Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  Under a system used until just a few years ago, math instructors would take the report, then ask for questions. If no cadet asked a question, the next command was, “Take boards.”

  This sent each cadet to a section of blackboard (they were numbered at the top). Using a long ruler, the cadet divided the board in half from top to bottom. Then, still using the straightedge, he or she drew two rectangles in the upper left-hand corner. Name in the top box, problem number in the bottom. Yellow chalk was for the work; white, green, and blue chalk for the drawings. The answer was to be underlined twice in red and labeled “ANS.” Naturally, the boards were graded for neatness. At some point the instructor would command, “Cease work!” All chalk went down immediately. The cadets stood by the boards as the instructor looked for a likely candidate to recite. Some instructors just looked at the work; others would also inspect a cadet’s uniform, shoes, haircut. This was not Columbia, after all.

  “Mr. Jones.”

  The cadets not chosen sat down.

  Stand at attention next to the board; begin by saying, “Sir, in this problem I was required to find the area under the curve defined by the equation …”

  Pick up the pointer; talk the class through the problem. Sometimes a helpful classmate might say, “Sir, I believe Mr. Jones made an error in the fourth step of the equation …”

  These people were not popular, except as targets in plebe boxing. They all went on to Stanford and Harvard Business School.

  Some instructors were interested in teaching math. They would gently ask questions about the method, about the reasons for using a certain approach. Others believed they were preparing the cadet to stand in front of a general at some future date and brief the plan for the next D-Day invasion. In that case, the cadet had better be ready to defend his work.

  Murphy’s law dictates that a cadet would be called upon to recite on exactly those problems she understood least.

  “And why did you choose that method?”

  Because it was my best shot, sir. The least complicated, the calculus equivalent of counting on my fingers and toes.

  The system made cadets work, if only to avoid being humiliated in class. But it had its critics, too. West Pointers’ reputation in the Army—they always looked for a definite answer, underlined twice in red—traces its roots back to that math board.

  After class, Friesema heads back outside. Everywhere, it seems, there are cadets running, singly and in groups. This is a constant at West Point, the sine qua non of cadet life. Some of them wear shorts and T-shirts; others wear sweats against the chill. They wear reflective bands like bandolleers across their shoulders. There is tremendous pressure on the women to be good runners, thus women are over-represented among the cadets who pass.

  Friesema is excited about Plebe Parent Weekend, just a few days away. His parents are driving fourteen hours from their home in Racine, Wisconsin, to visit. They are, he says, very proud of his choice.

  “It’ll be nice to show them around here, give them an idea of how I live, what I do.”

  He is only a few months removed from the high school senior they knew, but he has a keen sense of how much he has changed. For one thing, being away from home has made him more aware of how much family means to him.

  “My older brother, Andy, goes to the University of Wisconsin. We shared a room, and when he left I used to lie there and look at his empty bed. I really missed him.”

  It was Andy who got a mailer from West Point; and although his father tried to talk to Andy about the Academy, the card went in the trash. Bob Friesema fished it out and sent it in.

  “My parents have my two younger brothers in private school, so my getting a scholarship helps. But it was harder for them to send me here than to send my brother to Wisconsin. R-Day was the first time I ever saw my dad cry.”

  Friesema, the second of four boys, is fairly self-aware for a teenager.

  “There’s a three-year difference between me and the next youngest, Dan. In the months before R-Day [the younger ones] really looked up to me, asked me a lot about hunting and fishing. I haven’t really gotten along with John, the youngest, well. But in the short summer before I came here things got better.”

  Every few steps he greets an upperclass cadet with, “Beat Air Force, sir!”

  “I picked on him a lot,” he admits. “He was overweight. I was pretty ruthless. I feel bad about it now. He bawled his eyes out on R-Day and he writes me e-mail more than anyone else.”

