WAR GAMES: Cadets under Zielinski's lead face off against teams from Britain's elite Sandhurst Academy
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Underneath the polish, however, Zielinski has his insecurities about where he came from and where he's headed. He came to West Point as a rebel. Growing up among the preppies of Fairfield, Conn., the brother of a Princeton-grad investment banker and a son of a media executive, he was drawn to military life because he wanted something more than just a good job. He originally had his heart set on going into the Navy to become a fighter pilot, but when he visited West Point, he fell in love with its emphasis on the basic relationship of leader to soldier, its elemental emphasis on men, not machinery. He didn't focus on just the dreamier ideals. The minutiae of leadership and the daily self-assessment--Am I doing enough to prepare myself?--became an obsession. As he rose into his first leadership roles during sophomore year, Zielinski calmly assessed his relationship with his high school sweetheart. "I needed to be more available for my men," he says. "The relationship was keeping me from being the best leader I could be." He broke it off.
More than anything else, Zielinski is looking for practice, not theory, and the West Point faculty is changing to meet that demand. If the typical college professor floats somewhere high above the real world, at West Point instructors are expected to bring the real world with them--not just in private but in public as well. In Iraq, generals admit that the captains and lieutenants often know more about how to combat the insurgency than they do. It is, they say, a platoon leader's war.
Captain Chris McKinney, who led an infantry company during the first months of the Iraq invasion, had been brought to West Point to teach Fundamentals of Tactics. His easy ferocity inspires wide measures of terror and devotion among cadets. "I just hate that guy sometimes," says one, "but I would feel safest going into combat with him over my other instructors, definitely." To Zielinski, whose unit at Air Assault School had to withstand McKinney's withering inspection, the weakest instructors are the ones who act like your buddy. "When I see someone being tough with me, like Captain McKinney," he says, "I think it's a good thing. You only learn more that way."
McKinney knows that once they have tasted combat, his cadets may view his methods in a new light. "Later on, they are going to understand why I jump on mistakes," he says. "Later on, those might be fatal mistakes, ones they can't take back." He looks for ways to test both their knowledge and their instincts as they prepare for a battlefield where friend and enemy can be indistinguishable. He is a walking album of case studies: You're leading a platoon, he tells his cadets, and one of your men is lying wounded in the middle of a minefield. You go meet with a local farmer, who knows how to lead his herds safely through the field, so he could help rescue your comrade. But he won't talk; if he's seen collaborating with the Americans, he and his family could be killed. What do you do?
Many cadets' first reflex, he says, is to hold a pistol to the farmer's head. McKinney challenges them: Well, are you willing to pull the trigger, then? And wouldn't that endanger the lives of some of your men if the farmer's tribe wanted revenge? If he still refuses and you don't pull the trigger now, will you have lost credibility with your team?