"It's the field that leads us back to school," I replied. This was our chance to get on campus without having to meet up with our attackers again. Dalio had never been here, and most cadets never had a reason to. I had, however; it was one of the first memories I had of my school. This was the same area I'd run through trying to find the Wayne train station, trying to escape.
"Let's go," I whispered and we bolted into the woods. Scared, and angry, we navigated the darkness holding on to trees, using the moon as our guide. Minutes later, we saw the light from the cross perched on the chapel's roof, which was only fifty yards away from our barracks.
The irony of the situation forced me to smile, featuring my newly cracked tooth. Years earlier, I had run through these same woods with all of my might, looking for safety, trying to get away from campus. Tonight, I ran through the same woods looking for safety, but in the other direction.
Part III
Paths Taken and Expectations Fulfilled
I sat again in that large, gray, windowless room with about thirty other people waiting to see their fathers, husbands, sons, boyfriends, and friends. The air in the room was heavy and cold, the chairs hard. There was a vending machine with only a few sad items dangling inside. Small lockers lined the gray walls. We were told to place whatever we carried with us inside them. Nothing unaccounted for could go in--or out of--the secured room that would be our next stop. Out of the thirty people in the room, I was one of only two men. The rest were women and children.
One by one, the guards called out numbers. After about an hour of waiting, I finally heard mine. I quickly rose and walked over to a desk where bulletproof glass separated me from a corrections officer. The officer threw out the same barrage of questions they always ask. "What is your relation to the inmate? Do you have any electronic equipment or sharp items? Do you have any items you plan on passing on to the inmate?" Eventually they let me into the visitors' room, where I waited for Wes to be escorted in.
"I wasn't even there that day."
I looked at Wes, speechless. He still didn't admit to the armed robbery that had led to his final imprisonment.
There were days when our unexpected relationship started to seem absurd. What was I doing here, anyway? More than three years earlier, I'd written a letter to a stranger whose story had sat with me for years. We shared a name, but the truth was that I didn't know this man. He was simply an address, a P.O. box, and a personal identification number. A man convicted of murder. And, inevitably, as in every convict cliche I'd ever heard, he claimed innocence.
But I started to think more about his repeated defense, offered again and again in earnest: "I wasn't even there that day." Did he think that through repetition it would become true? That if he just incanted the phrase enough the prison walls would collapse and he'd be able to walk back home? Did he think it could reverse time? How far back would he have to go to be innocent again?
Wes folded his hands together; his broad shoulders leaned in. We were nearing the end of our get-together. Silence now overrode the conversation. He smiled.
I decided not to respond directly to this latest protest of his innocence. Instead, I asked a question: "Do you think we're all just products of our environments?" His smile dissolved into a smirk, with the left side of his face resting at ease.
"I think so, or maybe products of our expectations."
"Others' expectations of us or our expectations for ourselves?"
"I mean others' expectations that you take on as your own."
I realized then how difficult it is to separate the two. The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.
"We will do what others expect of us," Wes said. "If they expect us to graduate, we will graduate. If they expect us to get a job, we will get a job. If they expect us to go to jail, then that's where we will end up too. At some point you lose control."
I sympathized with him, but I recoiled from his ability to shed responsibility seamlessly and drape it at the feet of others.
"True, but it's easy to lose control when you were never looking for it in the first place."
An hour later, our time was up, and he was escorted out as quickly as he entered. I sat in the room alone, collecting my thoughts. I had more questions than I came in with.
SEVEN
The Land That God Forgot
1997
"Five minutes!" the jumpmaster yelled from the front of a C-130 military aircraft.
"Five minutes!" my entire chalk of Airborne candidates yelled back at him in the military's famous call-and-response cadence. We all knew what was next, and now we knew how long we had before it was time to face it. Five minutes.
I stood toward the middle of the C-130, staring at the back of another soldier's Kevlar helmet. The late-summer Georgia heat beat down on the metal shell of the airplane that we'd been packed into for over an hour. Sweat that had been beading all over my face was now streaming uncontrollably but, afraid to move, I simply let it fall. The only relief came from the open door at the front of the plane that our instructors--the Black Hats, we called them--occasionally looked out to inspect our drop zone. A Black Hat would brace his hands against each side of the door and stick his head into the open air, slowly turning from side to side to check for any potential obstacles. I had gotten used to the fifty pounds of gear cumbersomely strapped to my back, torso, and legs. My bladder verged on explosion because of the crazy amount of water we were forced to drink to stay hydrated. None of this now mattered. I was about to jump out of the plane. I was about to become a paratrooper.
An excited nervousness overwhelmed me. It had been a little more than a year since I decided to make the Army a fundamental part of my future. As my high school career was coming to an end, I was still being avidly recruited by college programs. The New York Times had even run a two-page article on my high school sports career and future prospects. I got a firsthand taste of the athletic campus visitation process, complete with young and attractive "tour guides" who showed me around and made me feel welcome--and wanted. It was a seductive ego stroke. Initially, it just reinforced my belief that I was special, that I was chosen. The young female admirers who seemed to come along with the package added to the allure. But eventually, all of these treats started to feel meaningless.
