Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  In recent years West Point has undergone another period of major change in its attempt to stay a top-ranked college and provide leaders for a rapidly changing Army. But even while administrators update the curriculum, seek funds for the physical plant, study the demographics of college applicant populations, solicit input from the Army on the quality of graduates, and track the promotions and separations of West Pointers, the alumni (known collectively as “old grads”) mostly seem interested in whether or not plebes are getting yelled at. The most pitched battles have been over attempts to get rid of pointless abuse while maintaining a tough—and toughening—experience.

  The Class of 2002 will remember R-Day as a visceral experience; nevertheless, each succeeding class thinks the ones following have it easier. And in fact the expression, “The corps has …” (as in “the corps has gone to hell”) is so well known and accepted as true that it needn’t even be finished. Use the first three words and a West Point graduate will not only get the message, he or she will probably agree.

  Some alumni recognize the usefulness of their own experience—even if they hated it—while accepting that change might be good.

  The old plebe experience paid off for John Calabro, ‘68. “When I was a kid I was a wimpy evader of difficult things. This place broke me of that. When I came up here I wasn’t sure what to expect. The first stop was at the gym; we were just shoved around by some disgruntled enlisted men and I thought to myself, ‘I can handle this.’ Then a soldier marched us to the edge of Central Area and pointed across this vast expanse of open space to a cadet in a red sash and said, ‘That’s where you’re going.’”

  “As soon as we hit that area, all hell broke loose, and I thought to myself, ‘This is what they were talking about.’”

  “What they were talking about” was the noise; the screaming; the nose-to-nose, spittle-flying screeching of upper class into the faces and ears of shocked new cadets. It was a hallmark of plebe year that started on R-Day and lasted until graduation: eleven months of hell.

  It’s gone.

  Brigadier General John Abizaid, ‘73, is determined to make West Point more like the Army and less like initiation into some fraternity.

  “Here’s the way someone explained [the changes] to me,” Calabro says. “You have the trainee, the trainer, and the task. It used to be that the trainer was part of the problem, part of what was making the task difficult. Now the idea is that the trainer is part of the solution. If you want to make things difficult, you raise the standards of the task, make the task harder.”

  This is a move toward what the academy calls “inspirational leadership.” It is also more in line with the paternalistic nature of Army leadership than was the old system.

  In his novel Honor and Duty, Gus Lee, a 1968 classmate of John Calabro’s, begins his story by describing the blast-furnace quality of the first day. Lee details the abuse handed out by upperclass cadets, twenty- and twenty-one-year-old youths with near-absolute power. Everything about the plebe’s life was at the whim of whatever upper-class cadet happened to be around. As late as the seventies plebes were ordered to “pass out their plates,” returning untouched meals to the waiter for an error in the bizarre table etiquette of the Cadet Mess, or for incurring the displeasure of an upperclass cadet. Lee writes about eating toothpaste in his room, of smuggling little plastic packets of jelly out of the Mess Hall and licking them clean in the darkness after taps.

  Yet some treasure the system that treated them this way, not for the treatment itself, but for the results it produced.

  Charles Murray, USMA ‘62, now practices law in Florida after retiring as a colonel. Murray is almost wistful as he speaks of the hazing that helped shape him. There were shower formations, in which plebes dressed in sweat suits and raincoats were made to stand in steamy shower rooms until they nearly fainted; uniform drills in which plebes were given orders to appear in a certain uniform in an impossibly short amount of time, the game repeated through endless varieties of uniforms until the plebes dropped from exhaustion in rooms littered with articles of clothing and equipment. And then, almost inevitably an upperclassman would announce “Room inspection in ten minutes!”

  “Steel is forged in fire,” Murray says. He is worried that the furnace has cooled too much. He admits that some of the hazing was just stupid, boys-school and fraternity-row stuff, but he also insists it was useful in the ultimate test: combat.

