By Jim Russell

Each state has a “West Point Field Force” of volunteer grads and parents who help young candidates assess whether West Point is a fit for them and assist the Congressional staffs and West Point to assess each candidate’s likely degree of success at West Point and in the Army.

In Washington State, our G2 classmate Joe Brillante has led the Field Force since 2004, with distinction.  Under Joe, cadets from Washington have punched way over our population weight in the number who became First Captains, Brigade Staff, Regimental Commanders, and Rhodes Scholars, among other honors.    

On a Sunday afternoon in September 2021, the Washington Field Force held a by-invitation event for candidates seeking admission to the rising Class of 2026. Two majors from the USMA Department of Admissions were on hand. They and Field Force members, including this author, met with individual candidates.  Field Force members wear these magnetic badges that hang in our blazer pockets, and for grads, show class year. 

As I was shaking hands with a young candidate for the Class of ’26, he read my badge, and his eyes got big. 

“Did you REALLY graduate in 1969?”

         “Yes”

“Wow.  My father wasn’t even born then.”

         “Well, it WAS about a hundred years ago.” 

“So that would make you … [eyes rolled up, trying to do the math] …”

         “I’m 73.”

“Are you really 73?”

         “Last time I checked.” 

“Wow.  You look pretty good for 73.”  

In his defense, the time gap between his prospective West Point experience and mine is huge.  It would have been as though, as a candidate, I had been interviewed by a member of the class of 1912! 

These young candidates are nearly always amazing, and occasionally entertaining as well.  West Point’s future is bright.

    

In June 1970, ten weeks into my first assignment and three weeks after making first lieutenant, I assumed command of B Troop, 3^rd Squadron, 7^th Cavalry, in Schweinfurt.

3/7 Cav was the one of the front-line ‘tripwire‘ units stationed along the East German border during the Cold War to deter the much larger Warsaw Pact Soviet forces from seizing West Germany. We believed an invasion could happen any moment. We worked very hard to prepare for that possibility. Fortunately, it never came.

At that point in my new career, I was not nearly ready to command a cavalry troop. I asked the Squadron Commander, a non-grad aviator, to give this command opportunity to a more experienced officer. But for reasons unclear then as now, he was firm that I take the troop. I really did not know where to begin.

     One of the more important recurring obligations of mechanized units in Germany was the monthly submission of DA form 2406, the “Material Condition Status Report”, colloquially the ‘deadline report’. It informed higher headquarters which vehicles were not combat ready, and why. B Troop’s report was due a week after I took command. One thing I actually knew something about was automotive and weapons systems, and I resolved that my deadline report would be 100% accurate. 

      The Army publishes detailed Equipment Serviceability Criteria (ESC) with very specific requirements for reporting the status of each vehicle type. With the relevant ESC in hand, I made myself conspicuous among my soldiers as they performed the requisite technical inspections of their vehicles. I tried to be clear that I wanted an honest and accurate report, which raised some eyebrows among my NCOs. But they did as I asked. Their honest inspections placed 29 of the troop’s 38 vehicles in the ‘ESC Red’ category, ‘not combat ready’, ‘deadlined’. I confirmed the accuracy of each deadlined vehicle’s status per the ESC, signed the report, and sent it to the Squadron Motor Officer.

     Somewhat to my surprise – I was new – my report was not well received at Squadron. I learned that my predecessor’s report for the previous month had showed only eight vehicles deadlined. My vastly larger report was not viewed as progress.

     I was summoned to the Squadron Commander’s office the next day and told to bring my deadline report. I anticipated some discussion, so I also brought the related Equipment Serviceability Criteria. The CO sat me down and closed the door. Oddly, neither the Squadron XO nor the Squadron Motor Officer was present. The CO was clearly not happy. He told me we would weed down B Troop’s huge deadline report to a more accurate number. Over the course of about 45 minutes, we went down the list vehicle-by-vehicle, with conversations something like this:

CO:  So, you’ve deadlined B-16 (an M-551 Sheridan) for inoperative intercom.

 

We work around that by giving the driver one of the infantry PRC-25 portable radios, and the vehicle commander can talk to the driver over the radio. No need for intercom, so off deadline.

