Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  After practice, the players shower and gather in the big hallways of the Holleder Center, where long tables have been set with dinner (the rest of the corps has already finished eating). The meal set for them is huge: plate-bending servings of chicken tacos. As with the Mess Hall meals, there is a scarcity of fresh vegetables. The closest thing here is shredded iceberg lettuce, which is nearly white under the fluorescent lights. Jett eats sparingly for someone so active.

  “A lot of people who know what we go through up here respect us for it. Up here,” he says, nodding at the practice field beyond the dark windows, “we’ve worked together through all those practices: when it’s hot, when it’s freezing cold. Teamwork is about pushing other people to get better for the sake of the team, about pushing yourself to make yourself better individually. … That’s the kind of leader I want to be, not just bossy, but someone who earns respect. Not by being their best friend, but by being approachable.”

  Jett is slowing down. His day started early and he hasn’t stopped moving—rapidly—since.

  “I’ve got a group coming to my room at 8:00,” he says, looking at his watch. It is 7:30. “We have a fluids design problem due this week. We have to come up with a way to check the viscosity of an unknown fluid.”

  He’ll be up until midnight, or later. And at 6:30 tomorrow morning, the plebe minute callers will be outside his room, signaling another day.

  Like Grady Jett, Shannon Stein, the second-detail Beast squad leader, is also a varsity athlete. Recruited to play soccer, she is the workhorse of the team in the contest against Navy just days before the Army-Navy football game. Stein, who is five three and weighs a hundred pounds, plays as if she weighed two hundred. She is a fierce competitor, throwing herself at the ball, at the opposing players, rolling and tumbling, everywhere at once.

  But the effort is not enough, and Army loses. Stein, who wore her emotions on her sleeve during Beast, is subdued the next day. She wears her camouflage BDU pulled low enough to hide her eyes. With ten unstructured minutes before lunch formation, she heads to MacArthur Barracks and the three-person room she shares with Meghann Sullivan and Lynn Haseman.

  The shades are pulled down and the room dark as Stein enters. Haseman is stretched out on one bunk, fully clothed and asleep. Sullivan, sitting in the glow from her computer screen, is dressed in BDU pants, olive drab T-shirt, combat boots. She is broad-shouldered, an athlete, with a fine complexion and a Botticelli face. The paper she is writing for PL300, the standard leadership course for second class cadets, is due at 4:00. In trying to explain what it’s about, she stumbles through jargon about “AOIs” and leadership theories and external outputs of something called “OOSM”, then she switches to plain English.

  “It’s about how West Point turns out so many social retards,” she says.

  The downside of living in an isolated, insulated world is that many cadets learn to function only in that small universe.

  “You have some weird people here,” Sullivan says. “You have a lot of people who think ‘I’m this great athlete,’ or ‘I’m really smart’, but a lot of them have absolutely zero social skills. They think everything revolves around the rules and that the rules are an answer to everything.”

  There are rules governing nearly every aspect of cadet life, from the way they dress to how they keep their rooms to how they address each other on official business. But it is not just the presence of so many rules that makes cadets feel squeezed; it is the lack of privileges. Only first class cadets are allowed to leave post daily and then only after their last duty. Evenings and weekends away from West Point are meted out to the under three classes, with the plebes having the fewest opportunities to escape. A cadet who is failing a course or is under some disciplinary action loses most of these privileges.

  “You’re twenty years old and you have to get permission to go out at night,” Sullivan says. “You should be responsible enough by this time to say ‘Well, I have to study tonight,’ or ‘I can afford to go out.’ They baby-sit you.”

  Lynn Haseman stirs under her comforter, then sits up on the bed and looks around. Like Sullivan, she wears BDU pants and an olive T-shirt; her boots are beside the bed.

