WAR GAMES: Cadets under Zielinski's lead face off against teams from Britain's elite Sandhurst Academy
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"I'm always completely honest with my cadets," Amerine says. "That's what I would want for myself." He manages to pack a war's worth of heresy against Army doctrine into a 50-min. class. He presses cadets to enunciate a meaningful difference between insurgent leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi and West Point icon and Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Pole who was the foreign fighter of his era. What is a terrorist? Amerine asks. Someone who flies planes into buildings, says a cadet. The Japanese did basically that, says Amerine. Someone who kills civilians, says another. The U.S. did that in Dresden, Amerine replies. He is the tireless devil's advocate, forcing cadets into deeper analysis and dense moral ground.
His faith in the essential goodness of the Army, the justness of the cause, he says, informs even his most piercing criticisms. It's delicate détente that all of West Point nurses--how to create well-informed junior officers without their giving in to cynicism. "I'm hoping to produce cadets who, after having lived through all the blood, all the horrors, will still absolutely believe in what they're doing," says Amerine. He told his cadets about a website that offers a host of Iraqi decapitation videos, but he didn't assign it as required viewing. "Just because they're cadets who are going to go to Iraq doesn't mean I need to make them watch people getting their heads cut off," he says. Sometimes, after his class discussion veers into the dangers that lie ahead, "I look to see that the cadets walk out kind of quiet, with their heads down, like I'd just told them my mother died. Then I know I've reached them."
Before long, many of those cadets walking out of Amerine's classroom will be officers in Iraq, commanding units of their own in an environment as hazardous and chaotic as West Point is placidly structured. If there's one doubt that eats at the world of certainties Zielinski has built for himself, it's whether he will be able to earn the respect of NCOs--noncommissioned officers. In the real Army, it's the sergeants--experienced, usually older enlisted men and women who serve at lieutenants' sides--who keep the green young officers from making deadly mistakes. The skills needed for leading enlisted troops, who are often older or from lower incomes or rougher cultures than the cadets, is a constant teaching mission. The academy places an NCO in every company barrack, both to mentor and to act as leadership guinea pigs. But the future leaders of the Army are being auditioned in Iraq now--which is why Zielinski is eager to get to the front. "I'm tired of waiting, of hearing what we're going to do," he says. "I just want to go do it."
CADET PAE
A DEBT REPAID
If being worried about their future is hard on cadets, it's nothing compared with what their parents are going through. For the class of '05, the coming of war changed the math. Parents who were proud of their kids for taking on the challenge of West Point faced a test of their own when it became clear that in this war and in wars to come, there was no safe specialty, no escape from the dangers of combat. "Ten years ago, parents were pushing their cadets to come here," Lieut. General Lennox observes. "Now it's the other way around: a cadet is pushing his own parents into accepting the fact that he wants to go to West Point."