Every officer a grunt (continued)

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Making fast friends

The relentless classroom schedule, the tests, cold days and nights bivouacked in the woods — all drag morale down like a ball and chain.

“It’s really hard to manage your time. The hours are really long,” said 2nd Lt. Eric Armstrong, another veteran of Class 186 from Las Vegas. “I kinda miss OCS.”

But the long hours forge friendships. For the men and women of Class 186, that is particularly true. Some from Class 186 — the lawyers, mostly — went back to college after OCS to finish their degree programs. But the men of 4th Platoon who went directly on to TBS stuck together, eschewing their new platoon comrades, growing closer and closer as they withstood the rigors of life as second lieutenants.

And like any fraternity, there was a lot of partying.

Students at TBS live in a series of cinder-block buildings called O’Bannon Hall. There’s an officer’s mess dubbed the Hanson Room for meals; the small, intimately appointed Hawkins Room serves as a cocktail lounge for the young lieutenants to blow off some steam after a hard day in the field.

But no one goes there.

On any given Friday, Amalfi, Sosa and Fitzgerald joined fellow Class 186 lieutenants Dan Boyle, James Brame and Michael Milliman in a caravan of cars bound for Washington, D.C., for a long night on the town. Amalfi’s girlfriend, Jenny Day, has an apartment just over the Potomac River, south of Washington. The guys use it as a crash pad after a long bender.

In other cases, the officers would go in on a hotel room rather than risk the possibility of getting busted by the cops on the long drive back to Quantico.

“Yeah, it can get pretty expensive,” said 2nd Lt. Josh Piper, a prior-enlisted Marine staff sergeant who wants to be an AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter pilot. “But a bunch of us just pool our money together and cram into one room.”

Weekend antics are a hot topic of conversation as the officers stroll bleary-eyed to their classrooms, just yards from their dorms, on Monday mornings. Most of it is lighthearted and jovial — like the time Fitzgerald wound up in a random girl’s room near Georgetown and locked himself out of his car.

But other times, it can be the precursor to bigger trouble.

One Friday night early on at TBS, Boyle headed into town with Fitzgerald and some others from Class 186. Boyle’s state at the end of the night varies depending who you talk to, but he was tagged as the designated driver and started the 45-minute trip back to Quantico late in the evening. It’s a straight shot down Interstate 95, but somehow Boyle missed the exit and found himself entering Richmond, Va. — about 80 miles further down the highway.

“I don’t know, man, I just got lost,” he recalled.

Rolling back to Quantico, finally, Boyle crashed hard in his bunk at about 6 a.m. The night’s events caused him to sleep through his alarm and miss a remedial run on the obstacle course that morning, putting him squarely in the sights of the Fox Company staff.

“I had to counsel him on that,” said his platoon commander, Capt. Kuykendall.

But as the months creep toward the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, some of the Class 186 comrades peel away from the weekend parties. They’re called “brown baggers” because they live off base — the label is a nod to the idea of the commuter’s bag lunch. Mike Jiabia is one of them, living outside Quantico with his soon-to-be bride.

Even as the bonds deepened among the lieutenants, so, too, would the threads of love and relationships outside. Both Jiabia and Piper would marry during TBS and Amalfi’s relationship with Jenny would deepen. It helped him deal with the stress of TBS, but sometimes it distracted him from giving his full attention to the rigorous academics, his classmates said.

‘Infantry’

Six months of mainlining basic rifle company tactics, Marine Corps history and philosophy and it all comes down to this.

No, it’s not graduation. It’s bigger than that. It’s the day they’ve all been waiting for: MOS day.

And as it turns out, this January day is as unremarkable as any other.

In his understated office with a government-issued desk, small refrigerator in the corner and a simple, wooden “flak stand” — a pair of crossed two-by-four boards designed to hold the officer’s helmet and bulletproof vest — sitting close by, Capt. Bobby Danzie delivers the news to Amalfi.

“Infantry.”

Amalfi hadn’t seen any other reason to join the Marine Corps; he didn’t want to be there unless it was to lead men into combat. He got his wish.

Because of the needs of war and the formation of two new infantry battalions, the Corps had dozens of spots open for new infantry officers. In the past, the field was highly competitive; these days, if a lieutenant wants to go infantry, he’ll probably get it.

Another plum assignment is intelligence. The Corps offers jobs in three different intelligence areas: human intel, which deals primarily with interrogations; signals intel, which focuses on collection and interpretation of electronic data; and ground intel, the hottest of the three, which deals with highly secretive direct-action missions and site exploitation.

Second Lt. Wes Gray, a Class 186 vet who broke from his pursuit of a doctorate in finance to join the Corps, breezed his way through TBS in the top of his class. At the top, you get your pick of jobs. He got ground intel.

