Every officer a grunt

[thedrifter]

October 03, 2005
Every officer a grunt
Lieutenants learn, sometimes painfully, what it takes to be an ‘officer of Marines’
By Christian Lowe
Times staff writer

The Humvee’s engine labored as it climbed the steep dirt road toward a shack just over the crest. From the gun turret, 2nd Lt. Davis Gooding saw something in the shadows.

“I see an enemy position near that shack!” Gooding shouted, yanking back the charging handle of his M2 .50-caliber machine gun.

The convoy commander, 2nd Lt. Benjamin Kiley, craned his neck in the passenger seat but didn’t appear to see what Gooding had spotted.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Clang!

Gooding fired off three rounds from the .50-cal. before the weapon’s blank-fire adaptor separated from the barrel, clanging to the hard-packed dirt road.

“Holy s---! I frickin’ broke the blank adaptor off!” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

Kiley rolled his eyes as the enlisted driver and another enlisted instructor in the back seat shook their heads in disgust, turning to look out the left-side windows.

Gooding kept yelling: “Did you see that! I frickin’ broke the blank adaptor off the .50-cal. Look how far it flew!” as his fellow lieutenants rolled by in their vehicles, some chuckling at the lieutenant’s enthusiasm over the broken weapon.

“Have you ever played that game Halo?” Gooding asks a reporter riding with him in the Humvee. “This is just like it.”

But this is not a game. This is The Basic School, the place where new second lieutenants learn the skills required to lead an infantry platoon in combat.

It is more than “officer finishing school” to the lieutenants of Officer Candidates School Class 186 and their fellow officers training in the woods of Quantico, Va., The Basic School is a necessary waypoint on the road to Iraq. With the war looming over the horizon for most, the new lieutenants are looking beyond this six-month course and on toward the “real” Marine Corps.

The lieutenants of Fox Company, Basic Officer Course 06-05, still have a lot to learn. It is September 2004, and in little more than a year, many, if not most, will be headed to Iraq or Afghanistan. The relentless days of practice in the field and hours of study in the cold classrooms of Heywood Hall will teach things about the Corps and its ways that they never knew existed. It will also push them in some cases beyond their ability to cope.

It’s an introduction to the real Marine Corps, but it’s not really the Marine Corps. The Basic School has the feel of a college campus, replete with late-night drinking binges, love affairs, missed classes and the forging of lifelong bonds. But there’s also a seriousness of purpose here.

And if the newly minted officers aren’t aware of that seriousness from Day One, the lieutenants’ new commander had a sharp rebuke. “You’re not at college anymore. You’re not in a fraternity. You’re not in a sorority. You have not ‘arrived’ either,” warned Col. Jim Laster, the stern commander of TBS, as he addressed the lieutenants on their first day. “I’ll reserve the right to call you ‘officers of Marines’ until you graduate.”

Their duty toward enlisteds

One of the first things you learn at TBS is that the school doesn’t teach you to be a Marine officer. Rather, the aim is to teach the new lieutenants to be “officers of Marines.” The subtle difference lies in the notion that leading Marines is a privilege.

Throughout their classroom studies — about 60 percent of their time at TBS — the officers are reminded of their duty toward the enlisted Marines they will lead and their responsibility to uphold the traditions and values of the Marine Corps.

The instructors and the lieutenants’ “staff platoon commanders” — captains who serve as mentors, advisers and disciplinarians for each of Fox Company’s six platoons — drill into them the notion that a career as a Marine officer is about serving the enlisted Marine.

“This school is not about you. … You owe it to that lance corporal to be the best Marine officer you can be,” Maj. Todd Bottoms, the commander of Fox Company, told a room full of lieutenants. “We are brothers and sisters in arms.”

The first few weeks of instruction at TBS are packed with history lessons, land navigation courses, terrain model construction classes and lessons on how to write combat orders — a task that will be an unending source of frustration for many of the student officers throughout the training.

