WAR GAMES: Cadets under Zielinski's lead face off against teams from Britain's elite Sandhurst Academy
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Others suggest offering the farmer protection, an idea that McKinney rips apart even more quickly. Never promise these people anything you can't deliver, he says. They remember those things.
Finally, McKinney gives the answer to the case study: There is no answer. Not one single answer, anyhow. It's all just guesses, and McKinney's guess is that you should leverage the strong Iraqi aversion to having a death on one's conscience. Tell the farmer that the soldier lying out there is a human being and that his death would be on the farmer's head. In other words, use your judgment, considering everything you have learned about the place and the culture and human nature.
For born warriors like Zielinski, the opportunity to put those lessons into practice can't come soon enough. Yet while West Point has been producing generals for 200 years, not every generation hears the same call. When Major Jason Amerine was attending West Point in the early '90s, the appeal of a career in uniform was fading. The Berlin Wall fell during his freshman year. "We went from the cold war to a thousand points of light," he recalls. "The feeling was, What are we doing?" During the first Gulf War, in 1991, the academy took to playing I'm Proud to Be an American again and again in Eisenhower Hall. "I just thought, O.K. already, I get it," he recalls. To this day, he can't quite bear to hear it. It's his version of Gulf War syndrome, he jokes.
When he graduated in 1993, Amerine was commissioned a lieutenant in what had essentially become the world's most muscular police department. His first taste of combat, during a Cuban-refugee riot in Panama in which every member of his unit was wounded, was not even labeled combat. None of his men got Purple Hearts. He was in a hotel in Kazakhstan when word came of the 9/11 attacks. Within weeks his team of 12 special-forces soldiers was dropped behind Taliban lines with little more than weapons, cash and a mission to start a Pashtun insurgency. In one fire fight, Amerine and eight of his soldiers, with the intermittent help of Afghan irregulars, stopped an advance of 1,000 Taliban soldiers. Just as they were descending triumphant on Kandahar, an errant U.S. bomb hit, killing two of his men and leaving Amerine with shrapnel in his leg, a busted eardrum and dark, hard memories of a war that had him putting his best sergeant in a body bag.
Amerine's war-hero status--he was a guest of honor at President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, although he ceded his position at Laura Bush's side to another survivor from his special-forces team--seems to give him license to act as a great counterweight to the misty-eyed patriotism of West Point. He was recruited to teach international relations--and the realities of war. "Major Amerine doesn't sugarcoat anything," says Cadet Jonathan Lum. "His basic lesson is, There's a percentage of you that will die."