  Haseman is from an Army family. A third-generation West Pointer, she is the ninth person in her family—and the first woman—to wear cadet gray. Her grandfather is buried in West Point’s cemetery, her cousin is a tactical officer. Her father and General Christman, the Superintendent, were on the track team together as cadets. Her mother and Sue Christman, the Supe’s wife, were sorority sisters. Her father was the former Commandant’s squad leader; the current Commandant is a classmate of her uncle’s. In Shannon Stein’s description, she is “Miss West Point.”

  “She knows everybody,” Stein says.

  “I still have to do everything everyone else does,” Haseman says. She is matter-of-fact about it, not at all defensive.

  “The only way it would help her is if she was about to get thrown out,” Sullivan says.

  “I’d call everybody I knew if they were trying to throw me out of here,” Haseman affirms. The women are not speaking hypothetically. Sullivan and Haseman are both facing disciplinary action for fraternization.

  “I just got into trouble for something so stupid,” Haseman explains. “I went and bummed a cigarette off a plebe … this is like three months ago. And two or three months later a classmate of mine who doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to come up to me in person writes a ‘serious observation report’ on me because he found some rule that he thinks I broke.”

  Sullivan, who only stood in the doorway of the plebe room, is not in as much trouble as Haseman. Both are angry with the classmate who reported them because he did it in a sneaky way: he did not confront them, or even ask them what happened. He merely turned them in.

  This is a problem with an institution that relies so heavily on regulations: it can create martinets who look to the rule book for the solutions to any problem. A mature “leader of character” would have had the guts to confront the rule-breakers.

  “This might be the biggest leadership school, and these guys are going to go out there and be CEOs, but they don’t have the people skills to handle tough situations,” Haseman says. “They think the answer is writing a report on someone. This guy didn’t even ask me about what happened.”

  She stands, tucks her T-shirt into her pants, pushes loose ends of her hair behind her ears. She is lively and pretty, in a tomboy way, with light brown hair, fair skin, and the build of a serious athlete.

  Shannon Stein, still leaning on the windowsill, is quiet. Meghann Sullivan is animated; Lynn Haseman is angry. This is not just about oppressive rules; it’s also about gender, about how men and women treat each other, about how well they follow the strict rules while living in such an intimate setting. Cadet women are on the front lines of the battle to integrate the Army.

  “If a girl does one thing, she’s labeled,” Sullivan says.

  “If I walk to class with a guy, then I must be dating him, I must be having sex with him,” Haseman says sarcastically. “One of the biggest problems in civilian life, in business, is the integration of women. Here we are, twenty years after the first women came through this place, and we’re still dealing with the same problems. It’s kind of ridiculous that we have to put up with the same stuff

  “I had a teacher who just didn’t like girls,” Sullivan says. “There were two of us in the class and he called us stupid right to our faces. The guys just laughed about it. No one wants to see what really goes on.”

  Haseman folds her comforter neatly and places it on the foot of the bed, grabs her boots and sits on another bunk to pull them on. “Whenever I get stressed out I go and sit in the bleachers, across from the barracks, and I look back at this place and try to be objective about it. I mean, it’s very pretty here, and my parents and my grandparents got married here.”

  She is now in a complete uniform: hair tucked neatly into a clasp on the back of her h
ead, boots shined, hat in hand. “If you don’t want to quit at some point,” she says philosophically, “there’s probably something wrong with you.”

  “You need to take a break every once in a while,” Sullivan agrees. The alternative is the West Point cocoon, the “social retards.”

  “You should see these guys,” Haseman says. “All they think about is the Army. They don’t know who they are so they let West Point develop them, develop their personality, and it shouldn’t be that way. When that happens, you wind up a complete dork.”

  Lunch formation is on the concrete apron between MacArthur Barracks and the Plain. Stein stands in the rear of the company and watches as twenty or thirty plebes, shouting “Beat Navy,” rush the half dozen seniors who make up the battalion staff. They tackle the first class cadets, one of whom is a tiny woman who puts up a great fight. The plebes sing Army fight songs. One climbs the base of Washington’s statue and leads a cheer.

  Inside the Mess Hall, Stein makes her way to the soccer team’s table.