  In Vietnam in August 1966, Murray led a relief force that fought its way to a besieged company of American infantry. The company commander had been killed; Murray took command of the shot-up unit in the middle of a firefight, surrounded, he says, “like Custer.”

  “I had bodies of my own men, including my classmate [the dead commander], piled around me. We could hear the enemy shouting and hollering, like they were holding a football pep rally, all through the night,” Murray says with a little laugh. “I thought it was going to be the shortest command in history.”

  When he talks of that night, with his new command decimated by fire, with dead and wounded all around him and the enemy within earshot massing for an attack, Murray credits plebe year with giving him what he needed to perform.

  “Plebe year is supposed to teach you how to function under pressure, how to control your emotions and still make decisions when people are counting on you. I’m not sure plebe year does that anymore.”

  In February 1998, hundreds of West Pointers thrilled at the following e-mail message posted by Bo Friesen, ‘83. It was passed around and around among the classes with the recommendation, “Here’s an awesome defense of the old 4th class system.”

  As I went through [plebe year], I did not understand how cutting a cake into nine equal pieces [plebes were required to prepare dessert servings] would help an officer lead soldiers into battle. The myriad of disjointed memorizations, ludicrous tasks and perpetual panic mode seemed to have very little to do with the profession of arms. I maintained this attitude throughout my upperclass years … right up until the moment I commanded a cavalry troop in the Gulf War.

  One night, around 0100, we conducted a passage of lines to assault an airfield. We had gone almost 60 hours without sleep and it was raining with a vengeance (yes, rain in the desert… lots of it). Our own artillery was falling short and landing amongst us, one of my platoon leaders was heading off in a tangent to the direction he should have been following, the squadron main body was drifting too far to the north, my driver was heading straight for a ravine, a tank in my 4th platoon threw a track, we found ourselves in the middle of one of our own … minefields, the objective was spotted on our right flank (instead of in front of us, where it should have been), almost no maps existed for our area of operations, my boss was perpetually screaming for me to change to his [radio] frequency (an impossibility with the wonderfully designed, single-transmitter command tanks), a half dozen spot reports were coming in from my troops (all critical), my intell NCO had a critical update, my XO [executive officer] had a critical update, my ops NCO had a critical update, my 1SG [first sergeant] had a critical update, my gunner had spotted dismounts [enemy soldiers on foot]. The regimental commander was forward with us adding his own personal guidance, visibility was almost zero, there was a suspected use of chemical weapons, regimental S-2 [intelligence] reported 500 heavily armed Republican Guards on our objective (later determined to be a squad of American engineers), and I had a moderate to severe case of dysentery. (A run-on sentence, I know, but then again it was a run-on night.)

  It was during this little slice of heaven (of all places) that the 4th Class System was illuminated to me in all its glory. Its goal was not harassment, ridicule or punishment. Its goal was to train the neural network to deal with an overwhelming amount of disjointed information, quickly process that information, categorize it, and make rapid, sound decisions. At that moment, I would have gladly given a month’s pay to the genius who devised the 4th Class System.

  Graduates who defend what the old system did for p
lebes never add, “and it taught good leadership techniques to the upperclass cadets.” West Pointers do not say that learning how to abuse, insult, and intimidate subordinates proved useful later on. And it is on those grounds—that the old system taught bad habits to upperclass cadets—that the system was attacked.

  At an alumni luncheon at the West Point Officers’ Mess, a member of the class of 1970 told how he had taken the lessons he’d learned as an upperclass cadet to the Army, with almost disastrous results.

  “We were in Berlin, and so we had pretty good soldiers. One day I heard that one of my men had dope in the barracks. I went to his room and started freaking out, turned over his locker, spilled all his clothes, flipped over his bunk. I was treating him like a plebe. And my platoon sergeant grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out of there and said, ‘Sir, that shit might work at West Point, but it ain’t gonna cut it here.’”

