Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  After a half hour of chatting, it is time to go (also specified on the invitation). Bradley tells his parents he’d like to have Chad Jones join them for dinner at a local restaurant. The Bradleys think that’s a good idea.

  The seniors are everywhere, floating on the excitement, glittering in the adoring eyes of their families. Every cadet is a hero this week: All sins are forgiven. In their white tunics they look like priests; this is their season, their week, their moment.

  On the grassy field across from the library, behind General Patton’s statue, formations of second class cadets in BDUs practice with sabers, learning how to draw them, how to salute with them, how to return them to the scabbard, all without taking off an ear or a finger. In a few short days, they will be seniors, and it will be their job to run the corps.

  In Thayer Hall, the cadet gospel choir gives a concert. The huge auditorium is not close to being filled, but the families there to watch make up for their small numbers with sheer enthusiasm. Colonel Maureen LeBoeuf sits down front with her young daughter, the two of them whispering and enjoying themselves and clapping to the music. Colonel Adamczyk and his wife sit a few rows back. He does not keep time with the music, but he is here, supporting the cadets and making another public appearance in a week of social hyperactivity.

  Johnny Goff, who quarterbacked Army’s football team last season, is one of the featured singers. He has a good voice, higher than one might expect from a Division I football player. When he is finished, he stands at the microphone and quotes from Proverbs. “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”

  Then he looks out into the audience and asks his parents to stand so he can thank them. They do, and the families applaud wildly, finding an outlet for all the emotion welling up.

  While the first class enjoys the festivities at West Point, the class of 2002 moves some thirteen miles from main post to Camp Buckner, where they will begin summer training after their long-awaited three-week leave. A large plaque beneath the flagpole tells visitors that the camp is named for Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, USMA 1908, who was killed in action on Okinawa, June 18, 1945.

  The new residents have cleaned the barracks, policed the grounds, stowed their uniforms and equipment, met their new chain of command, found their way to the snack bar and Mess Hall. In the morning, they will load trucks at 0445 to return to West Point for the rest of the week’s parades. But for this evening at least, they have an abundance of that most precious commodity: free time. This is genuine free time, not an hour stolen from the Dean with thoughts of a paper that’s due soon, not a slice wrestled from studying or athletics or sleep. This is the real thing, the genuine article. They cannot leave the camp, but they are finished with their duties and are practically giddy with relief as plebe year draws to a close and summer leave heaves into view.

  The Mess Hall staff has set up grills outside, cooking hamburgers and hot dogs, the smoke curling around the trees and many small buildings.

  Camp Buckner straddles the western end of West Point’s reservation, tucked hard alongside a lake amid low-slung hills. Buckner is a small town, with its own barracks, infirmary, theater, mess hall, guardhouse, and supply facilities; this is where the new yearlings spend their summer, learning about the branches of the army.

  On this Wednesday evening before Saturday’s graduation, the sky is clear, with a promise of stars. It is too early in the season for the swarms of gnats and flies that will plague them for two months, nor is there any taste of the crushing humidity that will fill the barracks for the rest of the summer. Right now, the cadets are dressed comfortably in PT uniforms, laughing and joking and simply stunned that this day has finally come.

  Like almost all of her classmates this evening, Jacque Messel wears an oversize USMA sweatshirt over her PT uniform of T-shirt and black shorts. Her hair is pulled back in a short ponytail. She is relaxed and smiling as she walks along the road that passes between the barracks, mostly metal buildings about eighty feet long by twenty feet wide, tossed haphazardly on the wooded hillside. Around her, the thousand-plus members of the class of 2002 play Frisbee or basketball or just sit on the ground, talking under the trees.

  “My grades were good,” Messel says. Then, a moment later, this former “Brainiest Girl” in her high school class says, “Not where I’d like them to be, though.”

  She has to pick a major in the fall. She had planned on chemistry or some other science that would prepare her for medical school; she has adjusted her sights.

  “Even the chem majors who validated plebe chemistry [tested out of the course] are up until 4:00 A.M. studying.”

  “The longer I stay here the more reasons I see that make me want to stay,” she says. There is no longer anything tentative about her; this is not a trial run. “You miss things that people get to do at other colleges—but you get stuff here that they don’t: the camaraderie, the shared experiences, stuff like the Army-Navy game. Everyone takes the same classes, does the same training, so you never really go through anything alone.”

  This is the essence of the cadet experience: The group is everything.

  She passes the small theater; there will be a show that evening, a hypnotist. Every few yards, someone calls out to her.

  “Hey Jacque, what company are you in?”

  The class is re-organized into different companies for the summer, which gives the cadets a chance to know and work with even more of their classmates. Messel is looking forward to the adventures, perhaps because getting here hasn’t been easy.

  “You can lose it if you just focus on what other people [outside of West Point] are doing.”

  A plebe in her company left just after exams, sticking around only long enough to earn credit for the semester. “He had gone to a military high school, to USMAPS [the Military Academy Prep School]. He quit because he couldn’t be himself. You can get yourself into that mental state if you just think about things like: ‘They tell me when to eat, when to sleep, what to wear’ But you also get a chance to be with friends, and even get away.”

