[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 24-26

Outside the Window: May 29, 2009. New York, New York. Cloudy and cool. Maybe some storms tonight.

Inside the Book: 2003. Ghazni and Shkin, Afghanistan. Hot. Tense.

In a 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs, Milton Bearden (CIA station chief in Pakistan between 1986 and 1989) dubbed Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” The Soviets had tried and failed to pacify it. A century earlier, the British fought three costly wars on the same terrain before retreating. Two millennia before that, Alexander the Great barely escaped with his life. Only Genghis Kahn had any luck incorporating the tribes into his empire, and according to Bearden, even he had to make “painful accommodations with the Afghans.” The initial invasions sometimes went pretty well, with foreign armies marching into cities and setting up puppet governments. But then, little by little, ambush by ambush…

This history is much on Mullaney’s mind. A well-trained historian, he sees evidence of it everywhere: from Ghazni’s 12th century “Towers of Victory” to a half-buried Soviet tank. The latter is another example of Mullaney’s keen eye for metaphor: the land can swallow an invader whole. Mullaney implies here and elsewhere that—despite a history of invasions and occupations—no outsider has been able to impose its will on this country, at least not for long. As he points out, “Afghans say Americans have all the watches, but they have all the time.” Read More

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 20-23

Outside the Window: May 27, 2009. New York, New York. Clouds and misting rain.

Inside the Book: 2003. Gardez, Afghanistan. Dust and “one hundred twenty-eight in the shade, sir.”

So far, Mullaney’s portrayal of the military has been almost uniformly positive. His superior officers especially are, to a man, tough and competent. At West Point, Airborne training, and Ranger School, they provided everything he needed, both the equipment and the know-how. In Afghanistan Mullaney confronts scarcity for the first time and, though he never says so explicitly, shockingly poor planning.

He has an Arabic phrase book. The people of Gardez speak Pashto. He can point out the Helmand River on a globe. The riverbeds around his base are unmapped. He knows the top speed of a running camel spider. The native tribes are a mystery. He has only three functional Humvees. A forth, hidden in a shipping container, is good for nothing but spare parts. In order to patrol with more than 15 men, he has to order some of his troops into an unarmored Toyota pickup. He can ask for new parts, of course, but the Army will place his order behind every broken Humvee in Iraq.

Mullaney catalogues these problems almost without comment. He doesn’t want to seem like he’s complaining, but Afghanistan’s status as the second, or “forgotten,” war clearly bothers him. He also hates the way his patrols, so full of sudden terror and frustration, become nothing more than statistics on PowerPoint presentations in Kandahar airbase. But he reserves his real scorn for the “fly-by” visits from civilian leaders and journalists, noting acidly that the cost of a decent meal is yet another round of the same inane questions (“Do you miss home? Is it very dangerous?”). Read More

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 16-19

Outside the Window: May 20, 2009. New York, New York. Sunny and nearly cloudless.

Inside the Book: 2001-2002. Muscogee and Chattahoochee Counties, Georgia. Unbearable heat. Jefferson County, New York. Knuckle-splitting cold.

While reading about Mullaney’s final months of training, I thought of George Orwell—not the middle-aged idealist who went to Spain and fought the fascists in Homage to Catalonia but the middle-aged grump who returned to England and wrote “Politics and the English Language.” In the latter, Orwell argues that vague language has a definite political purpose: it makes the indefensible palatable. Instead of calling (oh, let’s pick an example at random) the act of shackling a man’s arms above his head for two or three days until his legs and ankles swell to grotesque and painful size torture, we might call it an “enhanced interrogation technique.”

I revisited Orwell’s essay because, in The Unforgiving Minute, Mullaney argues that for an infantry officer euphemisms are useful, even necessary. Of the many acronyms he has to memorize, Mullaney writes:

It was a language designed for efficient commands over a radio, but there was another, more serious reason for stripping sentences. The real purpose was to reduce the sensations of panic and fear, to transform confusion into procedural formulas. Reporting “three friendly KIAs” was meant to be less visceral than detailing that Jones, Smith, and Reed were dead and beyond help. … Where people confront chaos and death as situation normal, the ability to constrain panic by procedure and sanitized language was critical to survival and success.

