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10 Return toVictoryDrive ' HIS IS NO PLACE I ever wanted to revisit. When I last left Fort Benning, Georgia, it was with an immense sense of relief. I hated this place, this "Home of the Infantry." I counted the days until I could say farewell forever to Fort Benning. But now I am back in the morning rush-hour traffic heading up Victory Drive in Columbus, past the pawn shops, the topless dance clubs, the well-worn motel rooms that have served thousands of soldiers . And then I pass a giant billboard with an American flag and the words: "Love It or Leave It!" This is beyond deja vu. This is altogether too strange. Here I am again in the tenth month of the ninth year of a decade, and I am in another two-door blue car entering Fort Benning, and I am filled with uncertainty about just what this experience will entail. My unease only intensifies when I park the car and Airborne troops are marching toward the parachute towers, shouting cadence with various chants, while loudspeakers atop Infantry Hall blare martial music. And I recall what it had been like to come to Fort Benning in 1969, how foreign and forbidding this Army world had been, my first step on the treadmill that seemed to lead inevitably to Vietnam. "The Infantry School provided a rude awakening from the vagaries of ROTC," I had written in my conscientious objector application. "And I started to have growing doubts as to whether I could allow myself to function as an Infantry officer. Something seemed wrong to me, a chord inside me had been struck. "I objected to all the emphasis on more efficient ways to kill106 RETURN TO VICTORY DRIVE 107 an instructor holding up two water buckets and pointing out what a better job of tearing the metal apart an M~ 16 [rifle] round does than an M-14 round. I disliked handling weapons. I found the aggressive~ ness required for hand-to-hand combat training totally foreign to my character. The long parade fields of hundreds, maybe a thousand, soldiers in synchronized bayonet training, yelling 'Kill, Kill!' at the top of their lungs-this I just could not accept. And when a classroom battlefield-situation problem emphasized that if a man started fleeing to the rear, it would be my duty as platoon leader to shoot him (with the hope that he would only be wounded) in order not to jeopardize the mission, this I knew I could not do. Whatever the mission, I could not see myself acting as a life-and-death decider and shooting one of my own men." Now, I am back in a classroom in the mammoth Infantry Hall again, amid a crowd of freshly minted second lieutenants, and I feel as though I have never left. The lecture hall looks unchanged, with broad risers stepping down to the stage, six lieutenants seated around each table covered with pale green linoleum, cinderblock walls painted the color of urine, faded blue drapes surrounding the stage and that perennial star of the Army educational system-the screen for the overhead projector. This is a class in leadership being taught to the Army's newest junior leaders, with the instruction provided by Maj. Harry Christiansen , a thirty-seven-year-old officer who has been teaching at the Infantry School for two years. Each table of lieutenants has been grappling to "define what a group is, in the military." Their responses have been jotted on a blackboard by Christiansen until that magic moment when he plops a slide into the overhead projector and the Army's own definition appears on the screen, displayed there long enough for some lieutenants to copy it down in their notebooks. I am trying to fight off drooping eyelids, but not these eightyfour lieutenants. Part of their responsiveness is the result of Christiansen 's teaching style, hard-charging and tough-talking ("kick some ass" is a favorite phrase). And the lean-and-mean major also happens to be that most feared form of lecturer, The Roamer, who moves about the hall with the threat that he may call on any student at any moment. Still, these lieutenants do seem resolutely enthusiastic, raising their hands at the slightest prompting, greeting each refer- 108 RECONCILIAnON ROAD ence to the Army's hard-core Ranger training or combat itself with that now-popular expression of Army gung ho, a low growl that goes, "HOOOOOO-AAA...

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