  “I could get a lot better grades if I wasn’t on Corps Squad,” she says as she waits to take her seat. The women’s soccer team played eighteen games between August and November. Practice for the next season will run through the spring.

  “Our coach was paranoid after last season.” (The team finished 2–16.) “He just keeps us running the whole practice: sprint drills. My legs are killing me.” There are several nods around the table.

  Stein’s boyfriend, another second class cadet, comes to the table, whispers something to her, stands around for an awkward moment, then leaves. There are pitfalls to dating cadets, Stein says after he’s gone.

  “Everybody knows your business. And some people who are dating, they just spend all their time with each other. Then if you break up, everyone knows all about it.”

  But with almost nine men for every woman, it is almost impossible for a woman to escape attention.

  After the meal, another male cadet comes to the women’s soccer table. He stands behind the chair of another player, looking out of place. She doesn’t look up. When the seat next to her opens up, he sits down and starts talking.

  Though the Mess Hall is huge, and is packed with four thousand young people all dressed alike, it is still possible to run into people. Stein sees plebes from her Beast squad from time to time. Often they greet her with their squad motto, “Always the Hard Way!”

  “I was amazed at how flexible I could be,” Stein says of her summer experience. “They [the new cadets] could be scared of me—I could spit fire or be relaxed and still keep tight control. I had one plebe [to supervise] last year [before her assignment to the Beast cadre]. But to take a group and have them do things together and have them enjoy it, that’s a great thing. I cared about them; they learned their stuff well. People in the chain of command got all wrapped up in ‘finish the mission, finish the task;’ it was more important that [the new cadets] learn.”

  “I’ll probably be a platoon sergeant next semester. I want to get up in front of a group of people before I go out on CTLT. [Cadet Troop Leader Training sends cadets into the Army to fill lieutenants’ jobs for a month.] I’d rather mess up in front of plebes than in front of privates who will judge West Pointers by what I do.”

  Stein joins the camouflage throngs squeezing through the big doors as the Mess Hall empties.

  “I’m not afraid to fail at stuff. I know it won’t be the last time. I took a lot away from that experience at airborne school [in which she had to repeat a week’s training]. I wasn’t leaving there without my wings, even if it took all summer.”

  She checks her watch. At West Point, it’s always time to hurry somewhere.

  “So many people here are afraid to fail. They’ve always been the ‘good cadet.’ But it makes a person humble, and you need to experience that before you go out into the Army. Because the people I’m leading will have had some failures and they need to be able to talk about it with someone.”

  Kevin Bradley, the firstie who commanded Alpha Company for the first detail of Beast, is now the executive officer, or XO, of the second regiment, a five-stripe captain, second in command of a thousand or so cadets. Moving that many cadets to Philadelphia for the game is a military operation that involves scores of buses, dozens of memos, hundreds of e-mail orders, coordination meetings and checkpoints and emergency procedures. In addition, second regiment has “the duty” this week, which means all the cadets on guard—and there are quite a few—come from Kevin’s unit. They will run a command post at the stadium, they will be ushers and courtesy patrol (think unarmed police enforcing good manners); others will return to West Point immediately after the game to oversee those cadets on restriction, who do not get a weekend pass and must return to the Academy right after the game. Although he works through an extensive chain of command, keeping this many moving parts going eats up a great deal of time.

  Still, Bradley seems to be enjoying himself as he stands in the sunshine for another lunch formation. Part of this is due to his competence: he gets the hard things done and makes them look easy.

  “Kevin is one of those cadets who get it,” Major Rob Olson says of him. “Things come to Kevin. Or at least, things appear to come to Kevin.”

  Bradley watches a thousand cadets of second regiment form into eight companies, leaving an open arena in the middle of the paved expanse. Everyone is in camouflage battle dress uniform—part of the “prepare for combat” mind-set that reigns this week.

  More spirit activities. The company commanders wear the costumes of the unit mascots: one is wrapped in a robe and carries a spear, like a Roman foot soldier. Another is dressed as a dog, still another as a bear. In the ranks there is an excess of good cheer; the weather helps: It feels more like October than December.

