Word: combatant
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...typical college professor floats somewhere high above the real world, at West Point instructors are expected to bring the real world with them--not just in private but in public as well. In Iraq, generals admit that the captains and lieutenants often know more about how to combat the insurgency than they do. It is, they say, a platoon leader...
...infantry company during the first months of the Iraq invasion, had been brought to West Point to teach Fundamentals of Tactics. His easy ferocity inspires wide measures of terror and devotion among cadets. "I just hate that guy sometimes," says one, "but I would feel safest going into combat with him over my other instructors, definitely." To Zielinski, whose unit at Air Assault School had to withstand McKinney's withering inspection, the weakest instructors are the ones who act like your buddy. "When I see someone being tough with me, like Captain McKinney," he says, "I think...
McKinney knows that once they have tasted combat, his cadets may view his methods in a new light. "Later on, they are going to understand why I jump on mistakes," he says. "Later on, those might be fatal mistakes, ones they can't take back." He looks for ways to test both their knowledge and their instincts as they prepare for a battlefield where friend and enemy can be indistinguishable. He is a walking album of case studies: You're leading a platoon, he tells his cadets, and one of your men is lying wounded in the middle...
When he graduated in 1993, Amerine was commissioned a lieutenant in what had essentially become the world's most muscular police department. His first taste of combat, during a Cuban-refugee riot in Panama in which every member of his unit was wounded, was not even labeled combat. None of his men got Purple Hearts. He was in a hotel in Kazakhstan when word came of the 9/11 attacks. Within weeks his team of 12 special-forces soldiers was dropped behind Taliban lines with little more than weapons, cash and a mission to start a Pashtun insurgency. In one fire...
...changed the math. Parents who were proud of their kids for taking on the challenge of West Point faced a test of their own when it became clear that in this war and in wars to come, there was no safe specialty, no escape from the dangers of combat. "Ten years ago, parents were pushing their cadets to come here," Lieut. General Lennox observes. "Now it's the other way around: a cadet is pushing his own parents into accepting the fact that he wants to go to West Point...