Failure and learning

I write this post in the absolute center of all civilization: The Airport. How different from the schedule-dominated life of the Marine Corps; how different from the mud and sweat of field exercises! The transition is not so much difficult - it is enjoyable to sit among a variety of people, casually listening to music from my headphones - but ironic. It is hard to take this life seriously after having spent time in the field. If I stop to consider, I am surprised that a bunch of 18-24 year old young adults can switch so easily from discipline, effort, and alertness of Marine training to the superficial complexity and savvy of a trend-driven society. It’s like being bipolar, but more useful. I kind of like it. It has a romantic tinge to it.

Last week was a tough one. We completed our 10-mile forced march (in the rain, which is hard on both one’s feet and one’s motivation) as well as FEX II, an acronym that stands for Field EXercise II. This was our first chance to lead and conduct platoon-level operations, with the added concepts of automatic weapons, support-by-fire positions, obstacle plans, offensive tactics (like envelopment), and prepared defensive positions. Like everything else involved in the infantry, it is mentally very challenging. How should you divide your manpower? How should you weight your main effort, or main attack? How can you best use your support-by-fire assets? What is your engineering/obstacle plan? What codes and signals do you use to coordinate the movement of 40-odd people through thick underbrush without bunching your attack up and risking friendly-fire casualties? How do you motivate everybody to dig waist-deep into rock-hard soil? We spent those two days experimenting with different kinds of attacks, trying to properly position grenade launchers and machine guns, attempting to set up barbed-wire obstacles, and hacking ourselves into defensive positions. At night, we sat up behind our machine-guns, alert for attacks. We didn't sleep. And we struggled to succeed.

I hope I have convinced you that the stereotype of a "dumb grunt" is completely untrue. Besides the grueling physical activity required, infantry operations require a firm grasp of technical data (such as weapon ranges and effects, ideal obstacle configurations, and fire support concepts) as well as creativity to make a plan that uses the assets available in a cohesive, mutually-supporting manner. Only thus is the mission accomplished correctly, which is to say as expeditiously as possible, with the fewest lives lost. It is one of the most mentally difficult things I have ever done - it ranks up there with Plato, Kant, and very abstract Theology. And speaking of lives lost, there is an additional wrinkle: if you are "dumb" and make a mistake, your people die, and it is your fault. Then you should go to jail, because their lives were your responsiblity. And that makes the exercise even harder. The infantry is at least every bit as intellectually demanding and emotionally stressful as civilian jobs. “Dumb grunt” is a grossly ironic title.

We didn’t do very well this week, and that's what made it so rough. No matter what "bad things" happen out there - if you cut your hands, bash your face against your rifle, twist your ankle, and develop a nasty gastrointestinal disorder - if your operations are successful and your mission accomplished, then you have a great time. If, on the other hand, everything goes right except your attacks (or your defense), then the field sucks. I have thus learned that personal comfort is perhaps the least important thing about Field Ops. I would trade even my own health and wholeness for little more success. But hopefully by WFEX III, perhaps we will be more combat-effective.

For now, though, we got a good lecture on our mistakes and attitude (lazy and sullen) from our platoon commander, who imparted this bit of wisdom that I think worth passing on. Always ask yourself these four questions: what am I doing? why am I doing it? what is it good for? and how do I know? If by the answers to these questions you discover you are doing something wrong (like eating chow in the field while everybody else is working hungry), then stop. I firmly believe that most of our personal failings are due to the fact that we make easy, wrong choices instead of more difficult, less pleasant, right choices. It seems so obvious to me now that each wrong choice I make out there renders my team less effective, and in this business of warfighting and killing, that is inexcusable. More generally, though, wrong choices affect my goodness throughout my life. I think that being a good person is the greatest task we have in this life, for it affects our relationships, our success, our health, and most importantly our happiness. And in my platoon commander's angry questions I found a way to do better.

Incidentally, it is very eerie in the field at night. I mentioned earlier our nighttime 7-mile forced march, which took place under a beautiful silvery moon. But though we had similar conditions this past week, the effect was strange and silent as we settled into defensive positions. Stranger still, it got almost imperceptibly darker, and shortly I began to hear the faint sound of rushing water. Everything was so still and alone I remember wondering quite seriously whether I was imagining things or not - the silvery light seemed once so permanent that I literally couldn't believe it was gone, then the rushing water - though I had just noticed it - seemed to have gone on since the beginning of time. If that sounds melodramatic, I promise you it seemed both natural and quite disturbing in the profound solitude of that night. When it finally began to rain, it seemed the strangest thing yet - the whole experience was decidely surreal. It seems even more so now that I am surrounded by the light and structure of civilization.

Between the hike and the FEX this week I feel pretty drained. But I am on my way to a wedding! It is exciting to travel, and I can't wait to see my old friends. A little vacation to normality will (I hope) return me to training next week eager to go back to the field, and do better there...

An Interlude

I am currently in a boring phase of TBS. The classes are dull, the events are difficult and unglamorous, and we haven't really learned anything new in a while. The only really exciting recent event was night land navigation. It is much like day land navigation - spiderwebs, thick underbrush, water hazards, and lots of bugs - only you can't see. So you fall into rivers and small lakes, you trip over logs, and you eat spiders more frequently than normal. That is all very unpleasant. But happily that night beautiful, starry and filled with moonlight, reminding me that though I chiefly joined the Marine Corps to learn discipline and virtue (so they would "make a man out of me"), I find here at TBS I am also getting more spiritual lessons. Due in part to the harsh training environment, I am forced into contact with beauty in ways that normal-life distractions have so far denied me.

