Brothers
All four years at West Point I roomed with a rugby player.1 As a result, even though I knew nothing about rugby going into West Point—my high school was so small, we did not even have a football team—I ended up befriending a number of players.
West Point Men’s Rugby Team, 2015. Source: United States Military Academy
West Point Rugby players call themselves “brothers”, in honor of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me”. It is a unique brotherhood. Thinking back, I have few memories of seeing just one rugby player, they were always together: meals, walking to class, practice, games, at the bar afterwards…always as a crew. And while the brothers had a well-deserved reputation for partying hard, and let’s say, pushing up against some of West Point’s regulations, they were no rebels without a cause. The brothers tended to draw in cadets who excelled physically and militarily and many of the players I knew went on to serve with bravery and honor in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Describing this brotherhood, then, is an incredibly hard challenge. Yet this is precisely what journalist Martin Pengelly does in his 2023 book, Brotherhood: When West Point Rugby Went to War. Martin, who had the distinct honor of playing rugby against the West Point team in 2002, brings to life the twenty-year story of the brothers who graduated in 2002. He captures the players, the team, and the brotherhood so well—it felt at times reading the book as if I was right back at West Point. But even more than that, Martin tells an incredible story about West Point and America over the past quarter-century. In this sense, his book reminded me of another iconic West Point book, Rick Atkinson’s 1989 The Long Gray Line, which chronicled the twenty-year story of the class of 1966.
I reached out to Martin and he graciously agreed to respond to some questions about his book. Our conversation is included below.
1. What led you to write the book? You first wrote an article for the Guardian in 2015 where you reported on the West Point Rugby players you had competed against back in 2002. What prompted you to turn that into a book?
There was simply much more to tell, than was tellable in 5,000 words or so for the Guardian. That piece included inevitable elisions and glosses, as the book makes clear, and certainly could never devote enough space to the stories of Zac Miller, Joe Emigh and Jim Gurbisz, the three members of the rugby class of ‘02 who died young. The 2015 piece raised questions I answered, or discounted, while writing the book – while I wasn't finding whole new questions to deal with too. Equally, a piece at that length couldn’t begin to describe the role of West Point in shaping these young men’s lives, or their home towns or of course the battlefields some went to. I’d also long wanted to write a book that might consider in some form the meaning of rugby: what it is, why so many men and women love it so much, and what its place is in America, my adopted home.
I worked on the book in various forms from 2015 to 2020, with cooperation from the players and encouragement from sources including HR McMaster, who ended up writing the introduction. In 2017 I shopped a proposal for a rather different book around publishers, none of whom picked it up. What made me write the book, or allowed me to write it, was a stroke of simple good fortune. For the Guardian, in the very first stages of the Covid pandemic, I interviewed Ted Widmer, a historian and the author of Lincoln on the Verge, a book about Abraham Lincoln’s journey to Washington in 1861. We got on well, so we had lunch that summer, and Ted asked if I had any book ideas. I described the West Point rugby idea and Ted turned out to have a friend, Will Thorndike, who had just bought a publisher, Godine … and who once played full-back for Harvard. Things progressed swiftly from there.
2. One element of your book that stood out to me is how much of it is centered on the players' time at West Point. I think almost half the book takes the reader into the cadet lives of the 2002 West Point Rugby team, tells their journeys to the Academy, and really takes the reader into what life at West Point was like (and probably still is like in many ways). Another great book that looks at the twenty-year arch of a West Point class, The Long Gray Line by Rick Atkinson, has about a quarter of its length dedicated to the cadets' West Point lives. In many ways, your book is one of the most compelling stories about West Point, the institution that has come out of the post-9/11 era, especially in the past decade or so. Can you share a bit about what led you to focus so much of the story on the four-year experience?
To a Brit, and a history studying one at that, West Point has a magnetic pull. I describe in the book the effect the train ride up the Hudson had on me and indeed still has. Landing later on Charles Dickens’ response to the same trip in 1842 was a happy coincidence – he felt rather the same way as me, only he didn’t spend a large part of his childhood watching Ken Burns on repeat, mimicking Shelby Foote and watching Gettysburg over and over again. Nor had he read Rick Atkinson, which I did around the time I wrote the original piece. I read David Lipsky, Absolutely American, too. And others – the novelist James Salter, who wasn’t very happy in his time at West Point, was a key influence too.
When I arrived at West Point, I realized from the first day I had a hell of a lot to learn – and should learn it – because such a unique environment and culture is bound to shape different people in different ways, let alone one that changed so suddenly and drastically in a single day, 11 September 2001. That includes of course the negative, or perhaps the ways in which members of the team chafed at academy order, and the ways in which the team gave them a place to escape or even challenge that order, four or five days a week. I now joke in book talks and interviews about realizing one should never set out to write a 400-page book with 16 main characters – 15 players and a coach. It’s really 17 – West Point is a character too.