As I began to play against nationally ranked players at various tournaments and camps, I realized that the disparity between my potential and theirs was glaring. I played hard while they played easy, with a gracefulness and effortlessness that I lacked. When you step on the court with players like Kobe Bryant or six foot eight point guards who can dunk from the free throw line, your mind begins to concentrate on your other options.
I realized that I had to make sure these schools knew my name regardless of what I did on the ninety feet of hardwood that had brought me to their attention. Just as military school had slowly grown on me, so had academic life. I actually liked reading now. My mother, sensing my apathy toward reading, had bought me the Mitch Albom book Fab Five. The book is about the Michigan basketball team led by Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, and Juwan Howard, a team with five freshman starters who made it all the way to the national championship game. The Fab Five sported baggy shorts, bald heads, and a swagger I recognized from the streets of the Bronx, all reflective of the way the hip-hop generation was changing the face of sports, and college basketball in particular. I was riveted by that book. The characters jumped off the page, and I felt myself as engulfed in their destiny as I was in my own. I finished Fab Five in two days. The book itself wasn't what was important--in retrospect, I see that it was a great read but hardly a work of great literature--but my mother used it as a hook into a deeper lesson: that the written word isn't necessarily a chore but can be a window into new worlds.
From there, I leaped into every new book with fervor. My fresh love of reading brought me to the transformative writers who have worked their magic on generations of readers. I explored Spain with Paulo Coelho. I li
stened to jazz on the North Shore of Long Island with F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was reminded by Walt Whitman to think of the past, and I awaited "The Fire Next Time" with James Baldwin. But there was a more recent author and public figure whose work spoke to the core of a new set of issues I was struggling with: the Bronx's own Colin Powell. His book, My American Journey, helped me harmonize my understanding of America's history and my aspiration to serve her in uniform. In his autobiography he talked about going to the Woolworth's in Columbus, Georgia, and being able to shop but not eat there. He talked about how black GIs during World War II had more freedoms when stationed in Germany than back in the country they fought for. But he embraced the progress this nation made and the military's role in helping that change to come about. Colin Powell could have been justifiably angry, but he wasn't. He was thankful. I read and reread one section in particular:
The Army was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America. Beginning in the fifties, less discrimination, a truer merit system, and leveler playing fields existed inside the gates of our military posts more than in any Southern city hall or Northern corporation. The Army, therefore, made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws, and to serve her with all of my heart.
The canon of black autobiography sensibly includes scores of books about resistance to the American system. For instance, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X--a book that begins and ends in the madness and pathology of America's racial obsessions--is a rite of passage for young black men. Malcolm never stopped pursuing truth and the right course, based on the best information he had at any given moment. His response to the world he confronted in the middle of the twentieth century was profound and deeply felt, but he didn't speak to my experience as well as Colin Powell did. Powell, in his pragmatic way, wanted what I wanted: A fair shot. A place to develop himself. A code that would instill discipline, restrain passion, and order his steps. A way to change the world without first unleashing the whirlwind. In the chaos of the world I grew up in, those were as appealing to me as Malcolm's cry for revolution was to his generation. I don't claim that Powell had it all figured out: American history bedevils the most earnest attempts to make sense of it. And, of course, the problems of race that Malcolm confronted have not disappeared by any means. But Powell gave me another way to think about the American dilemma and, more than that, another way to think about my own life.
As I started to think seriously about how I could become the person I wanted to be, I looked around at some of the people who'd had the biggest impact on my life. Aside from family and friends, the men I most trusted all had something in common: they all wore the uniform of the United States of America.
I thought about Lieutenant Colonel Murnane, my tenth- and eleventh-grade history and social studies teacher, who lit a fire in me about the importance of public service. I sat in the front of his class entranced as he spoke about the Constitutional Congress and the Federalist Papers, and their relevance to our existence today. I thought about Rear Admiral Hill, the former superintendent of the Naval Academy, who served as the president of Valley Forge in my last three years of high school. Admiral Hill had thousands of cadets, faculty, staff, alumni, and trustees to deal with on a daily basis but always made it a point to know the names and stories of as many cadets as he could. He also taught me an important lesson about leadership: it always comes with having to make tough decisions.
