From the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism, Part 3

This Man's Army
by Andrew Exum

(Page 3 of 3)

The Army was different from the rest of Penn. I was good at ROTC from the start. I knew how to navigate in the woods better than the Northerners, even in the flat woods of New Jersey, where we trained on weekends. I could outshoot any of them with an M-16, and I made easy friends. They jokingly called me "Sergeant York" after Tennessee's famous war hero, a moniker that pleased me to no end. I liked waking up early on Wednesday morning to drill, and learned how to perform exotic tasks like clearing bunkers and hallways with guns and grenades. I liked wearing a uniform, which made me look different from the rest of my classmates for at least one day during the week. On Mondays, I would report to military science class to learn about the rank structure and how the army organized itself. We also took classes in basic military tactics and leadership. I never made anything less than an A in ROTC, but unfortunately, I wasn't making A's in anything else. Despite my poor grades, the Army gave me a scholarship that summer. My mother gave me a big hug when she heard the news. We didn't tell my father until a few days later, but when he heard he greeted the news with a mixture of pride and apprehension. He was proud I had decided to serve in the military, but I don't think he'd planned on me showing so much resolve to stay up north for college.

Sophomore year wasn't any easier, though. My grades in the fall were the worst yet. In the spring, a particularly ugly (and absurd) classroom incident reminded me of how much of an outsider I still was. After becoming angry with me while arguing in class about whether or not order was restored at the end of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, one girl called me "David Duke" in retort to my argument. I guess she figured associating me with the modern South's most famous racist would shut me up and prove her intellectual superiority, but given the argument's context, the insult was a non sequitur. It was just an ugly slur from a Yankee prep school girl suddenly alarmed that she was being bested in argument by a backward Southerner.

I got mad and walked out of class. I returned the next week only after a black girl who usually sat by me in the class tracked me down and let me know how embarrassed the rest of the class was for what that girl had said.

ROTC wasn't as fun that year, either. In part because of recent protests that surrounded the ROTC presence on campus, the Army decided to merge the Penn Army ROTC program with all the other programs in the city. We now met at the Drexel Armory, which was only a few blocks from campus, but we were no longer a tangible part of the Penn community as we had been a year earlier.

I was angry about the protests. During the Vietnam conflict, college students protested ROTC as a way to protest the war in Southeast Asia. Now a small but committed group of activists on campus protested ROTC to complain about how the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy established by President Clinton and Congress discriminated against homosexuals. For my part, all I wanted to do was serve my country and pay for school, and it pissed me off that ROTC was moved off campus to placate a noisy special interest group that had a beef with a policy set up not by the army but by elected officials in Washington. To the protesters' credit, they never directly confronted the cadets. My gay friends openly appreciated that I was just trying to pay for college, but that didn't stop them from sometimes lashing out at me.

That summer, I took off immediately after passing my Ancient Greece exam at the beginning of May, so that I could begin training with the military at the U.S. Army Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia, a week later. Airborne School was my first real experience in the regular army, away from ROTC, and I passed with flying colors. For the first two weeks, we trained in sawdust pits and on towers meant to simulate jumping out of an airplane. In the third week, we jumped out of an airplane five times and graduated at the end of the week. During the course, I lived in the drab army barracks at Fort Benning and tried my best to be as anonymous as possible in training, to avoid the ire of "the black hats," as the Airborne instructors were known. When we were given time off, I sat in the room I shared with another soldier and read the books I had brought with me. I remember a Navy SEAL who was going through the course with me asking me about the book I was reading one morning, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. I didn't know how to explain it and mumbled something about the book being a narrative of a road trip between a man and his stepdaughter.

"Sounds pretty fucking boring," he replied.

"It is," I assured him.

I was proud to earn the silver wings identifying me as a paratrooper at the end of the month. Full of confidence, I resolved to turn things around at Penn when I returned for my junior year.

I did. My grades soared that fall, and I found professors who took an interest in mentoring me. One, a fellow East Tennessee native, even took me aside and let me know that any kid from East Tennessee couldn't do worse than an A in his class. The act of fraternal motivation worked. I responded by working my ass off for him as a token of gratitude and as a protest on behalf of all Southerners trapped in Philadelphia. During his office hours on Wednesdays, I would go in to talk with him, more about football and the University of Tennessee's opponent that upcoming Saturday than anything relating to class. The Tennessee Volunteers were unbeatable that season, going undefeated on their way toward winning the national championship, and I mirrored their success in academic halls above the Mason-Dixon Line.

I earned a varsity letter that fall playing lightweight football, a peculiar sport found only in the Ivy League and at the service academies. It's contact football played only by those weighing less than 165 pounds. A wide receiver and defensive back in high school, I now played defensive end. I enjoyed putting the pads back on again and, despite two broken bones in my left hand, played well enough that season to help us win the league championship. Our only loss that year was to West Point, who was always the dirtiest team we played against.

I also began to assert myself as a campus leader that year. I wrote a column each week for the school newspaper, served as president of my fraternity, and at the end of the year was selected for membership in one of the two exclusive senior honor societies.

ROTC picked up its intensity as well. During sophomore year, most of the classes we were taught had been the same as those we took as freshmen. Now, as juniors, we taught most of the Wednesday morning classes ourselves and were evaluated by the seniors. The ROTC battalion was divided up into four companies, and all the Penn cadets were in one company. I was the company first sergeant, responsible for ensuring that everyone was present for training, had their hair trimmed every week, and remembered to iron their uniforms and polish their boots. Keeping track of so many college students, who during the week all did their own separate thing aside from ROTC, was like herding cats, but we had fun. Every other week, I got the Penn cadets together to drink beer and complain about school and ROTC.

