Duty First by Ed Ruggero Page A

black and gold army insignia that reads, “RANGER.” The cliff faces, the bleachers, even the big rocks that sit alongside the trails, are all painted with oversize Ranger emblems.
    The Ranger tab (a cloth patch some two and a half inches long by half an inch wide) is awarded to soldiers who complete a very demanding nine-week course in small-unit tactics. Particularly prized by infantrymen, it has a high place in the hierarchy of badges denoting toughness and skill. And, by regulation, it is available only to men.
    Colonel Peter Stromberg, head of the Department of English, is a former infantry officer who earned his Ranger tab after graduating from West Point in 1959. Stromberg thinks the omnipresence of the Ranger tab at the training areas sends the wrong message to women cadets: Rangers are the ultimate soldier. Women can’t be Rangers; therefore, women cannot be ranked among the best.
    Lieutenant Colonel Kathy Snook, a professor in the math department and a member of West Point’s first coed class, sees this as a leadership problem, something the Department of Military Instruction (which has overall responsibility for summer training) should “fix.” “It goes along with a kind of mentality that says, ‘If you’re not infantry or armor or field artillery, you’re not really in the army’”
    To her way of thinking, the people who talk about the army as if itincluded only the combat arms—specialties restricted to men—are denigrating the contribution of women.
    There is an Orwellian flavor to the business of what a few words painted on rocks can mean. Ranger training was long known as the “Army’s premier leadership school,” because it taught a soldier to lead under exaggerated conditions of stress: hunger, fatigue, and continuous operations. It was nine weeks of “gut-check” leadership: no support groups, no consultants, just lots of stress and whatever courage a soldier can pull from deep inside. But according to the Public Affairs Office at Fort Benning, Georgia, where Ranger School is headquartered, the Army no longer refers to the training as a leadership course.
    “We call it a ‘small unit tactics course’ [now],” a Public Affairs official says. “If you call it a leadership school, then it has to be open to anyone. You could hardly make a case for keeping women out of a leadership course, right?”
    The painted signs on the rocks at West Point are thus a slippery slope that could lead to all sorts of arguments about the integration of women into the military. But none of the cadets appears to be thinking that as they try to master the art of rappelling down a cliff. At the top, the sergeants check the knots on the line before moving each cadet to the edge.
    “Sound off, new cadet!” the sergeants urge.
    “RANGER,” the new cadets yell, the women just as loudly as the men.
    Because this is risky training, everything is tightly controlled by the NCOs. No one moves unless he or she is responding to instructions. The new cadets are kept back from the edge, waiting in corralled lines, as if at an amusement park. This is called “positive control.” The cadets become used to moving only when told, and when they are told to move, they do so instantly. Once conditioned that way, the idea goes, the new cadet standing on the edge of the cliff will continue to respond instantly, reflexively even when the command takes the new cadet out into space.
    The new cadets are directed to undo, then re-tie their Swiss seats, the rope girdle that will hold them up.
    “C’mon, c’mon,” a sergeant barks at them when they move too slowly. “We’re not splicing DNA here.”
    There is a twenty-five-foot cliff and a seventy-five-foot cliff. The new cadets practice on the smaller one first. The sergeant in charge of the twenty-five-foot cliff points at the first new cadet in line and summons her forward.
    New Cadet Deborah Welle, the wit of third squad, steps up and faces the instructor, who is a head