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[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Outside the Window: May 14, 2009. New York, New York. Cloudy and cool.

Inside the Book: 2000-2001. Oxford, England. Continual rains and mists. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Chiang Mai, Thailand. Giza, Egypt. Jerusalem, Israel. Istanbul, Turkey. Crowded and confusing.

I’m now halfway through The Unforgiving Minute, and Mullaney still hasn’t left for Afghanistan. As I read, this began to wear on me. Although his travel writing nicely captures the sheer weirdness of globalization (in Bangkok, “…an elephant walked past sporting a blinking taillight suspended from its tail … one woman who had parked her ox-driven cart on the street came back with a bucket of chicken from KFC.”), Mullaney is a soldier, and it’s his growth as a soldier, not as a citizen of the world, that brought me to the book.

The educational value of his trips becomes clearer when an old man in New Zealand interrupts him in the grocery store with the news that the World Trade Center has been attacked. Suddenly, the world he has sallied out into has come charging back, and with nothing like his obvious good will. In light of the attacks, small moments appear foreboding, even menacing:

Televisions beamed American sitcoms and a Thai replication of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. My favorite was an original Superman cartoon with a slightly altered introduction. Instead of fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way,” the Thai Superman fought for “truth, justice,” and a second of muted silence.

In another revealing encounter, a local man chases Mullaney (a Catholic) and his two friends (both Jewish) out of Malaysia’s national mosque. This is a shame because moments earlier Mullaney had found, in Islam, a parallel to the quiet ritual of his Catholic Mass: “The air inside [the mosque] was cool and clean, a contrast with the choking pollution outside. This was refuge.” Mullaney, I think, is suggesting that both he and the Muslims at prayer are looking for a sense of order in a chaotic world. He can’t communicate this thought to the angry Malaysian, though, and has to leave. Even if he could, it might not help. Mullaney may be interested in understanding, but not everyone he meets is interested in being understood. Not everyone wants to eat at KFC and Starbucks, not everyone wants to adopt “the American way.”

He and his friends began their vacation as “innocents abroad,” a term Mullaney borrows from Mark Twain. By the end of their travels this innocence, about the world and their place in it, is gone. Mullaney understands that all of his preparation (from Ranger School to reading Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars) is no longer academic: “there [will] be boots on the ground—one day, my boots.” I’m eager for Mullaney to get to Afghanistan, but I also see why he’s lingering. He wants to show us that, despite all the warnings, September 11th, 2001, still took him by surprise. I don’t think he thinks he was alone.

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 11-12

Outside the Window: May 14, 2009. New York, New York. Rain again.

Inside the Book: 2000. Oxford, England. Continual rains and mists.

Mullaney’s education changes markedly when, after Ranger School, he reports to Oxford on his Rhodes Scholarship. While his instructors at West Point and at summer training camps tightly controlled his schedule, his dons at Oxford don’t give much direction at all. They’re hard to find, and not especially helpful once found. (“Read and think,” says one. “Simultaneously if possible.”)
He learns more from his fellow students. In the dining hall, Mullaney says,

It was as if I had landed on the planet Scrabble. Matt [a statistician] used words like “defenestrate” and “lachrymose.” Hayden [an M.B.A. student] was even stranger. He combined a Ranger’s command of curse words with Matt’s triple word scores. Dinners with them were verbal obstacle courses, but a complex vocabulary helped unlock complex ideas.

I perked up when I read this because it reminded me of my favorite moment in Joan Didion’s The White Album. The year is 1968, and Didion is reporting from San Francisco State College, where the students have shut down the campus. In that dry, sardonic tone of hers (I’ve always thought “pitiless as the sun” describes her work better than “slouches towards Bethlehem”), Didion dissects the scene:

“Adjet-prop committee meeting in the Redwood Room,” read a scrawled note on the cafeteria door one morning; only someone who needed very badly to be alarmed could respond with force to a guerrilla band that not only announced its meetings on the enemy’s bulletin board but seemed innocent of the spelling, and so the meaning, of the words used.

