Smart Soldiering

The Unforgiving Minute is a young man's memoir, surprisingly free of self-serving bravado and pompous unearned claims to manhood. Craig Mullaney knows how to shape his stories and give meaning to them, and he lets the scenes he creates from a range of captivating experiences—whether from West Point, Ranger School, Camp Drum, Oxford, Afghanistan, or marriage to the same woman twice—speak for themselves. Mullaney understands the art of restraint, so he keeps himself off center stage, unless his hardships and failures can help us see how he learned costly lessons on the way to manhood.

This powerful book moves inexorably toward combat and then reluctantly away from it, but Mullaney takes a long time in the first section to travel from West Point to Ranger School to Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar), and then to Camp Drum (as a platoon leader with the 10th Mountain Division). This lengthy "Student" section illustrates how long Mullaney considered himself an apprentice readying himself for the ultimate test of combat.

For readers familiar with the four-year West Point regimen, the most intriguing of these early chapters will likely be those dealing with Ranger School—a grueling sixty-day rite of passage required of those soldiers who aspire to be fully qualified as combat infantrymen. Mullaney affords a rare close look into the three phases of Ranger training that take initiates through strenuous conditioning, mountain warfare, and swamp operations. He shows us the effects of food and sleep deprivation, the costs of personal failure under mounting stress, and the long-range importance of this intensive training for small-unit combat leaders.

Traveling across the arc of Mullaney's personal journey, we discover in his stories a continuity rarely found in military memoirs—a quiet and subtle emphasis on the importance of both mind and body. As he reconstructs his educational journey, even apart from the compelling chapters on West Point and Oxford, he is careful to give the mind its central place during his apprenticeship. Having failed as the leader of a combat patrol during the mountain phase of Ranger training, Mullaney was sent back to join the next class. Only 20 percent of the candidates make it the first time.

While waiting his turn to begin again, Mullaney reads Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. From this book that deals with the "brutal training" a young Greek warrior received with the Spartans before the Battle of Thermopylae, Mullaney copies a telling passage and sticks it in his Ranger handbook: "The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has its legs under it; the real test comes when all strength has fled and the men must produce victory on will alone." But Mullaney knows too that will alone is not enough for combat success.

Two years at Oxford followed Ranger School. Then on his return to the 10th Mountain Division, Mullaney had a rude awakening—this time to the reality of his body. "Two years in England had made me soft," he writes. "When we took the first pt test, at 4:15 a.m., I flopped." There were other lessons. After his poor showing at the marksmanship range, the course commander taunted him: "Too much reading at 'Oggs-ford,' Mullaney?"

At Camp Drum two counterforces kept him balanced: the field manual that "minced no words" about close combat—"characterized by extreme violence and physiological shock"—and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Paul LaCamera, West Pointer, Ranger, and Silver Star recipient. Although LaCamera "spoke in cryptic one-liners like Yoda in camouflage," he told Mullaney that officers are "paid to think": "'Your educational pedigree matters only to the degree that it helps you train your men and make better decisions under fire.'" Everything Mullaney tells us about his training with the 10th makes clear that counterinsurgency combat, besides being "a test of will, endurance, and courage," is, for...