  When Bradley hears the story of Bob Friesema’s English class and their surprisingly conservative views on cohabitation, he isn’t surprised.

  “When you’re a plebe you don’t want to deviate. A lot of what they say is what they think the P [professor] wants to hear. Then in philosophy [a required course for yearlings] they pry away and get you to ask tough questions. If you had a room full of firsties, you’d get a wide range of answers.”

  Even so, Bradley agrees with Friesema’s English professor that the cadets are more conservative than the soldiers they’ll lead. Kevin doesn’t have a lot of time with Regular Army troops, but he finds hope in his limited experience during summer training. He could relate well to the junior enlisted soldiers, mostly because he is close to their age. The difficulty came in working with the non-commissioned officers, the sergeants who are, for the most part, older than the lieutenants.

  It is not uncommon for a new lieutenant, at twenty-one or twenty-two, to be paired with a platoon sergeant in his early thirties. The sergeant has all the experience, and a smart lieutenant knows that. But the officer is in charge. Clever young officers figure out how to walk the line—deferring to experience, soliciting input from the old hands—without turning over command. Good sergeants know how to train their lieutenants, passing along knowledge, providing guidance and coaching, without creating a power struggle in the unit. This working relationship is critical to how the Army’s small units function, and the West Point’s administration knows that. In the last few years, the academy has brought more NCOs on board to help cadets get it right.

  “We have a little spirit thing here at lunch,” Bradley says. “A pugil stick fight between a female midshipman, one of the exchange people, and a woman cadet.”

  The academies exchange first-semester juniors each year; West Point hosts six Air Force Academy cadets, six midshipmen, and two cadets from Coast Guard.

  A cadet in a referee’s shirt steps into the center of the paved arena and introduces the women. The midshipman (the Naval Academy doesn’t call them midshipwomen) is much taller than the cadet. The pugil sticks are about the length of an ice hockey stick, with heavily padded ends and more padding wrapped around the middle. The
contestants wear thick gloves, like those worn by hockey goalies, and helmets with wire face masks. Rock music blasts from a portable speaker system as the two women swing the sticks inexpertly, thumping each other with the padded ends.

  Major Rob Olson joins Bradley. “We had to go with pugil sticks because the jello didn’t set in time for wrestling,” he says.

  When the midshipman lands a solid blow, the crowd cheers her. The cadet doesn’t give up, and keeps wading in for more. After three short rounds of mostly ineffectual pushing, the referee declares the midshipman the winner. There are a few jeers, but the regiment applauds. Bradley ducks into the Mess Hall just ahead of the wave of camouflage, and Kevin goes back to talking about his summer training, when he spent time with a U.S. Army detachment in Japan.

  “It would have been nice to work more with the junior NCOs,” he says. “I mostly dealt with officers. My big concern is this: Here [at West Point] we get all the technical skills, but we don’t have any real experience dealing with soldiers’ problems. That will be the hardest thing for us.”

  Over lunch—small pieces of beef floating in gray-brown gravy—Bradley reflects on his experience working for Major Rob Olson.

  “He let us take charge of things, and he made it so you didn’t want to let him down. For instance, he gave me the plan from the previous year’s R-Day. He said, ‘See what’s good, what’s bad. Even though the old one was good, I’m sure you can come up with something better. You can change it if you want; just be able to explain why’

  “Sometimes Tacs get too involved. Major O walks this line,” Bradley says, making a knife-edge with his hand. “Letting us do it on our own and letting us screw up. I tried to give the platoon leaders the same sort of room he gave me. And then, if one of them had a problem and went to the Tac, Major Olson would look at them and ask, ‘What did Bradley say?’”

  The opportunities for leader development are limited during the academic year, when the Dean takes over and the focus of cadet life is study. But the Commandant’s side looks for ways to continue military training. From the cadet perspective, this means that someone in power is always adding to the list of requirements.