  The upcoming weekend will be a time to visit with his family. It will also mean a much-anticipated chance to leave the post. Although plebes do have some free time, they are limited in what they can do with that time, especially first semester. They cannot: wander into town, drive to a movie, wear civilian clothes, listen to music in their rooms, go to nearby New York City, visit friends at other colleges, have friends visit them overnight.

  They can: play sports and work out. And study.

  “I don’t like the fact that there’s no social life,” Friesema says. “Zero.”

  If the lifestyle at West Point is dramatically different from his home life, the values are not. Friesema, a graduate of Racine Christian School, is completely at ease with the honor code, because it’s in keeping with the values he was raised with.

  “Some people don’t take it too seriously, they think they can get away with little white lies. They don’t always think that there are implications to what they’re doing. Sometimes, with my roommates, I point out that there’s a connection between their doing something and the honor code, and they’re surprised. It just doesn’t always occur to them.”

  In English class that afternoon, Major Julie Wright takes the report from the section marcher and has the cadets open their copies of Newsweek magazine. An article talks about the rise in co-habitation as an alternative to, or precursor to marriage. There are a variety of reasons for this change, the writer claims: decreasing stigma for couples who have children without marrying, rising divorce rates, decline of marriage as an ultimate goal, women’s increasing financial independence, men’s increasing independence from the idea that they need a housewife to take care of the home.

  Wright asks the cadets to respond in their journals. Then she sends them to the boards to summarize their responses in groups of two or three. Bob Friesema’s group writes on the board, “Marriage is a holy union of 2 people and should not be desensitized [sic]; it is necessary for family stability; unstable families lead to societal problems such as crime and are detrimental to children’s development; cohabitation without marriage is the result of breakdown of morals and religion.”

  Other responses around the room are just as conservative. Wright does not comment on the content, but focuses on the rhetoric and the structure. Later, Wright says that the reaction was “not an anomaly.”

  “I definitely think they are more conservative than some of the enlisted soldiers they will encounter in the Army.”

  This is not surprising, given that the admission standards reward young men and women who have played by the rules, who have succeeded by all the conventional measures in academics, sports, and leadership. But the difference does contribute to the problems many young West Point graduates have communicating with soldiers and NCOs.

  The long days of classes lead directly to athletics. Cadets who don’t play on a varsity team (called Corps Squad) or on a club sport must participate in the extensive intramural program. During parade season (spring and fall), intramurals take place every other day; the alternate afternoons are spent at drill and ceremony practice. On any afternoon, thousands of cadets are out playing sports. Colonel Maureen LeBouef, head of the department of physical education (which oversees the intramural program), says that West Point has more sports opportunities for its four thousand students than Ohio State has for its forty thousand students.

  This period of athletics extends into the evening, and cadets are still on the parade field as dusk gathers. A steady wind comes off the river and pu
shes yellow leaves into the artificial light from a practice field. There is a diamond-chip moon overhead, and clouds sail down the river valley. Under the lights of their practice field, the Army rugby team churns the turf into mud. Wearing throwback uniforms of striped jerseys and thick, knee-high socks, they slam into each other at full speed. When they pause, they breathe like horses after a gallop.

  On the Plain, there is a heartbeat of a drum as plebes drill for Plebe Parent Weekend, which officially begins tomorrow, Friday. The windows of the Supe’s house are warmly lit. A van drops off some MPs and a bugler for the simple ceremony that ends each day: The bugler plays “To the Colors,” the retreat gun cracks over the valley, the flag comes down. People stop their cars and get out to stand at attention. The rugby team stops and faces the flag, and for an uncharacteristic moment, West Point pauses.

  Just after breakfast on Friday morning, Jacque Messel heads off to the gym, carrying her athletic uniform in a mesh laundry bag. Like Bob Friesema, she is more at ease than she was in Beast, and has lost the fidgeting nervousness that followed her during the summer. The change is profound.