An example of this occurred last week, during a day Land Navigation Event. It was six hours long because it involved greater distances and more boxes to find than we had previously seen. I worked under an iron sky, in a soaking, miserable rain. After finding my last box, I had a little time to spare, so I began a relatively leisurely stroll to the Command Post. I was picking my way down a muddy tank trail when suddenly, for no discernable reason, I looked up. There, as if it had materialized out of nowhere, stood a dignified and comely four-point buck, gazing at me curiously from a distance of several meters. Unable to stop myself, I spoke: "You are beautiful." It was a strangely solemn moment. We looked at each other for several still moments before he turned and bounded away with unhurried grace.

That is but one of the moments here in Quantico where I am overwhelmed by beauty. I will leave the barracks at sunset, for instance, and see the sky awash with copper-gold clouds, clear and glimmering. Or I will stop outside after a cell phone call to notice the distinct, intense and luminous array of stars above me. Or I will encounter a buck in the forest, strangely both familiar and majestic. These events gather themselves in my memory as a collage of light and smell and sound, and become a personal retreat from the immediate, rigorous, disciplined, and stressful concerns of military life. They are more than a retreat; they are a backdrop, and provide an overarching spiritual structure to my military experiences. They are necessary leisure, even if they only occur in an eternal instant. Each of them is the separate sensation of something endlessly beautiful running through you, uncapturable and barely observable; the infintessimal point at which you touch the divine.

Beauty, therefore, is not necessarily a property of visible things. "Beauty" describes the effect of things to raise our consciousness to a more metaphysical level. Essentially, a thing is beautiful that offers more clear evidence of God's grace and perfect creation: a person, a painting, a building, a flower, a mountain. I am beginning to understand this, and take hope from it. My journey in the Marine Corps is yielding richer fruit than I could have imagined.

Falling apart and picking up

I write this evening with a sad, tired smile on my face. It has been a hellish week. I am comfortable now, sitting glumly in my favorite little internet cafe, while outside it is raining as it only can in Virginia - heavy, painful drops that turn puddles into rapids and roads into rivers. There are serious tornado warnings for Northern Virginia, including the area I am in; evidently Hurricane Ivan sent us some exciting weather. The savage noise of the rain and all the sounds which accompany it - the frantic whipping of windshield wipers, the wet flop of feet scurrying over pavement, the incessant roar of water cascading off of roofs - leave a feeling of crumbling, as if somehow the world is disintegrating. Every thump my wheels make as I drive leaves me wondering if the air has left the tires, every turn of the wheel seems painfully close to a skid, everytime I step outside I grow more bedraggled and wet.

I finished my tour as Student Company Commander today. As part of our training, we undertake leadership billets within the company for two weeks at a time. These billets require us to take responsibility for our peers and for the training schedule. It means spending a lot of free time coordinating events with various staff members, keeping an exact count of the Marines in the company, and - what is hardest of all - ordering my peers to do things they don't enjoy, like cleaning stairwells. It is fun to be in charge, and fun to deal with the challenges of leadership, but it is also draining - I feel completely exhausted. I am also relieved; now I can focus back on the technical training aspect of TBS.

This past week we continued patrolling exercises. These mean 12-page orders, overlays of pre-planned artillery targets, preliminary "warning orders" to divide the responsibilities among different patrol members, a detailed terrain model, and then finally the exhausting conduct of the patrol itself. Twice. Once during the day, and an abbreviated version during the night which culminates in an ambush. It was also physically demanding, coming as it did on the heels of Land Navigation 4 - by the end of the first patrol, my legs were losing their ability to balance properly and I was panting with every step. It was not only a lesson in patrolling, but also a lesson in endurance.

Yet these kinds of extreme situations are nourishment to me, and I imagine to every Marine. The suffering is the price we pay for all the fun we have: the helicopter insert and extract, the many rounds of ammunition we fire, and the opportunity to simulate actual assaults on our fellow lieutenants. The helicopter ride alone made up for most of the pain. The essential fact, I think is that combat is fun. I suppose that is a shocking thing to write, but under consideration it makes sense. Why is competition (especially in sports) such a universal pleasure? Because humans enjoy fighting, after a fashion. It forces us to strive greatly, to use our bodies and minds to solve puzzles, and (if done correctly) yields us the victory. The stark physical and mental difficulty of planning and conducting a patrol resolves the simple pleasures of doing things well and winning into great clarity. I am beginning to discover how much I love my job.

I realize now, with great satisfaction, that I could complete another six hour land navigation session tomorrow morning at 7. There is one scheduled, as remediation for those who failed the earlier event. Fortunately, I am not in that group. But I know I could do it (as I have for the past two weekends). It seems, after 12 weeks of TBS, we are learning how far our real physical limits are from where we thought they were. Just when we think we have reached the end of our our strength, and we can't walk any more miles or carry any more weight, we simply focus on the ground and do it. It honestly seems like a bonus to have the entire weekend off.

After the recent birth of a baby daughter, which he nearly missed after being in the field with us, my Platoon Commander told us, "the Marine Corps is a big green machine, and it will keep going with you until you jump off or it spits you out in 20 or 30 years. It never stops." This is why people join the Marines: to be part of an endeavor greater than themselves. It is equally well expressed by a 1980s recruiting poster for the Marines, showing a column of vehicles moving down a road, with the headline "The Marines need a few good men...to keep 'em rolling." The Corps takes good men and makes them professional warriors, it executes our nation's policy with military force when necessary, and it does these things without demanding excess money or complaining about tough tasks. The formula for this is a continuous tempo of operations, the basic and universally understood imperative to pick up and keep going even when tired. Recovery will come, but it won't come in luxury - your body will heal in the classroom, and your mind will rest in the field.