The lieutenants spend a lot of time on the basics of rifle company tactics, techniques and procedures during the first two months of training. Everything they will be expected to do in the field during larger-scale exercises is drilled into them in 932 hours of classroom time. But most have a hard time keeping their attention up in class. Late nights of study — and partying at the many watering holes in the Washington area less than an hour’s drive away — keep many fighting off sleep during the day.

“I never really liked class that much,” said 2nd Lt. Almar Fitzgerald, a member of Fox Company’s 2nd Platoon who graduated OCS with Class 186.

But “brilliance in the basics,” as the instructors like to call it, is learned first in the classroom, and not paying attention there can draw sharp rebukes and poor peer evaluations in the field.

Beyond the tools of the rifle platoon trade, the officers at TBS learn another skill more important than map reading or radio operation. More than one-third of the instruction, both in the classroom and in the field, is geared toward teaching the lieutenants how to be leaders. The lieutenants hold company billets, including platoon commander, squad leader, executive officer and student company commander. This is really their only test of leadership because there is little direct interaction with enlisted Marines at TBS — it’s not like there’s a platoon of grunts standing by to be ordered around by a bunch of boot lieutenants. Leading real enlisted Marines won’t come until they’ve hit the fleet, so practice at TBS is essential preparation.

But leading your fellow classmates isn’t easy. They’re officers, too, so ordering them around comes across as a bit counterintuitive.

“I tried to play the nice guy,” recalled 2nd Lt. Victor Sosa, also a Class 186 grad who trained alongside Fitzgerald. “One time, we were on the defense and I had to get everybody to dig fighting holes. That’s no fun at all,” especially during the cold Quantico winter, when the ground is frozen through and rock hard.

“If you have a subordinate that knows they’re subordinate, then it’s easier,” Sosa added. “Problem is, while you’re leading your peers, you’re also leading your friends.”

Looking for direction

Sosa’s difficulties didn’t end there. While much of TBS is spent in the classroom, the lessons the officers learn at their desks and behind the sand tables are just prerequisites to the work they’ll have to do in the field. Sometimes, the exercises can have hilarious results. Other times they can be downright dangerous.

Ask anyone who’s been through it and they’ll tell you: At Quantico, you’re going to get lost. Hours are spent teaching the lieutenants to navigate with a map and compass and they’re expected to know their exact location at all times. During patrols or other maneuvers, instructors question the lieutenants on their position, faulting them for checking their maps and compasses too often.

“You keep looking at that map and your compass like that, they’ll think you’re lost,” Capt. Bobby Danzie, 2nd Platoon commander, told 2nd Lt. Andrew Wimsatt during a squad patrol.

Other times, the field work can be a comedy of errors.

During a nighttime field firing exercise, the platoons were split into two groups. One group awaited its turn to fire M16 rifles and M249 Squad Automatic Weapons, spraying tracers in glowing arcs through the blackness of Range 305. Meanwhile, another group stood in line to work with night-vision goggles.

Strung out along a twisty path through the woods, the lieutenants bumped and tripped their way through thickets, over fallen trees and under low-hanging branches. Arms waving in front of them like extras in a low-budget zombie movie, the students tried to keep their cool and maneuver the route — all while the enlisted Marines helping out with the exercise stood bent over with laughter at their bumbling. Yes, it was the lieutenants’ first time using NVGs. Yes, the goggles are less than perfect. Yes, they’ll get more practice at TBS and at their military occupational specialty schools. And yes, this is just training. But it’s still a kick for the enlisted Marines supervising the event to see the officers so vulnerable.

Sometimes, however, the exercises can get deadly serious.

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For Sosa, officer training was his first opportunity to handle a weapon. Qualifying on the rifle range was hard enough, but the pistol proved nearly disastrous for his future in the Corps.

He did just fine on the range — he’s no ace with a 9mm, but he’s passable. But his lack of experience with weapons and his unfamiliarity with the M9 Beretta pistol got him in big trouble.

“They made us safety our weapons and remove the clips,” Sosa said. “I had forgotten that the M9 automatically loads one into the chamber so I forgot to eject that one, too. We were dry firing and I pointed the weapon downrange and pulled the trigger and it fired.