  “The lowest point was my birthday [her nineteenth], August 17th. We were just starting the academic year, so I had all these new classes, and I had been through Re-orgy Week, and my parents had just left after their first visit.

  “But it was also a big breakthrough, too. My Dad and I finally got to talk about my coming here, about my staying here. They said they would support whatever decision I made. I knew that all along, of course, but the visit just reinforced it.”

  She had been focused too much, she says, on Beast Barracks. Like many cadets, she had a hard time imagining West Point would be any different during the academic year.

  “Platoon Sergeant Stitt helped me out there,” she says, mentioning the universally respected first detail platoon sergeant. “He got out a copy of Bugle Notes and started looking at all the clubs and activities; then he asked me what kinds of things I’d like to do if I was still around West Point in the fall. He didn’t try to convince me to stay; he didn’t talk about my dad or anything. But he did help me see that there was life beyond Beast Barracks.”

  Messel hurries into Arvin Gymnasium. Parts of this old building resemble a cathedral or a monastery: hallways topped with barrel-vaulted ceilings, doorways guarded by bas-relief carvings of athletes. On a high wall near one entry is MacArthur’s decree about the connection between athleticism and soldiering.

  Upon the fields of friendly strife

  Are sown the seeds that

  Upon other fields, on other days

  Will bear the fruits of victory

  Messel heads to the second floor and Hayes Gym, a huge room on the second floor, where her class will practice one of the most grueling physical tests West Point offers: the Indoor Obstacle Course Test, or IOCT. Messel and the other women line up behind the men at the beginning of the course. As each pair of runners takes off (there are two parallel tracks), the cadets in line shout encouragement. Soon the huge old gymnasium is filled with shouting and grunting as cadets negotiate the obstacles.

  Messel stands in line, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet with nervous energy. At the “Go” signal, she throws herself down on the wrestling mat in front of her and crawls for twenty feet beneath a wire mesh stretched a foot or two above the mat. She runs through parallel lines of tires, the old football practice drill. Then an “elephant vault” over a padded frame that stands a good four feet over the polished floor.

  From there she sprints to an eight-foot-high horizontal shelf. She grabs the edge, hangs, throws one long leg up over the lip of the shelf. Women tend to have more problems with this obstacle, as they do not have the upper body strength the men do. Messel uses her height advantage; she kicks, pulls, swings her way onto the shelf.

  The cadets climb from the shelf over a railing and onto the second-floor track, then swing through a series of bars until they can jump back down onto the gym floor. More running. They race to launch themselves through huge truck tires that hang like tire swings from the ceiling. (One instructor said that the largest cadets, especially the football players, have a hard time fitting through.) After the tire they make their way—”walking” on outstretched arms, legs bicycling in the air—along two sets of parallel bars placed end to end.

  By this time even the best-conditioned cadets are winded; they suck in huge gulps of the old gym’s dusty air. The long muscles of their arms and legs suddenly feel wrapped in lead.

  Thirty feet to the next vault: an eight-foot vertical wall. The technique is to jump for the top and place one foot as high up as possible on the wall. The sound of cadets kicking and crashing into the plywood wall punctuates the entire test.

  Messel’s height gives her an advantage, but eight feet is still eight feet. She drags herself over the top, drops down behind. Tiring, she runs flat-footed, her athletic shoes slapping the wooden floor. She climbs a padded step and reaches for the first rungs of a thirty-foot-long horizontal ladder. She swings out, legs churning as she grabs each rung and makes her way through space again. (Some of the gymnasts, their arms like steel cables, blaze through barely touching each bar.) Messel drops off the last rung and stumbles to the bottom of a frayed white rope. The cadets must climb sixteen feet to another shelf above their heads.

  Messel grabs the rope, pinches it between her feet as she has been taught, and inches her way upward. She is not the fastest, but she moves forward relentlessly; it is, as the sports announcers say, a game of inches.

