Jim Taft grew up just outside Newport, Rhode Island. He joined the Army, then attended West Point and graduated in 2005. He served as a psyop officer before leaving the service.
One morning, in the summer of 1998, I wake up with an epiphany.
I get into my car, drive to Providence, Rhode Island, walk into an Army recruiter’s office, and say, “Sign me up.”
I never had any intention of joining the military until today.
I went to a Catholic all-male prep school in Newport, Rhode Island; played sports; did what my mom and dad told me. Then I went to a Catholic college in New York and figured out that I really, really liked beer and I really, really didn’t like class. I left after one semester, came home, and went to a junior college. It felt like high school all over again, and I quit. My first bout of adulthood, and I failed miserably.
I’m eighteen years old and need to do something different with my life. Clearly, I don’t know how to be responsible. My thinking is maybe the military can teach me.
Two days later, I fly to Fort Benning, on the Alabama-Georgia border, for basic training.
It’s a shock to the system.
I’m short, about five five, and the drill sergeant seems eight feet tall. He has his shirtsleeves rolled up, and I can see every single sinewy muscle and vein in his arms. He’s got the perfect high and tight haircut and the perfect square jaw, and I’m pretty sure he has about half a can of Copenhagen packed in his cheek.
I have never been yelled at in my entire life. On top of that, the drill sergeant and all these other guys are using words and combinations of adjectives and adverbs and cusswords and made-up words that I didn’t know could be put together. I hear the word fuck used as a comma.
I didn’t know you could use fuck as a comma.
What the hell am I doing here? What is this?
I decide to give it some time. Slowly, my attitude changes from I don’t want to be here to Let’s get this over with.
I grew up in an extremely Irish Catholic family, in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. Here, I’m seeing all the colors in the crayon box. I’m being forced to interact with people from all different walks of life. And as hokey as it sounds, none of it matters because we’re all here together to accomplish a mission. This doesn’t happen in the real world. Even at my age, I know that in the real world you can’t throw together a group of people who have no reason to be together and expect them to do anything successful.
After basic, I head to Fort Gordon and get advanced individual training in communications. It’s nearing the end of 1999, and I get word that I’m going to be joining a humanitarian mission called Operation Stabilize, in East Timor. We get issued timber boots, uniforms, and these cool boonie hats. I’m assuming we’re leaving Georgia for someplace tropical. I’ve never heard of East Timor, but I’m assuming it’s in Indonesia since that’s our destination.
That’s all we’re told. That and we’ll be providing UN standard communications so everyone can talk to each other.
I’m the youngest person on the deployment. I quickly find out that I’m surrounded by specialists and higher-up guys who have a proven track record of being great at what they do. I also find out that my team leader fought for me to deploy. He told the command that I’m a capable and good soldier. He thought this would be a great experience for me.
I’ve been the good private. Got the shiny boots, the tight haircut, and I do well at PT. I never cause any trouble. I wake up, go run a couple of miles, do some push-ups, go to work, go back to the barracks, and shine my boots. Up until this point, the Army has been easy for me.
Now I’m going to be put to the test, to prove my worth on an actual real-world mission.
The airport in Dili has been completely sacked by civil unrest. It’s riddled with bullet holes and pockmarks left from an attack by some crude mortar systems. Some of the buildings have been mortared, maybe even bombed.
It’s my first time seeing actual destruction—the kind of destruction that fighting causes—and I feel my fear kick in.
Oh, shit. This is actually real.
The University of Timor is about ten miles from the airport. We move there and set up our commo shop, build a hooch, and set up defensive positions.
About a week in, I’m pulling security eight hours a day, working another ten, and then sleeping and working out whenever I can. And then it hits me:
This is really fun. I’m chilling out in some crazy, beautiful, foreign, tropical country with a loaded weapon. It’s fantastic.
I’m working out by myself in the crude little gym we’ve set up when the task force commander, Colonel Yarney, enters.
“Why are you here, Private?” he asks.