“They wanted to roll me to the next TBS class for the error,” he said.

But with some intervention from Capt. Lee Kuykendall, his platoon commander, and a demonstrated promise that he’d learned his lesson, Sosa was allowed to stay.

“Any more of those and I would have been gone. It never happened again,” Sosa said.

In most cases, though, mistakes during training are forgivable — and usually expected.

During an urban patrolling exercise at the FBI Academy’s “Hogan’s Alley” facility at Quantico, 2nd Lt. Patrick Amalfi learned that things can go downhill fast under fire. The urban training facility is strikingly realistic. A movie theater, a motel called the Dogwood Inn and a coin-op laundy line the streets, their English-language signs offering an unusual counterpoint to the Marines playing local “Arabs” for the exercise, who were clad in dishdasha robes and native headscarves.

Rounding a corner just ahead of a row of town houses abutting the laundromat, Amalfi’s patrol came under fire from a sniper in one of the town house rooms on the second floor.

His squad hit the dirt, some firing, others frozen. It was time for Amalfi to lead, but he wasn’t.

“Someone get some fire on that building!” he yelled finally, as one of the lieutenants made the sound of gunfire, shouting “bang, bang, bang” with his SAW (even blanks were off-limits that day because a “high-ranking government official” was mountain biking on the base; President Bush reportedly likes to ride at Quantico, but there was no confirmation that this time it was him).

During the post-exercise debrief, Amalfi was told he’d lost control of his forces. He had taken too long to inventory casualties and ammo. One “wounded” lieutenant sat along the side of the road for minutes before a medic was called.

The incident stung Amalfi, whose dream job in the Corps is to be an infantry officer.

“God, I didn’t do so good, did I?” he wondered, shaking his downturned head with disappointment. “What should I have done better?”

Fitzgerald had a similar experience at Quantico’s urban combat range.

As Fitzgerald’s fire team burst through the door of a building, several of his men were peppered with paintball rounds. Fitzgerald was plugged in the head.

“Man, that hit me really hard,” Fitzgerald said.

Making fast friends

The relentless classroom schedule, the tests, cold days and nights bivouacked in the woods — all drag morale down like a ball and chain.

“It’s really hard to manage your time. The hours are really long,” said 2nd Lt. Eric Armstrong, another veteran of Class 186 from Las Vegas. “I kinda miss OCS.”

But the long hours forge friendships. For the men and women of Class 186, that is particularly true. Some from the class — the lawyers, mostly — went back to college after OCS to finish their degree programs. But the men of 4th Platoon who went directly on to TBS stuck together, eschewing their new platoon comrades, growing closer and closer as they withstood the rigors of life as second lieutenants.

And like any fraternity, there was a lot of partying.

Students at TBS live in a series of cinder-block buildings called O’Bannon Hall. There’s an officer’s mess dubbed the Hanson Room for meals; the small, intimately appointed Hawkins Room serves as a cocktail lounge for the young lieutenants to blow off some steam after a hard day in the field.

But no one goes there.

On any given Friday, Amalfi, Sosa and Fitzgerald joined fellow Class 186 lieutenants Dan Boyle, James Brame and Michael Milliman in a caravan of cars bound for Washington, D.C., for a long night on the town. Amalfi’s girlfriend, Jenny Day, has an apartment just over the Potomac River, south of Washington. The guys used it as a crash pad after a long bender.

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In other cases, the officers would go in on a hotel room rather than risk the possibility of getting busted by the cops on the long drive back to Quantico.

“Yeah, it can get pretty expensive,” said 2nd Lt. Josh Piper, a prior-enlisted Marine staff sergeant who wants to be an AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter pilot. “But a bunch of us just pool our money together and cram into one room.”

Weekend antics are a hot topic of conversation as the officers stroll bleary-eyed to their classrooms, just yards from their dorms, on Monday mornings. Most of it is lighthearted and jovial — like the time Fitzgerald wound up in a girl’s room near Georgetown and locked himself out of his car.

