Craig M. Mullaney - Official Website

“At 5:30 a.m., speakers in the hallway blasted Guns N’ Roses at concert volume. The door slammed open, and Bellinger flicked on our overhead lights. Temporarily blinded, I leaped out of bed. “Good morning! Outside. On the wall. Two minutes.” Bellinger disappeared, and five seconds later another door slammed open. Crashes rippled down the hallway in beat with the bass line. It was  appropriate to begin a military career in chaos, noise, and dumbstruck terror.

“I leaped out and arched my back into the shape of a banana, as instructed. My eyes looked down toward the ground, and my body followed in a 120-mile-an-hour swan dive. I had never felt so alive—a million nerves dancing in the buffeting slipstream. Diving at the speed of a bullet train was the loudest silence imaginable, like a hurricane of emptiness. With every heartbeat I fell two hundred feet. The ground rushed toward me in a blur. One minute of free fall, sixty seconds alone to glide, to spin, to flip over and over and over, each rotation an insult to order. I smiled at the altimeter dial racing toward zero and pulled my rip cord. Imminent danger produces a bizarre clarity of purpose.

“At precisely 5:30 a.m. a pair of wrestling shoes creaked across the mat, flicked a dozen light switches, and turned on the stereo, always to the same song—Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” And then the pain began. As Robert Plant belted his promise to make us sweat, to make us groove, to make it burn, and to make it sting, a six-foot, two-hundred-pound man we referred to as Satan followed through with our punishment. Trent was my partner. One morning we would run seven stories of stairs a dozen times. On another we would sprint on the indoor track, stopping to do pull-ups between laps. We would have to take turns running while carrying the other person’s weight in a fireman’s carry. After an hour and a half of hell, practice concluded with our bodies at total muscle failure. Eight hours later we returned to drill takedowns and thirty-second mini matches. I enjoyed this: Struggle for struggle’s sake, a principle my father respected without ever stepping on a mat. I fight, therefore I am.”

“With identical uniforms and shaved heads, we were virtually indistinguishable from one another. The transformation was a testament to the efficiency of military indoctrination. As the parade concluded, we marched past proud and nervous parents. At the command of eyes right, I searched for my own parents in vain. We turned our backs to the stands as the wind whistled past Trophy Point’s cannons and drove us forward. We headed toward arched passageways marked with the names of hallowed battlefields. Leyte Gulf. Corregidor. Normandy. Their chiseled letters faded into shadow. The ranks of white in front of me merged into gray stone, and a hail of terrifying commands grew louder with each perfectly measured step. The barracks, backlit by the setting sun, jutted out like boulders carved from the hill beyond. At its crest, two hundred feet above our uniforms of white and gray, stood the chapel—a mass of granite blocks soaring to a crenellated bell tower. It was impossible to imagine West Point built of anything other than granite and steel.”

“What made me even more nervous were the “motivational” videos they had us watch as the hours ticked by slowly and my bladder filled to the brim while I continued downing canteen after canteen of water. Each video showed the gruesome results of different parachute malfunctions. One by one, paratroopers crashed into the fuselage of C-130 cargo planes, severed their limbs on the static line that attaches each suspended jumper to the preceding jump door, knocked themselves unconscious in inadvertent collisions, or tumbled unnervingly through the sky with misshapen parachutes doing little to slow their descent. The background music running through my head was “Blood Upon the Risers,” an Airborne cadence sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“Meena sent novels and history books, inscribing encouragements to continue challenging my mind. On slow days I could open a camp chair and escape Afghanistan through the books she sent. With an iPod and headphones, it was easy to close my eyes, drift back in time, and hear Hayden snapping his fingers along with the saxophone and clarinet of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.”

This is one of my favorite songs.  The saxophone solo is unbelievable.

““An interesting life,” Yingling told me, “is one filled with controversial
successes punctuated by occasional and spectacular failures.” We picked apart T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem about unrequited love that was one of a handful I’d copied into my journal. Don’t be like the timid Prufrock, Yingling warned, asking yourself: “Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe?”