I love Didion’s notion, admittedly snooty, that spelling a word correctly is a prerequisite for understanding it. Clarity of expression and clarity of thought are inseparable. And not only are our ideas no better than the words we use to articulate them, but the words we know determine what kind of ideas we can grasp and act on. No one, in her mind, who can’t spell “agitprop” could possibly produce it.

At Oxford, Mullaney’s academic freedom results in new perspectives on his education thus far. Mullaney’s Reading Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest “convinced [me] for a period of weeks that West Point had much in common with an insane asylum (and not just because cadets routinely streaked nude during full moons). Oxford, in general, made me much more skeptical of authority.”

—Paul Gleason

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 10-11

Outside the Window: May 12, 2009. New York City. Partly sunny and cool.

Inside the Book: 2000. Lumpkin County, Georgia. Okaloosa County, Florida. Heat and summer storms.

“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” So said Napoleon Bonaparte to the captain of the HMS Bellerophon. He had just lost the Battle of Waterloo and was being ferried from the Ile d’Aix to Portsmouth. The HMS Northumberland then sailed him to St. Helena, where the leader of the Grand Armée ended his life in exile.

Even though it’s a simple statement, it’s hard to know exactly what Napoleon meant. Was he boasting? Remembering his stirring words in Egypt? (“From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us!”) Was he bitter? Mocking the men who followed him to disaster in Russia? (Those poor rubes, they’d do anything to stand out!) It’s a great quote because he tells us what a soldier will do, but he doesn’t tell us why.

When he first references the Napoleon quote, Mullaney mines it for humor. For the “right to wear a two-inch black and gold Ranger tab” on his left shoulder he’s willing to endure “sixty-one days of pain.” The cost and benefit are out of all proportion. Even if, as Mullaney tells us, commanders routinely reject lieutenants without one, the Ranger tab seems like way more trouble than it’s worth. There’s got to be a better reason than “I hadn’t had a choice.”

On Wednesday I got a chance to interview Mullaney and asked him why soldiers today were just as willing to “fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon” as they were during the Napoleonic wars. This is what told me:

People seek the esteem of their par…of their peers whom they respect. Whether it’s a medal or a Ranger tab or Airborne wings, they’re signifiers of some accomplishment, an achievement validated by the community. When I see [a combat infantryman’s badge] on the lapel pin of someone walking around Washington, D.C. there is instantly a connection. Read More

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 6-8

Outside the Window: May 8, 2009. New York, New York. Sunshine at last this morning. Storms again tonight.

Inside the Book: 2000. Orange County, New York. Muscogee and Chattahoochee Counties, Georgia. Sweltering. Humid.

Mullaney subtitles his memoir A Soldier’s Education, and so far his education has been both physical and intellectual. In the classroom, he succeeds brilliantly and wins a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. In the field, though, his education proceeds by one misstep and then another. He wryly opens the sixth chapter with a bit of Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

His first command, a simulated assault on chemical weapons lab, ends with half his platoon dead. Later, while trying to raid an airport hanger, he takes a paintball to the face:
It knocked me to the ground, and blood gushed from the cut it left. Standing over me, my lieutenant rubbed salt in the wound.
“That’ll teach you. Imagine what a real round would feel like if you forgot to look up a stairwell before charging up it like John Wayne.”
“Yes, sir.”

