Duty First (5 page)

When Douglas MacArthur returned to West Point from the battlefields
of World War I, he was a decorated combat veteran, cited for gallantry. He entertained the idea—considered outlandish by many—that cadets should not spend their summers on the parade field, as they had throughout the nineteenth century, but should have to learn the combat skills required of junior officers. He ran into stiff opposition, especially from the academic board, the tenured professors who saw it as their job to keep West Point as it has always been. The battle is part of Academy lore.

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.”

Graduates who defend what the old system did for plebes 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.