Every officer a grunt

Officers learn, sometimes painfully, what it takes to be an ‘officer of Marines’

By Christian Lowe / Times staff writer

The Humvee’s engine labored as it climbed the steep dirt road toward a shack just over the crest. From the gun turret, 2nd Lt. Davis Gooding saw something in the shadows.

“I see an enemy position near that shack!” Gooding shouted, yanking back the charging handle of his M2.50-caliber machine gun.

The convoy commander, 2nd Lt. Benjamin Kiley, craned his neck in the passenger seat but didn’t appear to see what Gooding had spotted.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Clang!

Gooding fired off three rounds from the .50-cal., a burst that was interrupted when the weapon’s blank-fire adaptor separated from the barrel and landed several feet in front of the vehicle with a loud “clang” as it hit the hard-packed dirt road.

Gooding looked down through the gun turret.

“Holy s--t! I frickin’ broke the blank adaptor off!” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

Kiley rolled his eyes as the enlisted driver and another enlisted instructor in the back seat shook their heads in disgust, turning to look out the left-side windows.

Gooding kept yelling: “Did you see that! I frickin’ broke the blank adaptor off the .50-cal. Look how far it flew!” as his fellow lieutenants rolled by in their vehicles, some chuckling at the lieutenant’s enthusiasm over the broken weapon.

As the convoy rolled on, Gooding spotted yet another “enemy” soldier — played by enlisted instructors wearing off-colored camouflage uniforms. He fired another burst from the .50-caliber, apparently enjoying the thumping sound of the heavy-caliber weapon more than learning the basics of convoy security.

The enlisted instructors in the Humvee shook their heads again, this time looking at the floor, embarrassed for Gooding.

“That guy’s just opening the gate for us,” Kiley said in his thick New York accent.

It didn’t matter. Gooding was just enjoying being behind the trigger.

“Have you ever played that game Halo?” Gooding asks a reporter riding with him in the Humvee. “This is just like it.”

Though the officer instructors responsible for teaching Gooding and his fellow second lieutenants the skills expected of a rifle platoon leader didn’t like his characterization of this exercise one bit, his sentiments are not unique.

It’s been called the Marine Corps’ “officer finishing school” by some. But to the lieutenants of Officer Candidates School Class 186 and their fellow officers training in the woods of Quantico, Va., The Basic School is nothing more than an annoying but necessary waypoint on the road to Iraq. With the war looming over the horizon for most, the new lieutenants are looking beyond this six-month course that began in early September 2004, ready to get on with life in the real Marine Corps.

But the lieutenants of Fox Company, Basic Officer Course 06-05, still have a lot to learn — and the likelihood of a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan makes what they’re taught here all the more important. The relentless days of practice in the field and hours of study in the cold, dilapidated classrooms of Heywood Hall will teach things about the Corps and its ways that they never knew existed. It will also push them in some cases beyond their ability to cope.

It’s an introduction to the real Marine, but it’s not really the Marine Corps. The Basic School has the feel of a college campus, replete with late-night drinking binges, love affairs, missed classes and the forging of lifelong bonds. But there’s also a seriousness of purpose here.

And if the newly minted officers aren’t aware of that seriousness from Day One, the lieutenants’ new commander had a sharp rebuke.

“You’re not at college anymore. You’re not in a fraternity. You’re not in a sorority. You have not ‘arrived’ either,” warned Col. Jim Laster, the stern commander of TBS, as he addressed the lieutenants on their first day. “I’ll reserve the right to call you ‘officers of Marines’ until you graduate.”

Their duty toward enlisteds

One of the first things you learn at TBS is that the school doesn’t teach you to be a Marine officer. Rather, the aim is to teach the new lieutenants to be “officers of Marines.” This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it most assuredly is not. The subtlety lies in the notion that leading Marines is a privilege.

Throughout their classroom studies — about 60 percent of their time at TBS — the officers are reminded of their duty toward the enlisted Marines they will lead and their responsibility to uphold the traditions and values of the Marine Corps.

Though there is little interaction between the officer and enlisted at TBS, the instructors and the lieutenants’ “staff platoon commanders” — captains who serve as mentors, advisers and disciplinarians for each of Fox Company’s six platoons — drill into them the notion that a career as a Marine officer is about serving the enlisted Marine.

“This school is not about you. … You owe it to that lance corporal to be the best Marine officer you can be,” Maj. Todd Bottoms, the commander of Fox Company, told a room full of lieutenants. “We are brothers and sisters in arms.”

The first few weeks of instruction at TBS are packed with history lessons, land navigation courses, terrain model construction classes and lessons on how to write combat orders — a task that will be an unending source of frustration for many of the student officers throughout the training.

The lieutenants spend a lot of time on the basics of rifle company tactics, techniques and procedures during the first two months of training. Everything they will be expected to do in the field during larger-scale exercises is drilled into them in 932 hours of classroom time. But most have a hard time keeping their attention up in class. Late nights of study — and partying at the many watering holes in the Washington area less than an hour’s drive away — keep many fighting off sleep during the day.

“I never really liked class that much,” said 2nd Lt. Almar Fitzgerald, a member of Fox Company’s 2nd Platoon who graduated OCS with Class 186.

But “brilliance in the basics,” as the instructors like to call it, is learned first in the classroom, and not paying attention there can draw sharp rebukes and poor peer evaluations in the field.

