Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  In many ways, the entire season is just a prelude to the Army-Navy game, which is played on the first Saturday in December. This final contest is almost a separate season. An Army team can go into this game with a losing record and still salvage a great deal by beating the midshipmen. (The Army-Navy rivalry is so central to sports at West Point that academy officials talk about the success of the athletic program in terms of percentage of wins over Annapolis.)

  If football is a metaphor for war, then the Army-Navy game is the climactic battle. For the entire week leading up to the game, the corps wears battle dress uniform, part of the pep-rally feeling of one of the biggest weeks of the year at West Point. The barracks are decorated with huge bed-sheet posters hanging from windows (inside the quads; nothing is visible on the parade field side); plebes sound off with, “Beat Navy, sir!” at every turn. There are nighttime “spirit” missions and push-up contests and floats being made for the game. The Supe’s house displays an eight-foot “GO ARMY” banner on one side of the porch, a “BEAT NAVY” banner on the other. The school colors of black, gold, and gray are everywhere. Formations are energized; plebes break ranks and climb on statues and balconies to lead cheers. All the months of hard work, all the routine and regulation, give way to college pranks. Bedlam reigns.

  Except at the football tables.

  While the corps is outside celebrating, the team is already eating in a corner of the Mess Hall wing dominated by the Washington stained-glass window. The players are excused from lunch formation so they can eat quickly and squeeze in some team meetings before afternoon classes. Their tables are piled with double portions: huge platters of gray meat, loaves of white bread in plastic wrap, lukewarm corn piled in rectangular steel dishes. The football players eat head-down; there is little conversation.

  There is a notion popular among cadets who do not play intercollegiate sports that the athletes have life easier. No parades, fewer formations, all those road trips. Plebes on the football tables can relax, while a few tables away their classmates on company tables sit up straight, do table duties, eat in silence, and answer questions thrown at them by upperclass cadets.

  The athletes are quick to point out that they undergo a grueling practice schedule. They return to the barracks exhausted and begin their studies late. There is no such thing as leisure time during the season.

  Second class cadet Grady Jett, the Beast squad leader who stressed teamwork above all, sits at a mostly empty table in the stained-glass wing of the Mess Hall. His short hair is parted in the middle. The gold chain he wears around his neck looks out of place against his GI T-shirt. All around him, plebes move cartons of milk and platters of food. Jett is disappointed with the team’s record so far, but mentions his only touchdown, which came against Louisville the previous last game.

  Football dominates his life. It is not the only thing he is concerned about, but it takes the most energy. And it is through football that Jett wound up at West Point. A successful high school player in football-crazy Texas, Jett worked hard to get a scholarship to ease the financial burden on his parents. He didn’t know anything about West Point until Academy recruiters contacted him.

  “At first, I was like, ‘No way’ Then I started looking into it, into the possibilities for the future … it seemed like a good fit for me.”

  The biggest challenge for Jett was leaving his family; he is very close to his parents and sister. Amazingly, Jett’s father attended every Army game of the season, flying to New York from Texas for the home games, flying around the country for Army’s away games. The whole family will join him in Philadelphia after the Navy game.

  But Jett has a few obstacles to clear before the weekend of celebrating. “This time of year the screws are really on,” he says. He isn’t talking about game pressure; he’s talking about academics, about the projects and papers due near the end of the term.

  Jett graduated eleventh in his high school class of six hundred, but at West Point he hovers around the midpoint of his class of just over nine hundred. He knows his grades could be better if he had more time to study.

  “If I didn’t have football, my grades would definitely be better, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And it’s not just football, but the friends I made, the experiences I had; highs and lows, working with a great bunch of guys.”

  Jett loves playing, but the time commitment isolates him from the rest of the corps. It is especially apparent to him this semester. In spite of the time drain of football, he was made a squad leader in his company. He is concerned that he cannot give the cadets in his squad enough attention.

  “One of my guys had an older brother, a firstie, who died recently. He’d gone on sick call and they told him he was dehydrated. They gave him some fluids and sent him back. His roommate tried to wake him up in the morning, but he was dead. I tried to help my guy get through that. But it’s hard because I’m not around all that much. I try to stop by in the evening and see how the plebes are doing, but upper class aren’t even supposed to be around the plebes during study barracks.”

  Jett eats quickly, then climbs six flights of stairs to one of the huge drafting rooms above the Mess Hall. Coach Darrel Hazzell smiles as he greets the players, then begins the meeting by reading a moment-by-moment breakdown of the upcoming afternoon practice. He hands out a photocopied sheet of neatly printed formations and pass patterns, then begins a rapid-fire patter that is almost completely jargon.

  “Most of their guys are wrist-banded. In this non-crackable position,” Hazzell says, pointing to the paper in his hand, “if his feet are inside it doesn’t matter what alignment, you guys got to get inside. So make the switch signal. If we’re in spread alignment, the back is not going to engage.” The partial illustrations on the sheet have names like, “Rhonda 168 Hammer Smoke,” and “Larry Special Left Pass.”

