they return to molesting desks. But that neglects a more important consideration: Does learning to play with others for 7 weeks in an already packed 17-week schedule compromise the training of future combat leaders?
There was an early indication that the answer is yes even in the planning stage of my visit. I arranged to drop in during the middle of the seven-week course to witness some of the more dynamic exercises, such as the bayonet assault and water confidence courses. But the night before I left, my assigned public affairs officer (PAO) informed me that the training cadre had cancelled both events. “Why?” I asked. “Because of rain,” she said. (Both days ended up cloud-free.)
Entering the Infantry Officer Basic Course headquarters, my PAO in tow, I meet the man in charge, Lt. Col. John Carothers, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 11th Infantry Regiment. Carothers asks me to join him at his office conference table, and immediately he proves likeable, with a lopey, laconic gait that belies his slightly menacing George C. Scott-ish mien. His office walls are decorated not only with the Infantry Leader’s Prayer, but with sabers and machetes and other instruments of death, picked up in far-flung places like Panama, where Carothers also picked up a Bronze Star during Operation Just Cause.
A career infantryman who sports a Ranger tab, Carothers has been in command for a little over a month, and he’s been tasked with executing TRADOC’s pilot program (scheduled to be fully operational next year). If he’s not 100 percent supportive of the program, he sure does a masterful impression — an impression most officers are adept at when conducting interviews with public affairs officers weighing their every statement. In fact, with all the blinking and awkward pauses, the entire exercise can make the interviewer feel as if he’s dropped into an interactive hostage video. When I ask the colonel if there’s a danger of training being softened to accommodate non-infantry officers, my PAO interjects before Carothers can answer. The first seven weeks “are more elementary skills,” she says. “It was explained to me as crawl, walk, run.” Carothers grins: “We’ll definitely be crawling,” he says. “That doesn’t mean a standard’s being diminished,” she helpfully offers. Sure doesn’t, agrees Carothers. But when asked what those standards are, he concedes, “We’re experimenting with what the standards are going to be. For this test, we’re not gonna fail anybody.”
Carothers admits Army training involves a bit more hand-holding these days. “When I came in” in 1983, he says, “my leaders told me, you take one in the chest, you’re gone tomorrow, there’ll be somebody to replace you. I accepted that. I’m a professional fighting man.” Carothers, in fact, seems almost nostalgic for his Ranger school trainers, who woke him up at 4 A.M., turned over wall lockers, and made him file outside undressed as they kicked rocks and screamed at him. “It tickled the heck out of me,” he says, offering that though the Army does decidedly less of this today (“We’re getting smarter”), he had wanted it tough. “I think that’s what the kids want. And sometimes we turn them off with some of the what-do-you-want, do you want an Army of One?”
For a moment, Carothers seems to be careening toward the electrified perimeter of the Army reservation, but he makes a nice recovery. “I think [this program] is gonna pull the Army together — Army of One, all wearing the same hats, see how it comes together,” he says with hostage-video timing. “I honestly believe this program is gonna be awesome.”
Perhaps so, but what I observe over the next few days would be enough to give any hardened combat leader pause. For one, a high-placed source tells me that the Army Research Institute is monitoring the program at TRADOC’s behest and will make recommendations to “make the course more beneficial” to non-infantry officers. This can only mean less training critical to infantry platoon leaders and more generic “leadership” training. For another, women, who’ve historically been forbidden to serve in the infantry, are present not only as students (13 in this cycle) but as instructors who by definition have no infantry experience.
The result is a PAO’s nightmare. At the base pool one evening, the newly gender-integrated Charlie Company lieutenants who have failed the combat water survival test (a series of swimming exercises done in full gear) have turned out for remedial swimming. Soldiers are required to show up in their swimtrunks, before taking up floaties and kickboards and whatever else they need to help them stay above water. The trainers of Charlie Company, who include Capt. Elizabeth Smith (on loan from Ft. Bliss), are horsing around. One flirtatious male sergeant questions Smith’s choice of blue toenail polish. “They match my shorts,” she exclaims.
As the cadre play verbal footsie, students arrive late, as casually as if they’d only missed the cucumber sandwiches at a ladies’ tea. But there is no yelling and no demand for push-ups. After all, as I’m repeatedly told, this is an officer’s course, a “gentleman’s course.” As the non-swimmers file into the shallow end of the pool, a male cadre member explains that female trainers are here to help male infantry trainers understand the fairer sex. “For example,” Capt. Smith joins in, “issues may arise. Last week, we held guys up under their bodies to try to get them to swim. It may be an awkward situation for a guy to do that to a female or for a female having a guy do that to her. So they just bring us in and make it a little bit easier.”