That summer, I went to ROTC Advanced Camp at Fort Lewis, Washington, for five weeks of leadership training with upcoming seniors from other colleges across the country. We all had to meet a group of standards, but they were ridiculously easy, especially the physical requirements. All the activities catered to the lowest common denominator, and the biggest challenge we faced came in the form of living with female cadets in the same barracks, with only one latrine and shower room. Every day, we were given an hour to shower after the day's activities, and the eight females insisted they needed as much time in the latrine as the twenty-two males in the barracks. The males usually got in the shower last, and by time we did, the water was almost always cold.

I then more or less "interned" with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg for three weeks, jumping out of planes again and getting a feel for regular army life. I was deeply impressed by the men I worked with there and felt like an imposter among them. I felt like the cadet in Tolstoy's The Cossacks, who goes to live and work with the tsar's heartiest warriors. I did my best to fit in, always volunteering to carry the heaviest pack, and slowly earning the grudging respect of the other men. I was quick with a joke and never complained, so eventually the seasoned sergeants stopped resenting the fact that in a year I would be making more money than all of them as an officer, despite having never yet served a day in the active duty military.

Also that summer, my father and I took a trip to France on the occasion of my twenty- first birthday to see the battlefields of Normandy. We walked the length of Omaha Beach one morning and - in the afternoon - visited the American cemetery there. My father began to tear up as soon as we stepped foot onto the pristine, immaculately groomed grounds, and I too was overwhelmed by emotion as I walked by the thousands of tiny white crosses marking the graves of so many brave U.S. servicemen. I had a tough time believing I could ever live up to their example of service and sacrifice.

When I returned to Penn that next fall, I found myself eagerly looking forward to the coming semester for the first time. I had by this time fallen in love with Philadelphia. I loved the rhythms of urban life, the constant activity that filled the streets, and the bars on every block that served Yuengling beer by the bucket- load. Even the refinery on I-76 almost looked inviting.

Senior year was a blur. I watched as my friends scrambled to find jobs or get accepted to graduate school. I celebrated when I heard they had been hired by a prestigious company or had gotten into medical school or law school. I knew what waited on the horizon for me, and I can't say I was looking forward to it. I was now finally enjoying college - the freedoms, the good-looking women, and all my friends - and I didn't want it to end. I was reading things that year that began to expand my mind and change the way I thought. I studied lots of theory and philosophy my last two semesters, reading Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas but also the modern critical thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Marx. I began to reread things I had read years earlier, amazed by how much my perspective had changed. After four years of college, I had only just begun to really feel that I was learning anything.

I was the battalion commander of the ROTC detachment at Drexel that year and spent as much time in the armory as I did anywhere else. I slept only a few hours every night, waking up at five in the morning to run with the other cadets for PT and then going to football practice at night. By the time I went to bed around one or two in the morning, I was exhausted. I was always either sick or recovering from illness, and the inhuman quantity of beer I was drinking on the weekends wasn't helping my health. Many nights I didn't even sleep, joining my best friend George for breakfast downtown in the early hours after morning PT and a full night spent in the library. He was hard at work on his senior thesis that fall semester, en route to graduate school at Harvard, and we prided ourselves on our "rigorous" intellectual lives and corresponding lack of sleep. Many of my friends openly worried that I was spreading myself too thin, but my grades were good, and I was determined to get the most out of college before my military service began. I went out of my way to join friends for coffee or drinks in the afternoons and on the weekends, enjoying their company while I could. I knew I wouldn't be around many people like my classmates once I joined the army.

Every so often, one of my friends would ask me why I was joining the army, and I always fumbled to find an answer. Back home, joining the military just seemed like a natural thing for a young man to do, even if not as many do it today as once did. (Still, even today, armed forces recruiting stations in the South continue to fare far better than those in the North.) My friends at school, however, were forcing me to answer questions for myself as much as for them.

Why the hell was I joining the army? In a frighteningly short period of time, I would be a commissioned officer who could be leading men in combat. All that romantic crap I had thought in high school about being some sort of gun-toting tough guy didn't seem so valid anymore. But as I talked with my friends, I still could not imagine living to the age of sixty and looking back on a life in which I had never served. There was no war on the country's horizon in 2000, but I still felt that I should at least do my duty in the peacetime military.

My classical education helped to ease my doubts. In the polis of ancient Greece, it was the duty of every able man to serve in the military. The men of Athens and Sparta did not wait to be drafted under the threat of war. Instead, they grew up with the understanding that military service went hand-in-hand with citizenship. Taking up arms and learning military skills at a young age were facts of life for young Greeks. So if our society's culture of democracy had been built upon the Greek model, why should my classmates and I be any less ready to fight than the young men of Athens?

On May 20, 2000, just two days before I graduated with a double major in English and Classics, I was officially commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Infantry.

In three days, I would drive all my belongings back home to Chattanooga and set off cross-country to my first duty assignment, in Fort Lewis, Washington.

Now that college was over, the education of Andrew McDonald Exum could begin in earnest.

Copyright © 2005 Andrew Exum

About the Author

Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Andrew Exum is a veteran of Operation Anaconda. He reached the rank of captain with the U.S. Army Rangers before leaving the service in May 2004. He currently lives in Beirut, where he is studying Arabic at the American University.