  They’ve been in the room less than ten minutes when Hazzell, still talking continuously, puts a tape in the VCR. The screen shows a practice. Hazzell is all energy, pacing and pointing. The cadets stay awake but have few questions; every once in a while they nod in agreement or understanding. Twelve minutes later the video is off and the cadets hurry out of the room, and on to their next requirement. As Jett enters the stairwell, the cattle-drive sound of the corps leaving the Mess Hall fills the building.

  “Coach Hazzell is great,” Jett says. “He’s the best coach I’ve ever had. He never talks about personal stuff during practice. It’s all football. The coach we had two years ago used to fall asleep during meetings.”

  From Washington Hall Jett makes his way to MacArthur Barracks and the dayroom of Company C4, which has been his company only since the end of August. In between their second and third years, cadets are “shuffled,” assigned to new companies. The administration found that when cadets stayed in the same company for four years, as was the practice in the past, the companies developed “personalities.” They could turn into subcultures that might or might not share the institution’s values. Some companies were known for athletics or academic prowess; some were known for being hard on plebes, others for being easy on the fourth class.

  From the administration’s point of view, this meant a cadet who spent four years in one company might have a dramatically different experience of West Point than a classmate in another company. What’s more, some of these subcultures were at odds with administration policies and even Academy values. Now cadets get to know more of their classmates. More importantly, attitudes across the corps are evened out, and the developmental experience is more uniform.

  The dayroom, a combination meeting room and television room, is a windowless basement room with a pool table, a television, and VCR. Thirty or forty government-issue padded chairs crowd the space. One wall is decorated with a giant pencil sketch of a cowboy, the company mascot. Jett falls into one of the chairs.

  The room is hot and close and crowded with second class cadets, none of them enthusiastic about this mandatory meeting about alcohol and drug abuse. A f
irstie asks the platoon sergeants for a head count and gets an “all present.” Less than a minute later a cadet walks in.

  “Good report,” someone complains.

  A second-class named Walt Hollis, who is the company First Sergeant, begins. “Welcome to another class on alcohol. Here’s the plan. I’m supposed to show you this video, which lasts about twenty minutes, and then we’re supposed to discuss it. I have a list of questions and discussion points. But the VCR is broken, so I’ll just tell you about the video.”

  He reads the lesson plan from a set of printed notes. In the video he isn’t showing, a student goes to a frat party and gets drunk to the point of alcohol poisoning.

  Hollis looks up and asks, “Why do people drink?” There are a couple of chuckles, some whispered comments. There is still something in the air of the sophomoric fascination with drinking.

  “People drink to escape reality,” a cadet in the front row says.

  “To hook up,” offers another.

  “Because we think we’re much cooler when we drink.”

  “When does a person’s drinking become a problem?” Hollis asks.

  “When there’s not enough to go around,” offers a cadet slouched in a chair.

  Someone in the back of the room asks, “Why do you all have to act so stupid?”

  “A lot of people say that West Pointers get into the Army and don’t know how to act,” Grady Jett says. “They have a drinking problem because they’ve never been allowed to do it normally; it’s always such a big deal.”

  The juniors talk about a cadet who graduated a few years back. He used to return to the barracks drunk and fling open the plebes’ doors and shout at them before stumbling off to bed. They generally agree that this person was a sad case and no kind of leader, but there are still a few lingering sniggers.

  The juniors talk about the resources available on Army posts to help soldiers with these problems, then Hollis ends by quoting the lesson plan: “Alcohol and drug abuse are inconsistent with military service.”

  “Alcohol is a problem at West Point,” Hollis offers. No one disagrees.

  “There’s binge drinking and underage drinking and DUI. How can we work against that?”

  A young woman offers, “They’re on the right track in giving cadets more freedom. People take responsibility for their own actions. It’s not like before, where cadets got out and just exploded.”

  A firstie closes the class. He is soft-spoken, makes little eye contact.

  “Have a good time this weekend [in Philadelphia at the Army-Navy game], but be smart about it. Think about what you’re doing before you get into trouble.”

  Later that afternoon Jett heads to Michie Stadium for practice. He has spent three hours in class today. He will spend four and a half at the football complex.

  The training room buzzes with dozens of conversations. Jett climbs on a table and shaves his recently injured ankle with an electric razor; a trainer will wrap it in a small cast made of white athletic tape. While he waits he removes his BDU blouse; he is not big for a Division I player, just a shade over six feet and 180 pounds. Army recruits from a small pool of talent: kids who can play Division I football and handle West Point’s academics. They are the same athletes being recruited by Navy and Air Force, by Brown and Penn and Duke. Players recruited by the academies must also consider the service commitment of at least five years.

  The cinder-block walls are decorated with paper signs, most of them martial.

  “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”

  “Tomorrow’s Battle is Won During Today’s Practice.”

  A large plaque lists the years in which Army won the Commander-in-Chiefs Trophy, awarded to the major service academy that defeats the other two in football. Army last won in 1996.