Such situations are commonplace in a coed platoon, which is why Carothers won’t even entertain the notion that Army brass may be experimenting with an incremental approach to working women into the infantry. “I just can’t believe there’s a conspiracy out there to emasculate the infantry,” Carothers says dismissively. “It’s too important, what we do.”
After Capt. Smith has explained the new leadership dynamic, another uncomfortable situation arises poolside. A female lieutenant announces she is having her period, and is unsure if she should participate in remedial swimming. One of the lifeguards approaches a knot of cadre, saying, “If a female is on her period, she can’t get in the water, right?” “Why not?” I ask. “Because of bleeding and AIDS?” he offers, asking as much as informing. “I want her in the pool,” says Smith, who possesses a robust big-sister femininity, no-nonsense enough to make her male counterparts like her, feline enough to make them think she’s a hottie.
Lifeguards and cadre go scrambling for a black binder filled with OSHA regulations. They hash out the possible downside of blood in the water. They consult the unhelpful, six-inch thick book of regs. Smith finally wins the argument, and the lieutenant gets in the pool. The lifeguards seem confused. The lieutenant seems disappointed. The cadre seem unconcerned, as one male sergeant ambles up to Smith, noting the low-cut back of her swimsuit. “Is that a tan line?” he inquires. “It’s none of your business,” she exclaims brusquely. “Why do you ask?” she says, this time more gently.
Approaching another male cadre member, I ask him to give me his take on the good order and discipline of the mixed-specialties Charlie Company. “Be politically correct,” one of his fellow trainers warn. When asked his name, he says, “I don’t have a name sir, I’m a ghost.” I ask him what differences he sees in this new form of infantry officer training. “We’re not chewing their asses,” he says. “There’s a lot of people holding back, trying to lay off the cuss words and not say something that might get us in trouble.” Is this a unifying, morale-building exercise? “The soft skills pretty much know right now that no matter what they do, they’re gonna pass the course. But for [infantry officers], there’s a standard. When we say, ‘Soft skills, there’s no standard for you, but infantry has to pass with this,’ morale is let down.”
A few days later during morning PT (physical training), 3rd platoon has taken the field in their knit hats and sweatsuits for rigorous intervals of timed push-ups that Capt. Smith calls “Bulgarian bursts.” “Did she say ovarian bursts?” asks one female lieutenant. As the troops do push-ups in rapid 30-second cycles, one of the females has called it quits. She lies flat on her belly, barely nodding her head. “These are modified push-ups,” she explains, employing the verbiage of the Army’s PT double standards. “Yeah,” says a disgusted infantryman, “it’s called ‘not doing them.'”
A little later, the lieutenants are lined up to do sprints. When one soldier jumps the gun, platoon Sgt. Jim Litchford explodes, “Get your a –” but he doesn’t finish his thought. A 15-year veteran, Litchford is called “Old Army” by some students, but he offers a feeble “Get back there” to the stray lieutenant. “Give me a push-up,” he says for good measure.
“A push-up?” I later ask Litchford, incredulous. I tell him that, though I’m no triathlete, I’ve had tougher football coaches. In fact, I’ve had tougher tennis coaches. The clearly agitated staff sergeant’s jaw muscles pulsate, as if to suggest I don’t know the half of it. But he explains how the new system works: “I think a lot of cadre feel like they’re walking on eggshells, trying to keep from hurting [trainees’] feelings.” Litchford says the only tool he’s permitted to use to get trainees’ attention, even when they engage in eye-rolling insubordination, is “counseling.”
After PT, Lt. LaToya Porter, serving a two-day rotation as a student platoon leader, is stressed to her gills. Looking confused and asking questions of cadre in hushed tones, she has forgotten to inform her platoon of the packing list for an extended bivouac, for which they are supposed to leave in just two hours. It’s a fairly significant lapse, and as the platoon falls out of formation, a prior-service lieutenant who served in Special Forces calls the platoon together for a profanity-laced group ass-chewing that the cadre, walking away resignedly, seems unable to give. Sensing he may have gone overboard, he tempers his tongue-lashing with, “I don’t mean to step on anyone’s dick — or whatever you got out there.” “Hey!” says one female lieutenant in protest.
