From Chapter 1

Reception Day

In case of Sudden and Temporary Immersion, the Important Thing is to keep the Head Above Water.—A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Get off my bus!” screamed the cadet in charge.

“You’re not moving fast enough. Move it. Move it. Move it!” We stampeded from the bus like a startled herd of wildebeest, clutching our small gym bags with white-knuckled grips. As we poured into the hot July sunlight, chiseled senior cadet cadre aligned our crooked ranks.

“Left, face.”

Forty eighteen-year-olds turned at different speeds toward another white-starched cadet cadre. We must have looked ridiculous—a ragtag collection of shorts, untucked T-shirts, and long hair.

“Drop your bags.”

They landed on the pavement with a thud.

“You will now begin the administrative portion of your processing. Follow all instructions both quickly and quietly. During this process you will pass water fountains. You are authorized and encouraged to use them. Do you understand?”

I nodded my head with the others.

“Pick up your bags.”

***

July 1, 1996, was stamped on my military record like a wine’s vintage—my “date of initial entry into military service.” As my high school classmates alternated between summer jobs, afternoons at the beach, and summer reading lists, I headed off to West Point, New York. R-Day, short for “Reception Day,” was the first day of a six-week period of basic training. There was absolutely nothing hospitable about this first day of military indoctrination, beginning with an exercise in severing family bonds. After standing in a straggling line of twelve hundred would-be freshmen and their parents, I was herded into the basketball arena with another thirty “cadet candidates.” I had ninety seconds to say good-bye to my parents.

After obeying my first military order, I marched up th ... continue reading >

The Unforgiving Minute is former United States Army Capt. Craig M. Mullaney’s brisk, candid memoir about his education as a soldier. He learned different lessons in different places. As a cadet at West Point he learned to be dutiful, punctilious and unerringly accurate, even about the military method of folding underwear. At Ranger School he learned how to navigate difficult physical terrain and endure grueling tests of mettle. At Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar, he had a teacher who advised: “Read and think. Simultaneously if possible.” At home he thought he had learned how to make his father proud—until that father walked out and never came back.

As a reader he learned from writers as diverse as T. E. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling (from whose poem “If” this book takes its title), Jane Austen and Thucydides. As a traveler he vacationed with buddies, partied heartily and learned that the world is very large. And as an American he was in New Zealand on Sept. 11, 2001, when someone asked if he had seen the news and said, “I’m so sorry.” At that point every lesson absorbed by this soldier in training suddenly took on different meaning.

The Unforgiving Minute is Captain Mullaney’s attempt to reconcile the precombat lessons that seemed so clear to him with the exigencies of battlefield experience. He makes it clear that this is no easy process. ... (Read the full review)

It is hardly surprising that after seven years of war, a number of superb combat memoirs have emerged from the conflict in Afghanistan. One of the best is Craig Mullaney’s The Unforgiving Minute. Mullaney is a recent West Point graduate and a Rhodes Scholar who deployed to Afghanistan as a platoon leader in the 10th Mountain Division. The Unforgiving Minute relates the burden that leaders bear in war and the things war does to them.

When Mullaney initially decided to write this memoir, he did so to preserve memories that were slipping away and to finish a war that, like most combat veterans, he had brought home with him. That purpose evolved into a far more noble quest to “help America better understand its military . . . inspire some to serve . . . and shed some light on operations in Afghanistan that seem to have been largely forgotten by the American public.” In a larger sense, The Unforgiving Minute serves as an attempt to settle some of the debt that Mullaney feels he still owes his country.

Subtitled “A Soldier’s Education,” The Unforgiving Minute could just as easily be called “The Coming of Age of an Infantry Officer.” Throughout the text, Mullaney quotes the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Shakespeare and Marcus Aurelius to dramatize the critical incidents along his personal journey from West Point to Afghanistan and back. The book’s title is extracted from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If,” illustrating Mullaney’s own evolution both as a combat commander and as a man. ... (Read the full review)

Q: When did you start to write The Unforgiving Minute?

A: When I returned from Afghanistan I was assigned to the Old Guard, a unit right outside Arlington National Cemetery. It kept triggering a lot of memories—some of them painful—from Afghanistan and of the folks we had left behind. I wanted to write those things down as a way of taking command of the painful experience, rather than letting it intrude on me when I didn’t want it to.

Q: Has it helped you deal with the things you saw?

A: It helped me come to a degree of closure, and helped me to communicate with the other guys from my platoon. In many ways our memories and recollections conflicted. I was the one person who could sit down with all the maps and radio logs and lay out a chronology. And it gave me a vehicle for opening up correspondence with Evan O’Neill’s parents. He was a private in our platoon who was killed in that firefight just three days after arriving. I had a hard time mustering the courage to speak with his parents, until I finally had a manuscript I could share with them. I went up to visit them in Andover and had no idea how they were going to react. They told me a couple of things. First, they said, It’s not your fault. I can understand that intellectually and rationally, but emotionally it was something that took a lot longer. I sort of needed their forgiveness. Second, they said, Thank you for writing this book. No one is dead until they’re forgotten, and by capturing this Evan’s memory will persist.

Q: You quote Napoleon bragging that he could get men to risk their lives for a bit of colored ribbon. You said you could understand that. Why is that as true today as it was when Napoleon was leading his armies?

A: People seek the esteem of their peers. Whether it’s a medal or a Ranger tab or Airborne wings, they’re signifiers of some accomplishment, an achievement validated by the community. I guess that’s a ... continue reading >