  The storyteller was embarrassed, almost thirty years after the incident. “I had to completely relearn how to deal with people after I left [West Point],” he said.

  The effort to change the relationships between leader and led have been slow in coming and resisted as much by cadets as by alumni. But the changes have come. The Cadet Leader Development System, introduced in the eighties, overhauled the way cadets live and work together. CLDS (pronounced “cleds”) informs almost everything about the cadet experience at West Point; it is about developing leaders.

  The system was designed to ensure that cadets are given increased responsibilities over their four years. They move up through positions of greater responsibility and authority; they are exposed to the Regular Army through a variety of summer programs. A former Superintendent, Lieutenant General Dave Palmer, liked to say that West Point went from the fourth class development system (the old plebe system) to a “four class development system.” The culture changed from one in which plebes were held to high standards while everyone else slacked off, to one in which the upper three classes are held to increasingly higher standards as they progress through four years.

  “If we let your son in here, we assume he can graduate,” Colonel Bob Johnson tells the parents of recruited football players at a reception the night before R-Day 1998. “That’s our job. We’re surrogate parents. I’m not going to hug him or kiss him, but I will kick him in the butt when he needs it. I’m going to get eyeball to eyeball with any cadet who’s having trouble with academics and I’m going to tell him to get his act together.”

  Johnson, a former Army football player, looks like some casting director’s choice for an infantry colonel. He is dressed completely in black, with clothes that show his athlete’s physique, and a shaved head that makes him look a little like a black Mr. Clean.

  “We’re here to build leaders, not people who call home crying every five minutes. We will be fair, and we will be hard. We will teach him to be responsible, we will teach him to solve problems; when he gets home you will see a change in his demeanor.”

  “We’ll keep them straight and we’ll send them back to you better than you sent them to us.”

  R-Day speeds on. In Central Area the drumbeat pounds through another hour. The new cadets now march in larger units, platoons and companies of 150. They may not be ready to join the whole corps on parade, but they can do a fair imitation of a mediocre high school drill team.

  Cadre members scurry around the formation, checking to ensure that every new cadet has the right uniform. All 158 new cadets assigned to Alpha Company have been screened, measured, fitted, shorn, checked and rechecked. Each one is now under the control of a squad leader; the squad leaders answer to the platoon leader/platoon sergeant team, who in turn answer to the company commander, Kevin Bradley. Bradley answers to Olson for every body, every piece of equipment.

  Naturally, not everything goes right. Some new cadets are missing bedding. There are prescription eyeglasses to be picked up (the Army-issue frames that look like bug eyes; no stylish civilian glasses after today). The big clock in Central Area moves toward parade time.

  Bradley talks aloud about competing demands. Squad leaders don’t want to come outside too early and wind up standing around while other squads are still upstairs; the minutes are precious and too few. They’d rather use the time in the barracks to get things set up for the next day’s training. There are a staggering number of details squad leaders must teach these civilians, these almost-new-cadets: everything from how to make a bed to how to stow their uniforms to where the latrines and showers are. This means that each squad leader will hang back in the barracks until the last possible moment, trying to wring out of the clock just another minute of time to get things ready for the next requirement. And there is always a next requirement.

  Major Rob Olson and Captain Brian Turner do not interfere. They are there to make sure that the cadets can recover from any minor mistake, and that they don’t blow any of the big things.

  A platoon leader whispers something to Bradley. A new cadet has urinated on himself, probably a victim of “drink more water, DRINK MORE WATER,” and the decidedly unfriendly way the cadre asks, “Who has to use the latrine?”

  The platoon sergeant handled it smoothly, hustling the youngster upstairs where, fortunately, there is another pair of gray trousers that fit. No one laughs, at least not in the presence of the new cadet.

  “What’s your most important mission?” Olson asks Bradley as the cadet looks around the area, counts the squads ready for company drill, and figures out how many are still upstairs.