But other times, it can be the precursor to bigger trouble.

One Friday night early on at TBS, Boyle headed into town with Fitzgerald and some others from Class 186. Boyle’s state at the end of the night varies depending on who you talk to, but he was tagged as the designated driver and started the 45-minute trip back to Quantico late in the evening. It’s a straight shot down Interstate 95, but somehow Boyle missed the exit and found himself entering Richmond, Va. — about 80 miles further down the highway.

“I don’t know, man, I just got lost,” he recalled.

Rolling back to Quantico, finally, Boyle crashed hard in his bunk at about 6 a.m. The night’s events caused him to sleep through his alarm and miss a remedial run on the obstacle course that morning, putting him squarely in the sights of the Fox Company staff.

“I had to counsel him on that,” said his platoon commander, Capt. Kuykendall.

But as the months rolled on toward the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, some of the Class 186 comrades peeled away from the weekend parties. They’re called “brown baggers” because they live off base — the label is a nod to the idea of the commuter’s bag lunch. Second Lt. Mike Jiabia was one of them, living outside Quantico with his soon-to-be bride.

Even as the bonds deepened among the lieutenants, so, too, would the threads of love and relationships outside. Both Jiabia and Piper would marry during TBS and Amalfi’s relationship with Jenny would deepen. It helped him deal with the stress of TBS, but sometimes it distracted him from giving his full attention to the rigorous academics, his classmates said.

‘Infantry’

Six months of mainlining basic rifle company tactics, Marine Corps history and philosophy and it all comes down to this.

No, it’s not graduation. It’s bigger than that. It’s the day they’ve all been waiting for: MOS day.

In his understated office with a government-issued desk, small refrigerator in the corner and a simple, wooden “flak stand” — a pair of crossed two-by-four boards designed to hold the officer’s helmet and bulletproof vest — sitting close by, Capt. Bobby Danzie delivered the news to Amalfi.

“Infantry.”

Amalfi hadn’t seen any other reason to join the Marine Corps; he didn’t want to be there unless it was to lead men into combat. He got his wish.

Because of the needs of war and the formation of two new infantry battalions, the Corps had dozens of spots open for new infantry officers. In the past, the field was highly competitive; these days, if a lieutenant wants to go infantry, he’ll probably get it.

One plum assignment is intelligence. The Corps offers jobs in three different intelligence areas: human intel, which deals primarily with interrogations; signals intel, which focuses on collection and interpretation of electronic data; and ground intel, the hottest of the three, which deals with highly secretive direct-action missions and site exploitation.

Second Lt. Wes Gray, a Class 186 vet who broke from his pursuit of a doctorate in finance to join the Corps, breezed his way through TBS in the top of his class. At the top, you get your pick of jobs. He got ground intel.

Sosa, who at first wanted to be a naval flight officer riding in the back of an F/A-18D Hornet but later decided he wanted an intel job, got his first pick. He was assigned as a “human source intelligence” officer with 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

It’s an interesting pick for Sosa, a soft-spoken Nebraskan whose father, an Air Force nuclear missile officer, didn’t really want his son to follow him into military service. Would his deep religious convictions and strong sense of ethics interfere with his ability to do some morally ambiguous things during the interrogation of detainees?

“I’m going to probably weigh in on the conservative side of things,” he said. “I’m glad I got human intel because it looked to be the closest to my [college] major: psychology.”

But for many others, the assignment process wasn’t so clear cut. Though modern systems have removed a lot of the subjectivity from the MOS selection process, there’s still room for the instructors — the men and women who best understand the lieutenants’ strengths and weaknesses — to change a lieutenant’s job assignment.

A new computer program called “My MOS” generates a job assignment by matching a lieutenant’s top choices against his class rank among the roughly 250 lieutenants of Fox Company and the number of job slots available for new officers in the fleet. But sometimes, the job it spits out doesn’t seem right to the staff.

