Duty First by Ed Ruggero Page B

shorter than she is. He is the picture of cool confidence and speaks in a firm, quiet tone, signaling that he is completely in charge of everything going on. He yanks on her Swiss seat to make sure it is tied correctly and is tight. If she falls, even if she lets go with both hands, she’ll hang from this girdle of nylon rope.
    Once she has hooked the climbing rope into the D-ring at her waist, she turns her back to the cliff and shuffles toward the edge.
    “This is interesting,” she says. There is a little tremor in her voice.
    A moment later, the tremor is gone. Just as she’d been instructed, when she reaches the edge, Welle shouts, “On rappel, lane one!”
    Down below, another new cadet takes the ends of the ropes in his hands. If she falls, he need only pull the ropes tight and she will stop falling.
    “On belay, lane one!” her partner shouts back.
    “Loosen your grip with your right hand, let the line play out, and get into that L shape,” the NCO tells her.
    The first move is the trickiest. She bends at the waist and leans out over space until her legs are perpendicular to the rock face, her upper body still upright. To do this, she must move her feet a couple of inches over the edge of the cliff.
    “This is a first,” Welle says almost under her breath. “No jokes.”
    And over she goes.
    At the bottom, smiling, she just remembers to shout, “Lane one, off rappel!” as she clears the rope.
    Over on the seventy-five-foot cliff, New Cadet George Elias, whohas been Alpha Company’s model new cadet, stumbles a bit on his first bound. When he swings, his feet are below him, stretched toward the ground instead of toward the rock. He crashes into the wall.
    “Bigger bounds,” an NCO calls to him from the top of the cliff. The men at the top lean daringly over the edge, hanging by the safety lines at their waists. “Bigger bounds.”
    Elias tries it again, gaining confidence. When he reaches the bottom, he smiles and announces, “That was great. Especially when I smacked my face into the wall.”
    Jacque Messel is more timid; she tries to keep her body close to the rock wall as she goes over the edge, a beginner’s mistake. She winds up almost vertical, balanced on her toes, an unstable position. The NCO at the top leans over the edge, coaching her until she gets her legs in front of her, her hands braced on the line. She manages a couple of small bounds. On the ground, she backs up until the end of the rope slides through her D-ring, then smiles as she pulls off her thick leather gloves. She is sweaty and her uniform is covered with dust, but she no longer has the dark look she wore when she decreed, at last night’s meal, “This place is not for me.”
    After mountaineering training, the new cadets move back to the barracks to learn another lesson about soldiering: For every hour a soldier spends in the field, he or she will spend two or three hours cleaning and repairing field equipment. Alpha Company gathers in Bradley Barracks, named for Omar Bradley, Class of 1915.
    Jett directs his squad to one of the biggest rooms available, a three-man room belonging to New Cadets Ben Steadman, Pete Lisowski, and Tom Lamb. Within a few minutes of their gathering, the floor is covered with twenty pairs of assorted shoes and boots, all of them brand new and waiting to be spit-shined; ten rucksacks; fifty-some tent pegs; a pile of shelter halves; six cans of black shoe polish; eight or nine canteens; five pairs of running shoes; one bottle of nail polish remover; two cans of shaving cream (one empty); about two pounds of grass and dirt (brushed off the field equipment); and the ten harried members of Jett’s squad.
    They got to the barracks just ahead of a July thunderstorm that left the sky a steel blue. Because Jett, the Army football player stresses teamwork above all, they have assembled in one humid box of a room to clean their equipment in assembly-line fashion. In doing so they’re trying to win a small