“I’ve got to stay in shape to do good on my PT test, sir.”
His smile says Good answer. “Are you enjoying your time here?”
“Yes, sir, I’m having a blast.”
“Working hard?”
“Yes, sir.”
We work out for a bit. Then, out of nowhere, he says, “Did you graduate from high school?”
“Yes, sir. I graduated with a 4.0 from a prep school.”
“And did you take the SAT?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you do well on it?”
“Yes, sir. I went to a small Catholic college on a full academic scholarship.” Which is true. I leave out the part about how much I enjoyed beer more than class.
“Have you ever thought about becoming an officer?” he asks.
“Well, sir, I like money, so yes, I’ve thought about it.”
We finish working out. We eat some chow, shower up, put on our uniforms.
“Come to my office after lunch,” he says. “I’d like to talk to you.”
When I arrive, Colonel Yarney is there with one of his captains. They tell me they’re both graduates of West Point. The military academy, they say, tries to get two hundred active soldiers a year to matriculate. I can go to West Point, they tell me, but since I haven’t done any academic work for a good amount of time, first I have to go to their military prep school for a year.
“Think about it,” the colonel says.
I don’t have to think about it all that long. I like the Army. West Point is a great college, and I won’t have to pay anything, which is cool.
I head back to the colonel’s office before dinner.
“Sir, about your offer,” I say. “Where do I sign up?”
Five months later, when I arrive at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona, Colonel Yarney takes me to the officers’ club for a little celebration. I have lunch with him and five lieutenants who graduated from West Point.
Then, in 2000, I head to Monmouth County, New Jersey, for prep school. I get right back into the swing of academic life.
Showing up at West Point in the middle of summer—my first day, like the Grateful Dead say, is a trip, man. I see Gothic buildings that look as though they were plucked out of eighteenth-century Europe and placed down along the Hudson River. I eat lunch served family style with roughly four thousand people.
Cadets run the training, called beast barracks. It’s my plebe year, but I’m the same age as the juniors and seniors. In my private first-class head, since I’ve actually deployed, I have infinitely more military experience and knowledge than any of them. My beast roommate is a recruited swimmer, the first in his family to go to college, no military experience whatsoever.
When the cadets in my room scream at me like the drill sergeant did on my first day of basic, it’s hard to take them seriously. But my roommate does. He breaks down in tears.
“Dude,” I say, shocked. “What are you doing? You can’t cry.”
“I just…Why were they yelling at me? I just wanted to pick up my bag and they wouldn’t let me pick up my bag.”
“Calm down. No one’s gonna die today. Nothing’s going to blow up. This isn’t the end of the world. You’re going to be okay.”
Later, when no one else is around, my beast barracks squad leader approaches me and asks, “What did you do in the Army?”
“I was a signal guy.”
“Really? I want to branch signal.”
“That’s great, Sergeant.”
“Can you tell me what it’s like?”
You’re supposed to tell me what the Army is like, I want to say. Not the other way around.
Then it occurs to me that the guys here have accomplished something I haven’t: making it through freshman year. They’re on track to graduate, and more important, they’re in charge, so I reconnect with the attitude that got me through basic: Let’s get this over with.
Two weeks into the academic year, 9/11 happens. The country is going to war is all we hear from the active-duty officers who are our teachers.
West Point has a lunchtime tradition of announcing the names of graduates who have died. Those first few months, during the initial invasion into Afghanistan, are rough. Cadets who know the names of the dead—some of them can’t handle it. Some of them say, “I can’t do this,” and quit.
The older I get in cadet years, the more people I get to know, and the more names of the dead I start to recognize.
Alumni who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq return to talk with us about the war. They share combat stories from the battlefield. The way they speak, I can tell they’re trying to mold the students into good leaders.
Graduating West Point cadets get to pick their first post. Much like the NFL draft, the lineup is by branch, in order of merit. When it’s my turn in 2005, I pick infantry. I want to be on the front lines. I want to go to Afghanistan and have my revenge on what they did to us.