         Me:  Ah, sir, that’d be a practical workaround in a pinch, but as you can see, the ESC specifically disallow that for the deadline report.  I think we’ve got to report the intercom problem as a deadline item. I think B-16 needs to stay on the list.

CO:  You’ve deadlined B-32 (an M-114) for no electrical power to the commander’s turret.

But the vehicle commander can pop out of the hatch and fire the .50 cal up top. So, we can take it off the list.

Me:  Ah, sir, no doubt we’d do that in combat, but the ESC specifically require deadlining the vehicle if the turret doesn’t have power. Maybe they want to be able to fire buttoned up? I think it needs to stay on the list.

And so it went, through each vehicle on the list. The CO couldn’t justify removing even one, which did not improve his mood. My deadline report went to Brigade and Division without any deletions.

     I recall explaining to him, an LTC with Vietnam experience, the importance of submitting an accurate report, so higher headquarters would know how badly we needed the parts that would correct these serious problems, problems that would create casualties in combat. I also suggested that he could send in some reduced version of my report over his own signature, but that my signature could only go on the report I had already submitted. In hindsight, these were probably not the most diplomatic comments I might have made at that juncture. Perhaps unlike lieutenants from other commissioning sources, I was accustomed to frank discussions with my LTC instructors at West Point.

     This Squadron Commander and I had several other disagreements of principle during what was to be the brief tenure of my first command. In September, during my fourth month, an Armor captain showed up in the squadron, and I was promptly relieved. A trivial job was found for me in Brigade S2, where I marked time over the next twelve months, awaiting the predictable orders for Vietnam.

     Later, I learned that the Squadron Commander had earlier promised the Division Commanding General to reduce the squadron’s deadline rate below 5%. So, my initial deadline report was unwelcome, regardless what effect it might have had on our priority for getting repair parts.

     My Squadron CO did not share my “Officer Efficiency Report” job rating with me, so I saw it only when I visited the Office of Personnel Management at the Pentagon en route to Vietnam, a year later. I found I had received an 89 out of a possible score of 100. Having assumed command with near total ignorance of how to run a cavalry troop, and the mistakes I made as a result, this seemed to me a fair evaluation. Years later, I learned from one of the majors on the personnel staff that this score placed me at the floor of the bottom fifth of my peer group.

     Over the next couple years, as we all accumulated OERs, it became obvious that even weak officers rarely scored below 96. When the Army launched a Reduction-In-Force (RIF) of regular army officers in 1975, it came as no surprise that I was selected for involuntary separation.

On 12 October 1968, a Saturday, Army hosted Cal-Berkeley at West Point.  Rain and cold had cancelled the regular Saturday morning full-dress parade on the Plain.  The weather was not what the favored Cal team (ranked 16^th) was accustomed to.

For some reason that I’ve forgotten, I was invited to help man the chain gang at Michie Stadium¹

I had never done that before, so all my senses went into high gear.  “Don’t screw this up!” Seeing the game up close is quite different from standing in row 35.  You get an intimate sense for how tremendously kinetic the Division 1 game is, and how phenomenally athletic the best players are.

 

The foul weather and good defense on both sides kept it a low-scoring game.  Somewhere in the third quarter, Army had the ball and was moving toward the Cal goal line, at the south end of Michie.  I was holding my first down pole on the east side of the field, around the Cal 30, when the ball snapped and our big tight end Gary Steele exploded off the line, heading straight for me.  He was flying, a lot faster than he looked from the stands, and his defender matched him stride for stride.

As the play developed, Steve Lindell ² threw a pass toward Gary.  From my unique perspective, it was obvious that the pass was long and too high.  Gary couldn’t possibly reach it. It would go incomplete.  Too bad.

 

Wrong!  Gary kept on at full tilt, and at the uniquely perfect instant, jumped what looked like ten feet off the ground, a good two feet over his defender.  He hauled in that pass and got two feet in just before momentum took him out of bounds, a couple feet from me. Wow – Unbelievable catch!  First down!  A couple plays later, Army scored our only touchdown, and ultimately upset Cal, 10-7.  Grateful plebes fell out at tables all over the Corps.³

That was our senior year, and Gary’s best.  He caught 27 passes for 496 yards and three touchdowns. Against 4^th-ranked Penn State, possibly our toughest opponent that year, he caught eight passes for 156 yards, breaking the Army single-game record set by “Lonely End” Bill Carpenter, Class of ‘60.  Gary was a huge contributor and a big part of our memorable 7 and 3 season, including beating Navy, again.  He was hugely respected, and much loved in our class.