Beyond the tools of the rifle platoon trade, the officers at TBS learn another skill more important than map reading or radio operation. More than one-third of the instruction, both in the classroom and in the field, is geared toward teaching the lieutenants how to be leaders. The lieutenants hold company billets, including platoon commander, squad leader, executive officer and student company commander. This is really their only test of leadership because there is little direct interaction with enlisted Marines at TBS — it’s not like there’s a platoon of grunts standing by to be ordered around by a bunch of boot lieutenants. Leading real enlisted Marines won’t come until they’ve hit the fleet, so practice at TBS — hopefully — makes perfect.

But leading your fellow classmates isn’t easy. They’re officers, too, so ordering them around comes across as a bit counterintuitive.

“I tried to play the nice guy,” recalled 2nd Lt. Victor Sosa, also a Class 186 grad, who trained alongside Fitzgerald in 4th Platoon. “One time, we were on the defense and I had to get everybody to dig fighting holes. That’s no fun at all,” especially during the cold Quantico winter, when the ground is frozen through and rock hard.

“If you have a subordinate that knows they’re subordinate, then it’s easier,” Sosa added. “Problem is, while you’re leading your peers, you’re also leading your friends.”

Looking for direction

Sosa’s difficulties didn’t end there. While much of TBS is spent in the classroom, the lessons the officers learn at their desks and behind the sand tables are just prerequisites to the work they’ll have to do in the field. Sometimes, the exercises can have hilarious results. Other times they can be downright dangerous.

Ask anyone who’s been through it and they’ll tell you: At Quantico, you’re going to get lost. Hours are spent teaching the lieutenants to navigate with a map and compass and they’re expected to know their exact location at all times. During patrols or other maneuvers, instructors question the lieutenants on their position, faulting them for checking their maps and compasses too often.

“You keep looking at that map and your compass like that, they’ll think you’re lost,” Capt. Bobby Danzie, 2nd Platoon commander, told 2nd Lt. Andrew Wimsatt during a squad patrol.

Other times, the field work can be a comedy of errors.

During a nighttime field firing exercise, the platoons were split into two groups. One group awaited its turn to fire M6 rifles and M249 Squad Automatic Weapons, spraying tracers in glowing arcs through the blackness of Range 305. Meanwhile, another group stood in line to work with night-vision goggles.

Strung out along a twisty path through the woods, the lieutenants bumped and tripped their way through thickets, over fallen trees and under low-hanging branches. Arms waving in front of them like extras in a low-budget zombie movie, the students tried to keep their cool and maneuver the route — all while the enlisted Marines helping out with the exercise stood bent over with laughter at their bumbling. Yes, it was the lieutenants’ first time using NVGs. Yes, the goggles are less than perfect. Yes, they’ll get more practice at TBS and at their military occupational specialty schools. And yes, this is just practice. But it’s still a kick for the enlisted Marines supervising the event to see the officers so vulnerable.

Sometimes, however, the exercises can get deadly serious.

For Sosa, officer training was his first opportunity to handle a weapon. Qualifying on the rifle range was hard enough, but the pistol proved nearly disastrous for his future in the Corps.

He did just fine on the range — he’s no ace with a 9mm, but he’s passable. But his lack of experience with weapons and his unfamiliarity with the M9 Beretta pistol got him in big trouble.

“They made us safety our weapons and remove the clips,” Sosa said. “I had forgotten that the M9 automatically loads one into the chamber so I forgot to eject that one, too. We were dry firing and I pointed the weapon downrange and pulled the trigger and it fired.”

The accidental discharge of a weapon is a serious mistake.

“They wanted to roll me to the next TBS class for the error,” he said.

But with some intervention from Capt. Lee Kuykendall, his platoon commander, and a demonstrated promise that he’d learned his lesson, Sosa was allowed to stay.

“Any more of those and I would have been gone. It never happened again,” Sosa said.

In most cases, though, mistakes during training are forgivable — and usually expected.

During an urban patrolling exercise at the FBI Academy’s “Hogan’s Alley” facility at Quantico, 2nd Lt. Patrick Amalfi learned that things can go downhill fast under fire. The urban training facility is strikingly realistic. A movie theater, a motel called the Dogwood Inn and a coin-op laundy line the streets, their English-language signs offering an unusual counterpoint to the Marines playing local “Arabs” for the exercise, who were clad in dishdasha robes and native headscarves.

Rounding a corner just ahead of a row of town houses abutting the laundromat, Amalfi’s patrol came under fire from a sniper in one of the town house rooms on the second floor.

His squad hit the dirt, some firing, others frozen. It was time for Amalfi to lead, but he wasn’t.

“Someone get some fire on that building!” he yelled finally, as one of the lieutenants made the sound of gunfire, shouting “bang, bang, bang” with his SAW (even blanks were off-limits that day because a “high-ranking government official” was mountain biking on the base; President Bush reportedly likes to ride at Quantico, but there was no confirmation that this time it was him).

During the post-exercise debrief, Amalfi was told he’d lost control of his forces. He had taken too long to inventory casualties and ammo. One “wounded” lieutenant sat along the side of the road for minutes before a medic was called.

The incident stung Amalfi, whose dream job in the Corps is to be an infantry officer.

“God, I didn’t do so good, did I?” he wondered, shaking his downturned head with disappointment. “What should I have done better?”

Fitzgerald had a similar experience at Quantico’s urban combat range.

As Fitzgerald’s fire team burst through the door of a building, several of his men were peppered with paintball rounds. Fitzgerald was plugged in the head.

“Man, that hit me really hard,” Fitzgerald said.

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