The Ranger School chow hall in Dahlonega played this all the time.  It was the last song I heard before one particularly grueling five-day exercise in the mountains.  It played on repeat in my head and helped dull the pain of carrying a 90 lb. rucksack up 45-degree slopes.

“The soldiers in the platoon were a cross section of America that most of my ivory tower peers would never have the privilege of meeting, let alone joining under arms. Their blue-collar pedigrees matched my father’s, and I felt immediately comfortable around them. And although I didn’t make a point of telling them that I had watched both of my parents join union picket lines, I did let on that I loved stock car races and grew up listening to country bands like Alabama and the Oak Ridge Boys. Recalling what my father taught me, I didn’t want my soldiers to assume from my diplomas that I thought I was any better than them. I wasn’t.”

“After seizing our objectives, we marched mile after mile on sandy roads that doubled the effective distance. Some nights the only thing that kept me going was holding the straps on the rucksack in front of me. Other nights I hummed Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Three times through made a mile. Thirty times completed a march.”

This song came out the summer before I arrived at Oxford and was on the radio every day myfirst term.

“A cold winter light hung in the brisk February air as we walked past carts selling paperbacks along the banks of the Seine. Brisk gusts shook tiny whitecaps from the gray water. We made our way slowly to the Latin Quarter, stopping every hundred yards for a photograph. Brandon played his role well, manipulating our photo poses so that I got my arm around Meena as often as possible. It took us two hours to find a restaurant suitably authentic for Brandon’s tastes. White tablecloths draped a half-dozen cozy tables inside a small café. We warmed up with crocks of onion soup, the bubbling Gruyère cheese melting over the fresh croutons. Our garçon brought out the first bottle of Côte de Rhône, and we clinked our glasses.”

"We pounded gloves and began the fight. Given my uninspiring record, I would have been happy to survive two rounds of pounding without getting knocked out. My future soldiers clearly had a favorite, and it wasn’t me. To their raucous applause, the sergeant planted his third punch underneath my chin and lifted me a foot off the ground. I landed on my ass. Above me stood two opponents. A voice spoke to me, but it sounded like someone shouting underwater in a pool. “Two-three-four.” I stood up on “five” to face my opponent, who by now had resumed a single silhouette. I threw a few weak jabs that he easily dodged before planting a cross square on my mouth. Down I went again, this time for a full ten count. I came to as three soldiers lifted me to my feet and took me to find an ice pack for my swollen lips.”

“I dove into Indian culture headfirst (or heartfirst, to be more accurate).
We started at the movies. “Bollywood,” Bombay’s ambitiously nicknamed film industry, produces far more “fil-ums” than the United States. Given the epic length (three hours or longer) and enormous casts of these films, this was impressive, especially considering the elaborate choreography of the ten song and dance routines sprinkled through a typical Bollywood film. Suddenly, the hero would start dancing on a moving train or the scene would cut to the Alps where a couple danced in fields of edelweiss. It was like watching The Sound of Music mashed up with Saturday Night Fever. The key difference, at least to a twenty-two-year-old like me, was the absence of any display of affection. Every time two characters moved toward an embrace, the scene cut to a sweeping Himalayan panorama, a Victorian prudishness that rivaled West Point’s.”

Based on an Urdu poem by Sahir Ludhianvi, supposedly expelled from university in Lahore at the request of his beloved's father because he was Muslim and she was Sikh.

“I decided that I needed a wooing offensive for Meena’s parents. In the kitchen, while Meena’s mother stirred the sambar simmering over the stove, I tried out my Hindi by singing to her the song Meena told me was her mother’s favorite, “Tujhe Dekha To Yeh Janaa Sanam.” “Oh, my stars,” she exclaimed, smiling. “You know that song?”“Yes, Auntie.”

“When I saw this girl, she seemed to me like...a blooming rose, like a poet's dream, like a moonlit night, like a soft word, like a candle burning in the temple…”