  “Sir, the most important thing is to get everyone out there on time for the parade,” Bradley says.

  “And they all gotta know how to march,” Olson adds.

  Bradley smiles. “Yes, sir.”

  “Keep focused on that. Let the squad leaders have as much time as you can afford to give them—which may not be as much as they want.”

  Kevin Bradley gets the distinction, and moments later the 158 new cadets of Alpha Company are forming for the last block of drill instruction before their first ceremony on West Point’s famous parade ground, called “the Plain.”

  Meanwhile, the families of new cadets wait near the entrances to Central Area, which are closed off by heavy chains. At the corner nearest the old First Division barracks, a hundred or so family members sit and stand, peering into the area and trying to catch a glimpse of their new cadet. Many of them use binoculars. A couple of teenage girls in shorts sit cross-legged on the ground, their shoulders slumped forward like tired sentries. Suddenly one of them straightens, points, and yells, “There she is!” She is pointing at what looks like an undifferentiated mass of gray. With their new haircuts, new clothes, new way of walking, it would be difficult even for a family member to pick out one new cadet among the hundreds visible at a distance. The missing sister, even if she were only a few yards away, is no longer allowed to turn and wave, so the family has to be content with the unconfirmed sighting.

  A hundred yards away, the inside of the Cadet Library is cool and quiet. Just inside the reference room is a long display case, twelve feet of polished cherry with a glass front. In the center, a wooden plaque says “General of the Army” the gold lettering is flanked with five stars in a pentagon pattern. Displayed there are the class rings of three of the West Pointers who wore five stars: Douglas MacArthur, 1903; Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower, both 1915.

  The rest of the shelves are a display of class rings dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. It’s part museum piece (West Point claims to be the first undergraduate institution to give class rings); and part something else: a memorial, a memento mori, a reminder, to any cadet who might stop and read the tiny inscriptions, of the Academy’s ultimate mission.

  [Class of] 1988

  ILT [First Lieutenant] Donaldson Preston Tillar III

  Killed in action in the Persian Gulf War, 27 February 1991

  1969

  CPT [Captain] Paul Coburn Sawtelle

  Killed in Action in Vietnam

  16 Apri
l 1971

  January 1943

  ILT George Eberle

  Killed in action at Normandy

  6 June 1944

  1940

  CPT Joseph V Iacobucci

  Died in Prison Camp Fukuoka, Japan

  14 March 1945

  1841

  MG [Major General] Amiel Weeks Whipple

  Mortally wounded at Chancellorsville [Virginia]

  7 May 1863

  Gift of his grandson COL [Colonel] Sherburne Whipple

  1841

  LTC [Lieutenant Colonel] Julius P. Garesche

  Killed in action at Stone River

  31 December 1862

  1850

  BG CSA [Brigadier General, Confederate States Army]

  Armistead L. Long

  1892

  ILT Dennis M. Michie

  Killed in action at San Juan River, Cuba

  1 July 1898

  There are only a few librarians around. The reference room is quiet. Outside, the clouds are breaking up over the parade field. The library’s big arched windows frame the statue of General George S. Patton, 1909, which stands directly across the street. A dozen people in civilian clothes, in shorts and sensible shoes, circle the general, snap his picture, or pose in front of the statue’s base.

  At 4:00 the parade is about to start. The Plain is a flat patch of emerald on a bluff above the river. One side is braced by the long granite wings of Eisenhower and MacArthur Barracks. Opposite are aluminum bleachers, the massed cannons and tall trees of Trophy Point, then the long valley and flat silver plate of the Hudson River.

  The cadet companies pour out of the sally ports when the band strikes the first chords. The cadre members are dressed in white: starched trousers and high-collared tunics. The new cadets wear short-sleeved white shirts and gray trousers, white gloves, and no hats. This is the only parade, for their entire four years, in which their heads will be uncovered. (There is not enough time in the day’s tight schedule to fit everyone for hats.)