In one case, a female lieutenant was assigned signals intelligence — one of the most popular jobs among newly commissioned officers. When the instructors saw that, the arguments started.

“I’m telling you, it will not be a good fit,” said Capt. Stephanie Arndt, 1st Platoon’s staff platoon commander, a communications officer who explained that her roommate on a MEU deployment was a signals intel officer and was a much better and smarter leader than the lieutenant being considered this time. “She’ll have to lead one of the smartest groups of enlisted Marines in the Corps,” Arndt explained. “I don’t think she’ll be able to handle it.”

An argument ensued when some of the staff platoon commanders — who get final say on job assignments — agreed to move a lieutenant who’d been assigned a logistics job into the signals intel slot. A couple of the staff platoon commanders — the lieutenants know them as “SPCs” — wondered if it was a good idea given the fact that convoys and supply depots routinely come under attack in Iraq, requiring split-second, aggressive decision-making and leadership.

Again, the job might have been too demanding for a lieutenant with less-developed leadership skill. The officer wound up, after a couple weeks of consideration and horse-trading, with a different assignment.

The next assignments

With jobs assigned and the final exams and exercises complete, the beginning of March found the lieutenants looking well beyond The Basic School, readying themselves for moves to Camp Lejeune, N.C.; Pensacola Naval Air Station, Fla.; Camp Pendleton, Calif.; and other bases for their job-specific training.

A few of the officers would head to MOS schools and their first Fleet Marine Force units to find that their reputations had preceded them. In some cases, the SPCs call receiving-unit commanders to let them know to look out for certain issues with a given lieutenant, such as leadership or other basic skills that were underdeveloped at TBS.

A lieutenant may have passed land navigation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s good enough, and the SPCs make behind-the-scenes calls to let commanders know what to watch for.

“I made some calls to some friends on a couple guys,” said Kuykendall, who led Fox Company’s 3rd Platoon. “They may need a little extra supervision.”

Toast to the fallen

Graduation came March 17, but a week prior, the new lieutenants got a taste of an old-school Corps tradition that gave them a chance to relax a bit and swap stories as a full company. It’s a formal dinner called a “Mess Night” and the officers carouse with alcohol-fueled aplomb, puffing on cigars and downing punch late into the night.

But before the revelry, the weight of their past and the challenges of their future are brought home with a stark reminder.

The lieutenants, their instructors and guests rise for a solemn toast to their fallen brethren. A table at the back of the officer’s formal mess hall is set as if for a group of latecomers. But only photographs are there. Images of young officers who will never again partake in Mess Night. Officers who got lost in Quantico’s woods, just like these men and women; officers who partied in Georgetown with their classmates, too; officers who were just as confused and challenged and excited to be leaders of Marines as these lieutenants.

But they are gone now, killed in the line of duty — casualties of America’s war on terrorism.

Watching all this, his head slightly bowed, is one of those who has lost comrades in war — a man with whom some of these officers could be exchanging places in a matter of months.

Capt. Brian Chontosh, who counts a Navy Cross — the Corps’ second-highest award for combat valor — among his decorations, has seen the worst of it in two combat tours in Iraq.

He has led men and lost men in the streets of Fallujah and in the deserts of southern Iraq. As the young lieutenants look ahead to post-Mess Night reverie at the bar, Chontosh sits at his table, silent.

He knows that no matter what many of the lieutenants think right now, TBS does matter. Chontosh knows that the art of war, the history of the Corps, the ethics and rules — all the things he is here to teach — are all the young officers have when the bullets are flying and young Marines are dying.

“Brilliance in the basics,” as Maj. Bottoms said on the first day of this six-month ordeal — that’s what will most likely make the difference between life and death for these officers when it’s their turn to fight America’s enemies and lead Marines in war.

Some of the Class 186 officers are already in Iraq, serving on the front lines little more than a year after they first inched their way up the rope climb on the obstacle course at OCS.

Others are still in school or waiting for their first assignments, finding out the hard way that learning to be a leader of Marines doesn’t stop once TBS is in the rear-view mirror.

Ellie