Duty First (34 page)

“And the big place to do that, at least for new lieutenants, is at PT If you can run, people make positive assumptions about your ability. If you can’t run …” She shrugs.

Sometimes LeBoeuf has to keep women from pushing too far, as with the two women cadets who asked to join the boxing club. The male officers who oversee the club—and who are responsible for the preparation and safety of the cadets—came to LeBoeuf on behalf of the women.

“This captain is hardworking and sincere and wants to do a good job, but he’s really not an expert in boxing,” LeBoeuf says. “So I had to take that into consideration when I listened to his advice. He thought the women were ready.”

“So I have to ask myself, ‘What’s next?’ They’ll probably want to travel with the team and box outside West Point. So then I have to run this past the ‘front page of the
New York Times
test.’ If one of these women gets hurt, and the newspapers ask if we did everything possible to prepare them and set them up for success, what kind of answer can we give them?”

“So I thought about what we do to prepare men—most of whom have absolutely no experience—for boxing. We give them nineteen lessons in a structured program. So that should be good enough for the women, too.”

LeBoeuf contacted her boss, Brigadier General Abizaid, and asked his thoughts about having women box. Abizaid told her that he trusted that she would make a good study of the question and come up with a sound decision, which he would support.

LeBoeuf decided that any woman cadet who wanted to box would first have to audit the nineteen-lesson plebe boxing course. They would only spar with other women in that time. Successful completion of the plebe course is the only prerequisite for a man who wants to climb into the ring in intramural boxing; so it is for women, too.

The boxing ring isn’t the only place seeing change. Two women wrestled in the Brigade Open Wrestling Championships, a contest open to the entire corps.

“These women had wrestled for four years in high school—against men—in the 123-pound weight class. They had some experience.”

“The men in the crowd really behaved professionally,” LeBoeuf says of the popular event. “In fact, I heard two cadets talking about the women’s match later, and one of the guys said, ‘It was a better bout than some I saw.’ ”

“I talked to those two women afterwards. I told them, ‘You made history tonight.’ ”

Women’s performance in athletics and physical education is not an academic exercise for LeBoeuf. Nor is it about winning a victory for feminism. It’s about the Army living up to its promise to have a force that benefits from the diversity of its members.

LeBoeuf recalls interviewing cadets for chain-of-command positions.

“I was talking to one of the women about Close Quarters Combat,” LeBoeuf says. “And I asked her for some feedback. She looked me right in the eye and said the course was good, but that women needed to learn how to attack.”

The cadet was not advocating women in the infantry. She was talking about women taking the lead.

LeBoeuf is heavily involved in recruiting instructors for her department, in part because she is aware of DPE’s reputation among cadets and graduates. She was not happy with what she saw—in terms of leadership—during her first assignment as a physical education instructor. Too much yelling, too many personal attacks.

“I tell my faculty to treat cadets the way they want cadets to treat soldiers.”

LeBoeuf believes in the Commandant’s gospel of hard, fair, respectful treatment of subordinates, who are held to a high standard. To keep her faculty form backsliding to the bad old ways, she holds team-building exercises in places where not everyone is comfortable.

“Last time, we went ice-skating. Now you take all these gifted athletes out on the ice—and lots of them can’t skate. So they’re lined up along the side of the rink with white-knuckled grips, like little kids in a skating class.

“Another time we all went swimming. You take someone like Major White, who’s this big, muscular guy, a stud athlete in the boxing ring and on the football field, a guy who scares cadets just by looking at them. Put him in the pool and he needs two flotation vests to keep from going down, and he’s one step ahead of sheer panic.

“So I tell them, ‘You only teach what you’re good at; cadets have to take a little bit of everything. I want you to remember how you felt, how scared you can still be. That’s how cadets feel when they come into our classes.’ ”

LeBoeuf’s assistant carries in neat folders of material to be read, papers to be signed. There are appointments scheduled throughout the day; she must prepare for tomorrow’s trip to Washington and staffing meetings at the Pentagon. The guest speaker for a conference West Point is hosting for half a dozen universities just canceled. But for the moment, she focuses on what this assignment means to her.

“It’s great; it’s what I wanted. It’s good for my family,” she recites.

“But while cadets are great, they’re not soldiers. My buddies talk about their troops and what it feels like to lead people in the field. I love my captains and majors, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the same thing as having that [junior enlisted] driver who greets you in the morning with a big smile, even when it’s a miserable day in the field.”

She pauses. In the conference room next to her office, there’s another meeting going on.