  “After a month of Beast, I had no idea who I was or what I was doing. By the academic year it started to look a little more like a college with military training thrown in. There are some people who let themselves be defined by West Point, then you take that away and they’re lost.”

  That reminds her of a story about cadets who can’t get away.

  “A bunch of us went to New York City last weekend, after exams, with the guy who was leaving our company. We went in this place and half the people there were cadets; you could just tell,” she says, laughing.

  On a manicured athletic field beside the road, a dozen cadets are playing “ultimate Frisbee.” Just to the right is the Confidence Obstacle Course Jacque and her classmates will negotiate this summer, with its forty-foot tower and its fifteen-foot drop into the lake.

  “There was this one guy, he had on a BDU belt with his civilian clothes.”

  The government-issue black web belt is both functional and ugly. But the regulation says a cadet can’t leave without a belt. Since this cadet apparently didn’t own a civilian belt, he wore his BDU belt.

  “A chick magnet,” and she laughs again.

  This is what she must have been like a month or so before R-Day when she was enjoying her high school graduation and her friends.

  “The biggest compliment we got when we were in Mexico [on Spring Break] was when some guy would say, ‘You guys are cadets?’ We were paranoid. We’d look around and say to each other, ‘Look, there are real college girls.’ Of course, when the guys found out we were West Point cadets, they wanted to know how many push-ups we could do.”

  The highlight of her year was joining team handball. She grew close to her teammates and got to travel away from West Point. Team handball looks a little like indoor soccer, a little like basketball. A tall former volleyball player like Messel is a good fit.

  She wasn’t surprised to find that sp
orts turned out to be a saving factor. During Beast the previous summer, second class Greg Stitt, her platoon sergeant, talked to her about sports and activities to help her imagine what life would be like in the academic year. He helped her see past basic training, to put it in perspective.

  Stitt had a pizza party after second-semester exams for the plebes of his former platoon. Messel still talks about him with some awe in her voice; he took the time to figure out how to communicate with her.

  If team handball was the highlight of her year, the low point came in the spring, when a first class cadet on her table was reported missing at taps one night.

  “Everyone who knew him knew right away what had happened,” she says, lowering her voice.

  Cadet Eric Roderick’s car turned up abandoned in the parking lot of a small restaurant five miles south of West Point, a half mile north of where the Bear Mountain Bridge spans the Hudson. There was no suicide note, no indication that he was depressed or upset. In fact, the senior, twenty-two years old and just over a month from graduation, had just been accepted at medical school at Ohio University.

  “I sat at his table,” Messel says. “He was pretty cool. He had his stuff together. He worked out hard, he studied hard, he was so psyched when he got into medical school. He could crack a joke, and he would talk to you like you were a person.”

  Messel had a chance to talk to Roderick after she was picked to serve on an Honor Board. Since no plebe in her company had pulled this duty, she asked Roderick about it. When she told him she was worried that her questions were stupid, he put her mind at ease and said, “No, just ask.”

  It is still hard for her to reconcile that this young man she saw every day is gone. Harder still because his motivation is so difficult for her to understand. Eric Roderick was a thrill-seeker.

  “When he was in high school he used to jump off bridges and into mineshafts. He used to brag about it to people.”

  “There is every indication that this was a thrill-seeking activity that went bad,” Captain John Cornelio of West Point’s public information office told a local newspaper. “He had mentioned to classmates that he wanted to jump off the bridge.”

  The roadbed is over 160 feet above the water. Roderick’s body was not found.

  Messel describes the midnight “Taps Vigil,” the corps’ traditional way of saying good-bye to one of its members.

  At the end of the evening study period, the corps assembles on the concrete apron beside the parade field, and the lights are all out in the barracks. The four thousand cadets are silent. There is just the shuffle of leather-soled shoes on concrete, the sound of the barracks doors opening and closing. In front of them, out in the darkness along diagonal walk, a bugler plays taps, then a bagpiper follows with “Amazing Grace.” Finally, the corps sings the alma mater.

  And when our work is done

  Our course on earth is run,

  May it be said, “Well Done!”

  Be thou at peace

  Then the cadets go back to their rooms. Messel tells the story as she walks to the end of the camp and some picnic tables placed beside the lake. The evening is cool, and she pulls her knees to her chest as she sits on the bench.

  She is looking forward to leave, to seeing her friends and her family, to revisiting one of her family’s summer spots at the Lake of the Ozarks. Boating, skiing, swimming, and “touristy” stuff; the simple pleasures of being able to drive again, to sleep in a little, to decide her own schedule. Pete Haglin had planned to come and visit her over the summer. She saw a lot of Haglin during the spring semester, she says, “because he had a crush on my roommate.” But Haglin will be in summer school.

  “He landed in STAP by .3 percent,” she says. He’d let stuff go too long, and then he’d work really hard to try to catch up. But he didn’t make it with chem. He always talks about quitting; I know he was really looking forward to getting out of here this summer. But he’ll be back.”

  And so will Jacque Messel. West Point is a different place for her than it was ten months earlier. She and her classmates have finished the intense period of learning how to follow. Now they begin the climb to leadership positions.