And this is before he gets to Ranger School, a three-week gauntlet of chin-ups, five-mile runs, muddy obstacle courses, and sleep-deprived hikes under 60-lb. rucksacks. Even though it demands near-superhuman fitness, the course tests more than Mullaney’s muscles. Every Ranger has to master the gritty intricacies of infantry tactics: ambushes, raids, reconnaissance, booby traps, and disguise. By the end of the course, Mullaney can spot a sentry’s cigarette at four hundred yards. This all seems eminently practical until Mullaney confesses that no one, not even his instructors, thought this kind of training was valuable for its own sake:

If we could have gotten away with it, we would have rolled our eyes in boredom. Vietnam was our parents’ war. We thought guerilla warfare had gone out of style with the Contras. Even our instructors admitted that the tactics were antiquated. They told us that the ambushes and raids were merely vehicles for testing leadership under stressful conditions. “You won’t actually need to know how to conduct an ambush in Kosovo,” quipped one instructor.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are both more than six years old now, and it’s sometimes hard to remember that the U.S. military ever fought anything other than guerilla wars. It wasn’t so long ago that the kind of warfare we are engaged in now was an afterthought. (We had Powell’s overwhelming force; what more did we need?) As well-planned as Mullaney’s education is, it equips him for the future almost accidentally.

In his speech to Mullaney’s graduating class, then-vice president Gore warns the cadets not to get complacent in a peace-time military. The attacks on the World Trade Towers are still a year away.

—Paul Gleason

Buy The Unforgiving Minute for $1 when you join Progressive Book Club.

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 3-5

Outside the Window: May 7. New York, New York. Still cloudy. Mist this morning. More rain tonight.
Inside the Book: 1996 – 1999. Orange County, New York. Mostly hot.

Now Mullaney’s education has begun in earnest. Along with daily drills, he takes a standard regimen of classes: calculus, chemistry, history, psychology, and English 102. The latter, “Plebe Poetry,” is “designed to suck the soul out of Shakespeare.” The cadets recite Henry V (“we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”), Randall Jarrell (“When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose”), and Macbeth (“To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow”). To earn a perfect eight points, a cadet must deliver an “informed reading with perfect accuracy and pronunciation; appropriate tone and attitude.”

The point, of course, isn’t to compare the two kings as they ready for battle. The point is that, as future officers, they’ll need to memorize reams of rules and tactics. Mullaney knows and has some fun with this: “Comprehension, fortunately, wasn’t graded.” He prefers history class, where his professor, a helicopter pilot, asks him what impact Einstein’s theory of relativity has on the idea of a single historical truth.

His professor’s question is a good one, and it clearly engages Mullaney’s intellect in a way that Plebe Poetry doesn’t. But perhaps Mullaney dismisses rote memorization too easily. Even if only to practice “accuracy and pronunciation,” it’s nice to have a bit of Frost, Roethke, or Larkin at hand. In a subway car too full to read in, they’re sure to be the only other agreeable passengers. Jim Holt is right: memorization is fun, full of pleasures. And chief among those pleasures, at least for me, is paying enough attention to every line to realize something that had escaped notice before. Read More

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 1-2

Outside the Window: May 5, 2009. New York, New York. Cool and cloudy. Rain all morning. More to come tonight.

Inside the Book: July 1, 1996. Orange County, New York. Sunshine. Heat.

“It was appropriate,” Craig Mullaney writes in the second chapter of The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education, “to begin a military career in chaos, noise, and dumbstruck terror.” It’s an appropriate way to begin a military memoir, too. The book’s first words (“GET OFF MY BUS!”) yank us right into the Beast, a six-week basic training course that proceeds the academic year at West Point.

For a dozen pages Mullaney reveals almost nothing about himself. Instead, older cadets shout orders while new recruits, understandably addled, try and fail to follow them. Even the smallest mistake earns a sarcastic rebuke:

“What’s your name, candidate?”
“Craig, sir.”
“Is that your first name?” His eyes widened.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you think I care what your first name is? Do you think I want to be your friend?”
“No, sir.”

For Mullaney, it’s clearly terrifying. Every time he opens his mouth, he gets into trouble. The only way to escape notice is to act like everybody else. As Mullaney realizes, this is precisely the point: “Our purpose was to follow, to obey, and to be formed in the image of our leaders. We had begun our transformation, reduced to a common denominator, at the barbershop.” In these training scenes, Mullaney uses “we” as often as “I.” Read More