I thought about Colonel Billy Murphy, the commandant of cadets. He was one of the most intimidating but fair men I have ever met. He and his command Sergeant Major Harry Harris demanded excellence from every unit, every platoon, and every cadet. They believed that excuses were tools of the incompetent and forced every cadet to believe the same. One of the last times I saw Colonel Murphy was in our chapel. I sat toward the front. The hard wooden pews forced us to sit up straight, and the message coming from the pulpit demanded everyone's attention. Colonel Murphy ascended to the podium, looking as strong as ever, his eyes still alit with a sense of purpose. Then he announced that he was leaving Valley Forge to undergo treatment for his advanced-stage cancer. He said something I will never forget. "When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were ever here." The notion that life is transient, that it can come and go quickly, unexpectedly, had been with me since I had seen my own father die. In the Bronx, the idea of life's impermanence underlined everything for kids my age--it drove some of us to a paralyzing apathy, stopped us from even thinking too far into the future. Others were driven to what, in retrospect, was a sort of permanent state of mourning: for our loved ones, who always seemed at risk, and for our own lives, which felt so fragile and vulnerable. But I started to see it a little differently that day. Life's impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here. It's what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.
My next decision was clear. I wanted to stay at Valley Forge and attend its junior college, which would allow me to go through the early commissioning process, receive my associate's degree, and become a second lieutenant in the Army. I wanted to lead soldiers.
"Three minutes!" the Black Hat yelled out.
"Three minutes," we replied with a good deal less gusto. I looked around the plane at the faces of my fellow prospective paratroopers. U.S. Army Airborne School is a collection of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, cadets, and anyone else who has received the funding and possesses the will to become Airborne-qualified. Some of the attendees needed the qualification to advance in their careers. For example, those planning to join a Ranger battalion or one of the elite Army units like the 82nd Airborne Division needed to be qualified as paratroopers. For some attendees, whose career goals didn't involve combat, it was a way to get a taste of what the combat experience feels like. For all of us, however, it was, at this moment, terrifying. For some in my chalk, this was the first genuine military activity they would engage in. For a few, this was the first airplane ride they had ever taken. These few, even after today, still wouldn't have had the experience of landing in an airplane, just taking off and jumping out.
Broad smiles and hollow laughter were undermined by trembling legs and shaking hands. Our sweat-stained uniforms, still dusty from the endless push-ups and practice jump landings in man-made pits overflowing with sawdust from our first week, clung to our skin.
My left hand grasped the yellow ripcord for dear life as my right hand pressed against the side wall of the C-130 for balance. That bright yellow cord was my lifeline. If it failed, the reserve parachute that was strapped to my belly like a baby kangaroo would be my last hope.
A week before I boarded the most memorable plane ride of my life, Valley Forge had selected me to be the regimental commander for the 70th Corps of Cadets. This meant that I would be the highest-ranking cadet in the entire corps of over seven hundred people. I would be responsible for their training, health, welfare, morale, and success. I remembered watching the regimental commander my first year at Valley Forge with simultaneous fear and awe. On his command, the entire corps moved. Wherever he stepped on campus, cadets snapped to attention. Every cadet possessed a burning desire to be recognized, but never noticed, as his piercing blue eyes evaluated his corps. Now, days after I became a qualified paratrooper, I would take on that role.
The plane steadied as we neared our drop zone. At eighteen hundred feet in the air, the large aircraft began to cruise and prepare to offload its twenty aspirants. I was only eighteen years old, the youngest in my chalk. When I was commissioned, less than a year from that moment, I was told I was one of the youngest officers in the entire United States military. My platoon sergeant would probably be older than my mother. My company commander would probably have over a decade of life on me. It was one thing leading cadets, but would I honestly be ready at such a young age to lead soldiers?
My mind began racing again when a c
ommand brought me back to reality.
"One minute!"
"One minute!"
My mind retraced my three weeks of training in fifteen seconds. I remembered the components of landing. When I landed, I needed to make sure that my feet and knees stayed together, that my eyes stayed focused on an object in the distance, not on the ground, and that my "five points of contact" hit the ground in order (balls of my feet, sides of my calves, hips, lats, and shoulders). It seems much easier than it actually is: jumping from a plane the wrong way or landing the wrong way could lead to serious injuries, even the kind after which you can't tell the war stories the next day.
Step out with one leg. Chin tight against my chest. Right hand on the handle of my reserve parachute.
Do I count to three or count to four before pulling my reserve?
Which way do I pull my parachute slips if the wind is blowing left to right?
Damn, I can't remember.
Is that minute up yet?
My mind and my nerves were on edge. The Black Hats yelling "Get ready, Airborne!" brought me back to task.
Our Black Hats always told us to remember three things as we were jumping: "Trust your equipment, trust your training, and trust your God." As we were seconds away from taking the leap, the multitude of prayers that left the plane were palpable.
I stared at the yellow light at the front of the plane, waiting for it to turn green; I spoke with God, asking Him to watch over me and the others in the plane. The excessively hot and cramped conditions, coupled with the fact that some of the toughest schools in the military take place at Fort Benning, have earned the base the nickname "the land that God forgot." I was hoping He'd remember us today. The formalities that usually accompanied my prayers--"dear most heavenly father" and "most gracious and everlasting God"--were replaced with very simple, blunt, and direct requests like "Help!" and "Please don't let me die like this."