  “Since Recognition we’ve gotten more and more responsibility,” Messel says. “And that’ll increase once we’re out here [at Camp Buckner]. We’ll rotate through as team leaders; one of my classmates is acting squad leader right now because the squad leader isn’t here. It’s scary and exciting.”

  Whatever lessons Jacque Messel has learned about leadership—good and bad—have come from observing others. She feels lucky to have had, during the academic year, good team leaders. Each had strong qualities she wants to emulate.

  “Dan Young was my team leader first semester; he always stuck up for me. I had friends whose team leaders were afraid to approach the squad leader, the platoon sergeant, the platoon leader. This spring my name came down on this list saying I needed to make up a road march [from Beast]. But I knew I had done enough to qualify.”

  Including the last few hundred meters of the march back from Lake Frederick, going up the ski slope. Her team leader explained this to everyone in the cadet chain of command. All they said was “Your name is on the list, you gotta do the road march.”

  The march presented no great physical challenge. It would be an inconvenience more than anything. But the list was wrong. Messel didn’t want to go along with the program just to excuse bad recordkeeping, and she had every right to be taken at her word.

  “My team leader went to the Tac. I think she was impressed he would do that. She said, ‘If you’re qualified, you’re qualified.’ ”

  At the same time, her team leader did not try to shield her from trouble when she messed up, or did not know her plebe knowledge. She is glad he took this approach, since it is important to Messel that she stand on her own feet. Many of the cadet men get a “big-brother” mind-set and want to do everything for the women, but Messel knew that approach would come back to haunt her. So she did things on her own.

  “Being a woman here isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I thought we’d be isolated, but it doesn’t happen much, mostly when the guys are afraid. Sometimes they worry too much about offending us. I figure if you offend easily you’re in the wrong place anyway.”

  As Messel heads back to the barracks, a three-quarter moon rolls along the treetops. Along the road leading away from the camp, cadet guards walk their post. They wear BDUs, pistol belts with canteens, and they carry flashlights. A van pulls up and three cadets, second class women in starched whites, climb out, still laughing about some story they’d been telling. An officer passing by chats them up; they have returned from a dinner for the women’s crew team.

  This is a place of groups and subgroups. A cadet belongs to a team and to a certain platoon in a particular company, to a class, to a group of friends. Belonging is the defining feature of cadet life. This is how the whole is held together, by the crosshatched and overlapped connections that run like tape wrapped around a package.

  Bob Friesema emerges from Pershing Barracks two days before graduation, wearing the white over gray summer dress uniform. He looks like an upperclassman, though he still wears the plebe’s brass “U.S.” on the shoulders of his dress white shirt. He is relaxed, confident, and nothing like he was during Beast. He handled every challenge thrown at him, most very well; yet he had a wild-eyed, nervous look throughout Beast.

  Nine months later, his hair has grown to the point where he can comb it, and he no longer moves as if he’s had too much coffee. He’ll be a good model for the admissions candidates he will meet at home over summer leave.

  “I wanted to know the small details,” he says. “That’s what I’ll talk to them about. Like the fact that my family addressed all my mail to ‘Cadet Friesema’ instead of to ‘New Cadet Friesema.’ And every time I got a letter, some upper class would say, ‘So, you think you’ve already made it though Beast, huh?’ I did a few push ups for that.”

  Still, he
says, life was relatively easy during Beast. “You get yelled at, you do some push-ups. But you didn’t get hours [on the area] or Article 10s [administrative punishment]. Of course the crisis times were my fault. I’d procrastinate on some assignment and get behind. That was stressful, as opposed to scary. I came into the semester thinking that if I just stayed out of summer school I’d be happy. I try not to think like that any more.”

  Like Messel, Friesema went to the pizza party Greg Stitt had for his former charges at the end of the year. He arrived late, but he stuck around after the others left to talk to Stitt. The widely admired junior talked to Friesema about when to do a West Point detail [as Beast or Buckner cadre], about how to pick a major. He also told Friesema to keep his military grade as high as possible because that grade affects all a cadet’s assignments.

  “Afterwards I talked to him about his perspective on Beast, because I knew they [the cadre] saw it differently. They were up later than we were and got up earlier. They were accountable to the Tacs and the chain of command; we were only accountable to one person, the squad leader.”

  The prospect of increased responsibility doesn’t make him nervous; it’s what he most looks forward to.

  “You have to know that tough times are necessary, and it’ll be better for you in the long run.”

  Then he quotes one of Stitt’s favorite sayings: “Pain is just weakness leaving the body.” In a year or two, some other class of plebes will be talking about Friesema and quoting it as his.

  His experience with Stitt, Grady Jett, and Shannon Stein, with his own team leaders from the academic year, has shaped what Bob Friesema thinks about leadership. Not one of the plebes mentioned a lesson in leadership from an academic setting, from a classroom. Few of the plebes mentioned any officers (from whom they are separated by layers of upperclass cadets). Their whole experience in this most formative year came from other cadets. In particular, from the cadets they were closest to. Not the Kevin Bradleys, up there in the rarefied air of company command, but the team leaders and squad leaders they saw every day.