Branching

The way it works here at Army OCS, there are some of us coming in who already have our branch slots guaranteed and others of us who have yet to select our specific Officer job. The in-service candidates and the reservists all already know what job they will have when they are done with OCS. All other college options, even those with a prior service record in the Army, must wait until week 6 of the course to know what they will be doing for at least the next three years in the Army. I fall into the latter group, so at the moment I don’t know if I am going to be a Field Artillery Officer, a Quartermaster Officer, or an Infantry Officer. There are 10 or 12 different jobs that I could possibly end up with at the end of the next 6 weeks.

Which of those jobs you got used to be almost completely out of your control. Your future was determined by your cadre and the Army’s Human Resources Command (HRC), with a cursory consideration of a wish list that you filled out at the beginning of the course. Now we candidates have a great deal of more control over our own fate, using the Order of Merit List (OML). Basically every aspect of the course is weighted and graded, from leadership, to the physical fitness, from the tests to the confidence course, and all those points are tallied up by the cadre and used to create the OML, which lists all candidates in the class in order of performance from first to last.

Currently the OML system for branching is used so that college option candidates can choose their own branch from those available. It starts with HRC, which supplies the cadre with a list of all of the branch slots it needs filled. There may be 6 Infantry slots, 8 Military Intelligence slots, 4 Armor slots, 25 Ordinance slots and on and so forth for all the various branch slots. Then all the cadre does when it comes time for the candidates to branch in week six is give the list to the class and let them choose from what’s available, based on the OML. So the top-performing candidate in the class gets his or her pick of the litter. The candidate at the end of the OML gets to choose only from what is left after everyone else has already had their pick. So the higher up you are on the OML, the greater the chance you have of getting your top choice of job. It therefore behooves every candidate to perform at high a level as possible.

On Tuesday we have our first and possibly most important event that counts towards the OML: the initial Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT). This event will make or break many peoples aspirations to get branched into one of those high speed, competitive jobs like Infantry or MI. Maxing out your APFT at 300 would clearly set you out in the top ten or fifteen percent of the OML from the start. Shanking it with a 240 could leave you eating dust all cycle long. Clearly Tuesday’s APFT is very important. I am hoping to get a 300, which would be a 30 point improvement on my last score. I only need to get 8 more sit ups and 6 more push ups to max out those events. The run is going to be the harder nut to crack, where I need to drop a minute off of my two mile. It’s doable, but I am really going to have to book it. My plan is just to run until I throw up, and then keep on running more.

I cannot yet say for sure what my first choice for a branch will be, but I want to give myself every possible opportunity when we get to week 6. In fact the question of which branch would be best for me is something that has been on my mind almost constantly since I began my training over two months ago. Before I entered the military, I imagined myself going Infantry all the way. Airborne, Ranger, the whole nine yards. But that is a much easier thing to intellectualize than to actually do, something that began to dawn as me as experienced some of the milder privations of basic training, which is a vacation compared to Ranger school, or a 12 month deployment as a PL in a light Infantry unit. Now, to add to my own reservations, I have discovered that, in fact, Infantry is one of the most competitive branches to get. While I hope to be in the top 30 or 20 percent of the class, there is no guarantee I’ll get the chance to pick Infantry. There may only be 4 or 5 slots for the entire class.  

At the moment I am in no particular rush to make up my mind one way or the other about Infantry. I still have six weeks before I need to make a final decision on the matter. The question that is more gnawing in my mind is whether or not to go for a combat arms branch, because I will most certainly be able to get branched into one of those if I want. All the way back since the time of the Roman legions, the attack force of an Army has been made up of three major components: Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry. The forms have evolved, but the basic components and their relationship with one another have remained fairly constant for a couple thousand years. I feel as though I should immerse myself into that Warrior tradition, that I should branch Infantry, Armor, or Artillery, in order to “answer that eternal question”, as Matt Eversmann puts it in his chapter of The Battle of Mogadishu.

There are many reasons why one would want to avoid branching into combat arms: it’s hard on your body, it’s dangerous, it’s difficult for your family. It is an all around dirty job, a savage job. But at the end of the day all the logistics and strategy in the world won’t mean a thing without someone to execute the violence, to kill and to put their own necks out on the line. I dread the experience of being shot at or being hit by a combined arms ambush; I do not doubt the strength of the Taliban. But I nonetheless feel as though this is the war of our lifetime and I want tot be a part of it. I want to go and put my boots onto the soil of Afghanistan and Iraq. I want to be in the middle of the action, to see the real war, rather than sit on a FOB somewhere and count munitions. As an Officer, one has their whole career to do logistics. I want to have my time as a tactical operator.

In all likelihood I will swallow my doubts and jump into the unknown world of combat arms, when all is said and done. I will do it for all the reasons I have written above. It is, nonetheless, a tough decision; tough precisely for the fact that I cannot be sure I am doing the right thing. I believe I am doing what is right.

For now I am happy to be here, at Ft. Benning and I am excited for the course to begin in a couple of days. I am hopeful to improve my PT test and to tackle everything I can with as much alacrity and ferocity as I can muster each day. I look forward to learning as much as I can about the three major combat arms branches: Artillery, Armor, and Infantry. And in six weeks I am sure I will be as ready as I am going to be to make one of the toughest decisions of my life. In all of this, I have neglected to mention that I would not even be able to consider any of these options if it were not for the sincere and undying support of my wife. I owe her forever for that compassion and generosity.