Sosa, who at first wanted to be a naval flight officer riding in the back of an F/A-18D Hornet but later decided he wanted an intel job, got his first pick. He was assigned as a “human source intelligence” officer with 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

It’s an interesting pick for Sosa, a soft-spoken Nebraskan whose father, an Air Force nuclear missile officer, didn’t really want his son to follow him into military service. Would his deep religious convictions and strong sense of ethics interfere with his ability to do some morally ambiguous things during the interrogation of detainees?

“I’m going to probably weigh in on the conservative side of things,” he said. “I’m glad I got human intel because it looked to be the closest to my [college] major: psychology.”

But for many others, the assignment process wasn’t so clear cut. Though modern systems have removed a lot of the subjectivity from the MOS selection process, there’s still room for the instructors — the men and women who best understand the lieutenants’ strengths and weaknesses — to change a lieutenant’s job assignment.

A new computer program called “My MOS” generates a job assignment by matching a lieutenant’s top choices against his class rank among the roughly 250 lieutenants of Fox Company and the number of job slots available for new officers in the fleet. But sometimes, the job it spits out doesn’t seem right to the staff.

In one case, a female lieutenant was assigned signals intelligence — one of the most popular jobs among newly commissioned officers. When the instructors saw that, the arguments started.

“I’m telling you, it will not be a good fit,” said Capt. Stephanie Arndt, 1st Platoon’s staff platoon commander, a communications officer who explained that her roommate on a MEU deployment was a signals intel officer and was a much better and smarter leader than the lieutenant being considered this time. “She’ll have to lead one of the smartest groups of enlisted Marines in the Corps,” Arndt explained. “I don’t think she’ll be able to handle it.”

An argument ensued when some of the staff platoon commanders — who get final say on job assignments — agreed to move a lieutenant who’d been assigned a logistics job into the signals intel slot. A couple of the staff platoon commanders — the lieutenants know them as “SPCs” — wondered if it was a good idea given the fact that convoys and supply depots routinely come under attack in Iraq, requiring split-second, aggressive decision-making and leadership.

Again, the job might have been too demanding for a lieutenant with less-developed leadership skill. The officer wound up, after a couple weeks of consideration and horse-trading, with a different assignment.

The next assignments

With jobs assigned and the final exams and exercises complete, the beginning of March found the lieutenants looking well beyond The Basic School, readying themselves for moves to Camp Lejeune, N.C.; Pensacola Naval Air Station, Fla.; Camp Pendleton, Calif.; and other bases for their job-specific training.

A few of the officers would head to MOS schools and their first Fleet Marine Force units to find that their reputations had preceded them. In some cases, the SPCs call receiving-unit commanders to let them know to look out for certain issues with a given lieutenant, such as leadership or other basic skills that were underdeveloped at TBS.

A lieutenant may have passed land navigation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s good enough, and the SPCs make behind-the-scenes calls to let commanders know what to watch for.

“I made some calls to some friends on a couple guys,” said Kuykendall, who led Fox Company’s 3rd Platoon. “They may need a little extra supervision.”

Toast to the fallen

Graduation came March 17, but a week prior, the new lieutenants got a taste of an old-school Corps tradition that gave them a chance to relax a bit and swap stories as a full company. It’s a formal dinner called a “Mess Night” and the officers carouse with alcohol-fed aplomb, puffing on cigars and downing punch throughout the night.

But before the revelry, the weight of their past and the challenges of their future are brought home with a stark reminder.

The lieutenants, their instructors and guests rise for a solemn toast to their fallen brethren. A table at the back of the officer’s formal mess hall is set as if for a group of latecomers. But only photographs are there. Images of young officers who will never again partake in the celebration of Mess Night. Officers who got lost in Quantico’s woods, just like these men and women; officers who partied in Georgetown with their classmates, too; officers who were just as confused and challenged and excited to be leaders of Marines as these lieutenants.

But they are gone now, lost in combat in America’s war on terrorism.

Watching all this, his head slightly bowed, is one of those who has lost comrades in war — a man with whom some of these officers could be exchanging places in a matter of months.

Capt. Brian Chontosh, who counts a Navy Cross — the Corps’ second-highest award for combat valor — among his decorations, has seen the worst of it in two combat tours in Iraq.

He has led men and lost men in the streets of Fallujah and in the deserts of southern Iraq. As the young lieutenants look ahead to post-Mess Night reverie at the bar, Chontosh sits at his table, silent.

He knows that no matter what many of the lieutenants think right now, TBS does matter. He knows that the art of war, the history of the Corps, the ethics and rules — all the things Chontosh is here to teach — are all the young officers have when the bullets are flying and young Marines are dying.

“Brilliance in the basics,” as Maj. Bottoms said on the first day of this six-month ordeal — that’s what will most likely make the difference between life and death for these officers when it’s their turn to fight America’s enemies and lead Marines in war.

Some of the Class 186 officers are already in Iraq, serving on the front lines little more than a year after they first inched their way up the rope climb on the obstacle course at OCS.

Others are still in school or waiting for their first assignments, finding out the hard way that learning to be a leader of Marines doesn’t stop once TBS is in the rear-view mirror.