  Jett is closer to the young men in this room than to anyone else at West Point, but he also talks with some envy of his friends who aren’t on Corps Squad. “They have the time to go out with their buddies, to make other friends in the corps. I know my roommate, when he comes back from dinner, he has some time to hang out with other people and make other friends. I get back and have to get to work right away. I wish I had time to know more people.”

  The trainer works quickly, unrolling tape and tearing it into neat strips.

  “People who know what we go through respect us. Then there are those people who think we just come up here and joke around and that we get out of a lot of stuff, like drill and formations, that we’re just get-overs. They don’t understand how hard we work.”

  “On the faculty you see both attitudes. Some of them know what we go through. Some of the Tacs went through our strength-training workout one day. The coach said a lot of them couldn’t even finish it,” he says with obvious relish. “That changed a lot of attitudes. A teacher traveled with us when we went to a hotel the night before a game; he was amazed at how intense our schedule is. We go from practice to meetings. He never knew that we went through all this prior to games.”

  Jett jogs off to change into his practice uniform, then moves to the warren of meeting rooms, which are shabby, with low ceilings, holes in the walls, burned-out lights. The floor is thick with folding chairs, and after the players start to assemble, with piles of shoulder pads and gold helmets. The linemen lumber through the room; a few of them have stomachs like middle-aged men and will have to lose weight to fit within the Army height and weight standards before they can be commissioned. There are more motivational posters hung unevenly around the tight space. One could be Coach Hazzell’s motto.

  “Success is not an Accident; It’s a Planned Event.”

  Hazzell coached at the University of Western Michigan, where he “had a lot more time,” he says. “It took a while to adjust to the cadets’ schedule. We coaches have to understand what these guys go through, because their lives off the field are so hectic, there are a lot of demands. But they’re outstanding guys to work with. They have this tremendous willingness … they want to work, on a consistent basis. A lot of places you gotta pull teeth to get things going, but not here. You can’t ask for a better coaching situation.”

  Hazzell is five ten, with a neatly trimmed mustache and a black Army Football nylon warm-up suit, a baseball cap with a simple “A” on the front. He begins the session with his minutely detailed overview of the upcoming practice session, then he goes to the white board and sketches the plays they will work on today. He talks fast, quizzing the players and shuffling through a pile of papers on a rolling table.

  Grady Jett, who was up until midnight or 1:00 the night before, who was up this morning at six, and who just returned from a Thanks-giving leave where he got “no sleep,” is fighting to keep his eyes open. Yet he answers every prompt.

  At 4:20 P.M. they are on the field for warm-up exercises. The practice field sits in the right angle formed by Michie Stadium and the Holleder Center. (Sports venues are named for cadet athletes later killed in action. Dennis Michie, USMA 1892, brought the new sport of football to West Point in 1890. Michie was killed fighting the Spanish in Cuba in July 1898. Don Holleder, USMA 1956 and Army quarterback, made the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine during his last season. Holleder was killed in action in Vietnam in 1967. He was thirty-three years old.) The big lights come on and the temperature starts to drop; when the players stand on the sidelines and remove their helmets, steam lifts off them in clouds. Beyond the bare trees the mountains to the east are outlined against a dove-gray sky.

  The practice field is two hundred yards long and seventy-five wide; it is covered with players, some in white practice jerseys, most in black. There are more than a hundred and eighty cadets in this system, more plebes than upper class. This week’s practices are emotionally charged: because it’s the Navy game, and because it’s the end of football for some of these players.

  “Seniors,” one of the coaches says, “This is your last Monday practice.”

  The entire two-hour practice is run like the two-minute
drill at the end of a clutch game. The coaches read from identical copies of the time plan. They move squads and subsquads here and there on the field at a run, bringing together the backs, then the receivers and quarterbacks, then the linemen.

  “Everything is designed to get the most out of the time we have with them,” Head Coach Bob Sutton says, “because their schedule is so tight.”

  And it works. The parts all come together like rapidly spinning gears, like a complex field operation, like a battle drill. This is due, in part, to meticulous preparation. But none of this would be possible without the tremendous resources available to this program. There are two elevated platforms, raised by hydraulics, at one end of the field. Three video operators spend the entire second half of practice shooting footage from fifty feet up. There is a squad of managers in yellow sweats, a dozen trainers and coaches.

  Football gets the most attention at West Point—many feel too much attention. It also generates revenue that supports the rest of the varsity sports program. Football is the national spectacle, the perfect mix of violence and glory and sex for our society. Maybe it works at West Point because it is a military metaphor, a surrogate for war. Or it may be that football, in spite of commercialization, retains some of the magic Cadet Michie saw when he organized the first games on West Point’s muddy Plain.

  Late in practice, Grady Jett catches a touchdown pass, the ball floating into his hands in the artificial light, in the crisp air. It’s a Hollywood play, of course. The defenders aren’t running full-speed and the point is execution, but the play is beautiful nonetheless, and the players on the sidelines cheer wildly. This is Navy week.