  Sixteen feet is marked with an orange band. Messel touches the band, then swings her legs over to the shelf, climbs the railing again to the track. There is a canvas cart filled with leather medicine balls. They are just large enough and, at about twelve pounds each, just heavy enough that even the biggest cadets have to use two hands. There is no way to run smoothly with the medicine ball; it’s like running while carrying a case of beer.

  One lap with the ball (twelve laps to a mile on this track), then trade the ball for a baton, then a last lap empty-handed. An instructor with a stopwatch calls out the times as cadets cross the finish line; they report this time to a recorder on the first floor. They are on their honor to report the correct time.

  As they wait in line to report their scores, they rest, hands on knees. There is little talking. Messel has only a few minutes to shower and change after class. Books under her arm, hair still wet from the shower, she hurries to Thayer Hall for psychology, another required course for plebes.

  The classroom is crowded and hot, and when she sits down, it is the first time she has stopped moving all day. Within a few minutes, several of the plebes, including Messel, are having trouble staying awake. This is a common problem at West Point, especially forplebes. Cadets operate on little sleep; they stay up late and get up early. If they sit down and remain still for more than a few minutes, they will nod off. It isn’t unusual to look into a classroom and notice one or two cadets standing in the back of the room, struggling to stay awake.

  After psychology, Messel has a free period, so she heads to her room. Like a lot of plebes, she lives with two roommates in a room designed for only two people. There is barely enough room to pull the chairs out from the desks. On the bookshelf above her desk is a large frame filled with smaller photos: a group of girls making faces at the camera; a small photo of Messel with her parents. In the photo she looks mature in an evening gown, makeup, jewelry. At West Point, there is no opportunity to dress that way.

  “I’ve just tried to fit in, be one of the guys, I guess. I don’t spend a lot of time with makeup or any of that. Even when we’re allowed to wear civilian clothes, a lot of the girls choose not to let their hair down or wear makeup or jewelry. Some of them do take advantage of any chance, though, like at football pep-rally dinners.”

  (At the mandatory Thursday night dinners during football season, cadets sometimes wear various costumes, which may include civilian clothes.)

  “I feel
more comfortable just fitting in. A lot of girls, it really bothers them that we have to dress like the guys and all. Every time they go out they buy something feminine to wear or to decorate their room.”

  “Decorate” may be too strong a word to describe the individuality allowed cadets. Beside the one framed picture per roommate, the only other thing that qualifies as a “decoration” are a couple of two-inch plastic pumpkins tucked away on a bookshelf.

  Messel checks her watch repeatedly as the morning slips by. Plebe Parent Weekend begins at lunch, and that’s when she’s due to meet her parents. She puts on her hat and goes outside to wait by the big clock outside her barracks. Her parents arrive a moment later, as if on cue.

  Jerri Messel, Jacques mother, is petite and pretty, a quiet woman. Physically, Jacque Messel favors her father, who is tall and broad. She does not have his booming voice and tendency to dominate the conversation.

  Messel’s demeanor changes around her parents. As she leads them into the Mess Hall for the guest lunch, she becomes quiet. Throughout the meal, the two women sit quietly as they hear stories of Robert Messel’s cadet days. He talks about West Point in the 1960s, about playing Army basketball, about the great football teams, about the new buildings and the old way of doing things, about everything except his daughter’s experiences in her new world.

  At times, Messel seems confused about the role her father played in getting her to West Point. At times, she says he “encouraged” her, telling her stories about his experiences, about people he met and places he’d been. At other times, it seems that she became a cadet to please him. “This was his dream,” she states flatly.

  CRUCIBLE

  The football season goes a long way toward making West Point a tolerable place to be stuck on fall weekends. Each week there is the buildup to Saturday, the pageantry of the pre-game parade, and the carnival atmosphere of the game itself. All cadets must attend, and tradition dictates that they stand for the entire game. The cadet section of the home stands is a solid block of noisy gray, and cheering for the team is a release for pent-up energies.