3. All sports at West Point build a sense of team and are viewed as essential to preparing cadets for leadership. The MacArthur quote you highlight--"On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds, that on other days, on other fields will bear the fruits of victory"--is deeply embedded in West Point's DNA. What is it about rugby, both in general and with respect to the West Point Rugby team, that causes the bonds to be uniquely close?
In 2002, long before rugby became a varsity sport at West Point, it fostered an outsiders’ bond. Most of the players came from other sports – cut from football, loath to continue losing weight weekly for wrestling, bored of soccer or track. Rugby, with its wild reputation and provision of a place (simply put) for drinking, partying and general iconoclasm, held huge appeal. It still does but now the academy has taken it more firmly under its wing (in large part to control it), the martial aspects of it come more to the fore.
Coach Mike Mahan, who sadly died this summer, and his successor Matt Sherman regularly speak of the benefits of the game for teaching decision-making under pressure, leadership, teamwork and, bluntly, fighting on while hurt. Rugby is also way less regimented than football, which leads its advocates to claim it makes better officers, more likely to adapt and thrive on the fly. Special forces types in the ranks of the Old Gray have told me this often. Regular army sorts tend to smile indulgently while they do.
4. Your book takes the readers deep into the lives and families of the 2002 team. How did you earn their trust and build a relationship where they would open up to you and bring you in?
I’ve never been a door-knocking reporter, trained to intrude on privacy and often private grief in order to get a story. So setting out to tell the story of the 2002 team, as I knew from the off of the three deaths involved, required a bit of steeling myself and a lot of preparation.
Approaching each family, particularly those of the players who died, with my research done and references collected was imperative. Respect has to be shown to be earned. With the players themselves I was passed around the circle recommended onwards as OK to talk to, on the level, a proper rugby guy, etc. I had the advantage of having played against them but some had well founded suspicions – any writer telling someone else’s story is appropriating that story and, when the final result is in print, risks telling it in a way that may anger or upset any number of readers. Like most reporters I’ve read The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm – and worried about my work ever since.
I owe a lot to Matt Blind, the ‘02 captain who did a hell of a lot to make the book happen, including staging a reunion in summer 2021, at his place in Massachusetts. Some of the players who had more doubts were there, and as the book describes, those two days let them see me and meet me and watch me, and decide to tell me their stories.
5. When you speak about the book, what is it that resonates the most with audiences?
There is a resounding sadness to the book, leavened with doses of rugby humor. Audiences understand that. Sometimes that humor becomes pitch black, but audiences get that too. Mordant jokes even play a part in the culmination of the book, four chapters which reconstruct the death of Jim Gurbisz on the roads of Baghdad in November 2005. That is the hardest thing I have ever had to write, for all sorts of reasons, emotional to technical, and most readers and audience members tell me it is hard to read. That, of course, is the point.
To indulge myself briefly, I’ve had a lot of questions and remarks about the style of the book, which is basically reportage, as I’m a reporter, but which thanks to various influences sometimes reaches for a little more in descriptive passages (the journey up the Hudson, or describing a game of rugby), whether influenced by history, other writers or just the thoughts I had at the time and managed to get down in notes first. Most audience questions and reactions on this score have been favorable, which makes me happy, not least because “serious” writing about rugby is … not common, around the world, to say the least.
6. In one of the final scenes in the book, you describe returning to West Point in October 2022, as part of the Class of 2002's 20th reunion. And your first visit to West Point, I believe, was in 2015. How, if at all, did West Point feel different in 2022 versus 2015?
The 2022 return was a very emotional one, as the team staged a memorial at Anderson Rugby Complex for Clint Olearnick, their center, perhaps their best player, who died of cancer at the end of 2021, way too young and very suddenly indeed. I wasn’t there for any of the reunion events but I did meet the players on the Saturday night for a few drinks and then went down to the field for the memorial the next day, which forms the epilogue of the book.
I take my impressions of how the place had changed from the players themselves – who marvel at the rugby facilities and resources now, none of which they enjoyed – and from watching the current cadets who attended the service, to be spoken to by players, coaches, and me, about a man who graduated when they were learning to walk. I’m sure any class of cadets at any time since the 1800s would have been studiously polite and careful around their elders but it focused my mind on the time that had elapsed, not least in considering how the world the current cadets were going into had changed.
From 2015 to 2022, I’m not sure I noticed too many changes at West Point itself. But then, the biggest thing that changed the outlook of cadets in that time period happened in summer 2021, some of it on the same weekend I was in Cohasset with the ‘02 team: the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. It seemed apt that a book about the era that begins with 9/11 owed so much to interviews done as the withdrawal from Kabul was completed.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about West Point Rugby (men’s) here: https://goarmywestpoint.com/sports/mens-rugby.
Hear Martin talk about his book on the Horns of a Dilemma podcast: https://warontherocks.com/2024/09/sport-and-war-martin-pengelly-on-his-book-brotherhood/.
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Technically there was one semester my first year (“plebe” year) where none of us played rugby, but the other semester I had a roommate who played rugby.