Decades later, at the 2008 Founders Day dinner at Fort Lewis, a tableful of classmates reminisced about how much that football team had meant to us.  Gary’s name came up.

 

 

“Great athlete.”  “Great guy.”  People nodded.  One of my classmates said, “You know, Gary was the first African-American ever to play football for Army.”  Everyone emphatically protested.  That couldn’t possibly be true, we argued.  For one thing, we had come to West Point in 1965, and African-American players in Division 1 weren’t exactly a novelty by then.  For another, well, we just all would have known about it, if that had been the case.  Gary was such a seamless part of the team, and of the class, we would surely have known that.

Someone took out his smart phone and looked it up.  Sure enough, Gary had in fact been Army’s first African-American varsity football letter- man.  And even as well-known as he was in our class, most of us didn’t even know it decades later.  We were stunned. But that’s exactly what kind of classmate Gary was, and what kind of man he became.

 

 

Footnotes:

1. Michie Stadium (MIKE-ey) is West Point’s football stadium, named for Dennis Michie, USMA 1893, who played football at West Point and was Army’s first football coach. He was killed in the Spanish American War in Cuba in 1898, aged 28.
2. Steve Lindell, USMA ’69, was Army’s starting quarterback.
3. Until the mid-1970s, plebes were required to eat their meals sitting at an exaggerated position of attention – “bracing” – and in silence. For special occasions, the plebe class could be temporarily excused from bracing at meals, which was known as “falling out”.  Winning an important football game would often get the plebes a “fallout” for the week following the game.

Jim Bachta was our perennial Brigade Boxing Champ at 132 lbs¹.  He graduated 189^th in our class.  I was 35 files behind him at 224.²

We both branched Armor.  Luck of the draw moved us nearly simultaneously from the Armor Officer Basic course to Airborne School (where we shared an apartment with classmates Lew Riggsby and Don Smith) and Ranger School to a tour in Germany to a tour in Vietnam to a second tour in Germany.  During the second tour in Germany, we’d occasionally weekend together, touring parts of Europe we could reach on our BMW motorcycles.  One summer we traversed North Africa, which is another story.

When the Army had finished with us in 1975, we moved into an apartment near Heidelberg and enrolled in an international relation master’s degree program, intending to find civilian work that would allow us to stay in Germany.  It turned out that employers were hiring only MBAs for the interesting jobs.  We should have checked first!  We dutifully got ourselves into the MBA program at Stanford, and again rented a place together off-campus.  Among the things the sparsely furnished house lacked was a coffee maker.

To economize, we went looking for a used Mr. Coffee at the local Goodwill store.

We found three.  One looked much better than the other two.  I picked up the nice one and headed toward the cash register.  “Just a minute,” says Jim.  “Maybe, we should plug it in first, to at least see whether the little pilot light comes on.”  I thought that was overdoing it for so simple a device, but out of respect for my classmate and friend, I sought out a power outlet.

When I plugged in the nice-looking Mr. Coffee and switched it on, we heard a large circuit breaker nearby open, and all the overhead lights went dark.  And no pilot light on our Mr. Coffee.

We told the staff about that defective Mr. Coffee, and selected one of the scruffy ones to replace it.  When the store lights came back on, we plugged that one in.  The little pilot light came on nicely, and the hotplate under the pot began to warm up. The store lights stayed on. We bought that one – $6, I think – and took it home.  It was still working fine when we graduated from business school 18 months later.  We donated it to the rental house.

The lesson:  Class rank matters. 