As the platoon heads back to their barracks to collect their gear for the three-day deployment, I make the acquaintance of Lt. John Prine, who spent 10 years as an enlisted man before going to Officer Candidate School and whose experience extends back to Desert Storm. Prine has an idea of what infantry training should look like. And as I follow him back to his room, where he offers a breakfast-choice of Pepsi One or Busch beer while taking a pinch of Copenhagen and medicating his socks with Gold Bond powder, Prine eviscerates the new program.
The course, thus far, he says, has been what Snuffy Joes like him call a “C.F.” (cluster f –). When he went through enlisted basic a decade ago, he thought the strap on his helmet was “just for the drill sergeant to grab. Now, they can’t even curse at you. It’s too laid back, there’s not a consequence behind screwing up.” Prine’s platoon-mate, Lt. Michael Trujillo, who also has prior service, adds, “As an infantry officer, you’ve got to be pretty tough, pretty bad-ass. It’s a challenging job, and if somebody’s gonna die, you’re gonna be responsible.”
Both men catalog a litany of exceptions that wouldn’t be tolerated in regular infantry officers’ training — they hope: bringing the troops in from bivouacs because of rain; allowing them to bring extra possessions to stash in a group duffel bag instead of limiting them to what they can haul in their ruck; timid cadre delegating disciplinary authority to assertive students; nearly non-existent PT (“I’m in worse shape than before I came here,” says Prine).
“It’s hurting the infantry soldiers. It’s taking seven weeks out of our training,” Prine adds, echoing sentiments I hear repeatedly from students and cadre who say that most infantry skills touched upon in the seven weeks will have to be revisited. “The cadre’s hands are tied,” says Prine, defending the one-push-up demands of Sgt. Litchford. “They don’t want too many bad after-action reviews [in which the students offer written comments about trainers]. These people bitch about stupid shit. They write ‘Sgt. Litchford hurt my feelings when he yelled at me.'”
Consequently, says Prine, “Every time we do something, we have one of the cadre explaining why they acted a certain way, did they get on us at all, if so, they’re sorry, take it as constructive — all this touchy-feely, stroke-your-feathers, making-you-feel-worthwhile. We had an after action review Tuesday night, and I said, ‘I really don’t give a damn why you’re doing this. I’m here to be trained. You chew my ass, I screwed up, I’m not going to do it again. You stroke my feathers, and it’s not that big of an ordeal. F — all this wasting time . . . telling me where you’re coming from. I don’t give a damn. Train me! Let’s go — we just wasted two hours talking about it.'”
I remind Prine that this is supposed to be a “gentleman’s course.” “If I wanted a gentleman’s course,” says Prine, “I would’ve accepted a medical commission and been out on the golf course by noon everyday.” Just then, his phone rings. It’s Lt. Porter, still stressed from that morning’s meltdown. Prine sounds as if he’s talking her off a ledge: “You’re doing good. . . . You’re not ate up. . . . Got a long day. . . . Take a shower. Relax. Put your hair up.” Prine suggests we move out to the next formation. We’re already five minutes late, but he asks me to count how many of his 33-member platoon I see assembled. Thirteen, I reply. “Pretty scary, huh?” he says.
By the time I leave Benning, I have worked Lt. Col. Carothers over for hours, but haven’t moved him off his willfully naive statement of faith, “I believe the Army line.” As we tear down the base’s red clay trails in his Jeep, off to a grenade range not unlike one where he once caught shrapnel in his knee, Carothers flawlessly applies camopaint to his face without benefit of a mirror. The discussion we’ve taken up is general Army readiness, which by all accounts is at record lows. After getting pushed a little more, Carothers finally breaks character. Perhaps he is tired of not speaking his mind, or perhaps he is fatigued by a creampuff civilian reporter trying to sound like some high priest of hooah. Whatever the case, his eyes grow fiery, his back stiffens, and his words come out with a steely evenness, at once comforting and unnerving:
“I know what right looks like, and right now ain’t right. Historically, the American people are ready to pay for non-readiness with the blood of their children. They aren’t willing to fork out the bucks for a large standing Army that’ll do the things they want us to do, and that’s gonna cost them their sons and daughters. But that’s okay. If that’s what they want, there’s guys like me. I will go stand on the Bataan peninsula and fight. I’ll stand in the Pusan perimeter without good weapons or squat for support. Guys like me, we’re gonna stand, and we will not let the infantry erode. My philosophy is the men we train are gonna some day take my sons to an unfair fight.”
No need to take them anywhere, Colonel. In the new Army, they’re already in one.