Notes:

1. Boxing was and remains a mandatory plebe (Freshman) physical education course, and also a winter intramural sport. The best boxers are encouraged to enter the annual Brigade Open Boxing Tournament, where single-elimination matches determine a brigade champion in each weight class. Unlike most other sports at West Point, boxing was new to practically everyone, so it was a good measure of native athletic ability.  Usually cows (Juniors) or firsties (Seniors) won these individual brigade championships, because it took experience to develop the skills. Jim Bachta was an exception to the rule. He won the championship during his plebe, yearling (Sophomore), and firstie years.  During cow year, he had broken his nose sparring with Jim McDonough, a heavier classmate and, I think, our only Golden Gloves alumnus. The boxing program in 2019 is similar, with two additions:  1. When women joined the Corps in 1976, they initially took a female-oriented self-defense course in lieu of boxing.  Over time they demonstrated their toughness and lobbied for taking the same boxing course as the men.  From 2016, they have taken the same boxing program as the men, boxing other women.  2. In 1976, boxing returned to the intercollegiate sports world with the birth of the National Collegiate Boxing Association.  Army has fielded a team from the beginning of this era, and is consistently dominant, having won seven national championships.  At this writing, Army is the defending national champ.

2. Class rank: Most things cadets do – academics, leadership, sports – are graded in one way or another.  These grades are continuously tracked and combined into a single evaluation, “General Order of Merit”.  Individuals’ GOM scores are rank-ordered to determine class rank. For firsties, class rank determined order of selection for branch and first duty station.  At graduation, we received our diplomas in order of class rank.  Everyone’s class rank was published, and we all knew well where we stood.  Although class rank has other components, academics are most important.  We commonly gauged our classmates’ intellectual capacity by their class rank.

Cadet photos courtesy of the Jack Engeman Collection, the Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Editor’s note: Every five years, the Class of 1969 meets for a reunion. At each reunion, a memorial service is held to commemorate the lives of those classmates who have died. It is a solemn yet beautiful occasion that reminds all that these men who once shared the classrooms and fields of West Point have been taken home, but they are not forgotten and cherished still by their classmates, family and friends. Jim Russell presented this reading to the assembled classmates and families as they marked the 50th year since their graduation from West Point and remembered 124 of their classmates.

 

I’m going to read an excerpt from a book by a 20th century German Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner (1904-1984). The book is structured as a series of letters to God, each posing a complaint about some aspect of the human condition.

One chapter, about losing long-term intimate friends, seemed particularly salient now, as we’re losing about a classmate per month. And unlike the combat losses we fully anticipated 50 years ago, these losses to the ravages of age are in some ways harder to accept.

Here’s Karl Rahner on losing his friends:

O Lord, I should like to remember my dead to you, all those who once belonged to me and have now left me. There are many of them, far too many to be taken in with one glance. To pay my sad greeting to them all, I must travel back in memory over the entire route of my life’s long journey.

When I look back in this way, I see my life as a long highway filled by a column of marching men. Every moment now, someone breaks out of the column and goes off silently, without a word or wave of farewell, and is swiftly enwrapped by the darkness of night stretching out on both sides of the road.

The number of our marchers becomes smaller, at first slowly, and now more quickly. The new men coming up to fill the ranks don’t really replace those who have gone. The only ones really making this pilgrimage with me are the ones whom I set out with, the ones who were with me at the start of my journey, the dear ones who are close to my heart.

The others are mere ”companions of the road”, who happen to be going the same way as I. There are many of them, and we all exchange greetings and help one another along. But the true procession of my life involves only those bound together by real love, and this group grows ever smaller. One day I myself will break off from the line of march and leave without a word or wave, never to return.

My heart will always be with them, with my loved ones who have taken their leave. There is no substitute for them; there are no others who can fill the vacancy when one of those, whom I have really loved, departs, and is with us no more.

In true love, no one can replace another, for true love loves the other in that depth where he is uniquely and irreplaceably himself. And thus, as death has trodden roughly through my life, every one of the departed has taken a piece of my heart with him.

So, that’s Karl Rahner on the subject.

He wrote these words in 1938. I doubt he ever heard of West Point. But he captures the experience we’re having, losing our brothers, brothers who in our case have been with us nearly since our birth as men, and certainly since our birth as a class.

We West Pointers are privileged to love one another better than most men can do in their lifetimes. What a gift, but also what pain, as we watch our brothers “breaking out of the line and going off to the darkness of the night.”

God bless our classmates.

God bless our class.

Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence, written in 1938 and published in the US in 1999 by St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, IN

(Over 800 classmates and family members assembled from all over the world for the 50th reunion.)