“I wonder if I’ll get itchy feet after a few years here; I wonder if I’ll be ready to move again.”

I
n a speech to the yearling class, Retired General Norman Schwarzkopf told the assembled cadets about his first week as the number-two man overseeing the Army personnel system. One morning he came into work to find his boss leaving, briefcase in hand. Schwarzkopf, unsure of the new job, started firing questions at the three-star. His boss turned to him calmly and said, “Follow rule number fourteen.”

“What’s that?” Schwarzkopf asked.

“When placed in command, take charge.”

This wasn’t enough for Schwarzkopf. He followed his boss down the hall, badgering him with questions about upcoming meetings and decisions that had to be made and programs and news briefs and on and on.

“Rule number fifteen,” his boss said.

“Rule number fifteen?”

“When in command, do the right thing.”

The story’s punch line was Zen-like in its simplicity, and about all the retired Schwarzkopf could do in fifteen minutes with a room full of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds.

Speeches by visitors such as Schwarzkopf are meant to reinforce messages the cadets hear constantly. Do the right thing. Live honorably. Duty, Honor, Country. But mantras aren’t enough. There is a structure in place to educate cadets on the nuances of what these aphorisms mean, and one of these programs is built around the cadet honor code.

Honor education is the province of the cadet Honor Committee, which designs the four-year program with the help of the officers from the Commandant’s office. There are formal classes, lectures, company meetings, and informal discussions. In an attempt to raise the standards of honor education, West Point established the Center for the Professional Military Ethic in 1998.

Lieutenant Colonel Charly Peddy Deputy Director of the CPME, says that while honor education has long been a part of the cadet experience, it was uneven and sometimes haphazard.

“No one really sat down and thought about how we should develop character among the cadets. It was almost as if it was supposed to happen by osmosis: Put cadets among a bunch of staff and faculty and hope the stuff rubs off on them.”

The center will develop lesson plans, integrate the education over four years, and generally seek to standardize cadet development. One of the initiatives in this area is the establishment of CHET, or Company Honor Education Teams. Two or three faculty members are assigned to work with each company, to help the cadets develop lesson
plans for honor education. The idea is to give the cadets the benefit of the years of experience residing with the staff and faculty.

Colonel Peter Stromberg, head of the Department of English, is a member of the Company Honor Education Team for Company D-3. Stromberg, USMA ‘59, is the senior department head at West Point. He is tall and thin, with a deep voice, a keen sense of the absurd and an ability to laugh at himself. He is in Thayer Hall to observe an honor class conducted by the yearlings of D-3.

Inside the room, twenty-some yearlings mill about, trying to patch together short skits that will illustrate the learning points laid out for them in the prescribed curriculum. After a few minutes delay, the second class honor rep opens the door and invites Stromberg and two other faculty members of the CHET team inside.

In the first skit the yearlings create a hostage drama, in which a police chief must decide whether it’s OK to lie to terrorists holding hostages. His plan is to tell them he wants to negotiate, then, when they let down their guard, send in the SWAT team. Another police officer questions whether this tactic is justifiable.

Although this group of performers spent time preparing (they had even typed out a script that sounded a lot like a Bruce Willis movie), they confuse the audience. Some cadets claim that lying to terrorists is OK, others aren’t sure. Ultimately, there is no resolution.

The second skit involves three cadets in a firefight with enemy soldiers. Pinned down behind some desks, almost out of ammunition, the three consider surrendering. One suggests they hold up a white flag, then shoot the enemy soldiers when they reveal themselves. True to the lesson plan, if not very plausible, another cadet argues calmly that this would be a violation of the Law of Land Warfare. The cadets watching laugh at the performance. On this day, safe in the classroom, the skit has as much to do with them as space travel.

The cadets have stumbled through a half hour already. The CHET members sit quietly, and the audience keeps checking the clock. One cadet has his head down on the desk and might be asleep.

Stromberg whispers, “This is student-centered learning.”

The last skit concerns something the cadets call the “home team, away team dilemma.”

A male cadet, home on leave, sits at a table with a young woman. After ordering dinner, he suggests a bottle of wine that “might make things more fun later.” His date giggles, demurs, then agrees. Later, we see the same male cadet back at West Point, where he runs into his cadet girlfriend. The two make plans for what passes as a big evening for West Point couples.

“Let’s go running,” the woman says.

“Great, and after that, we can go to the gym.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Lift weights, play some hoops. Then … uh … I guess we could go out for a run or something.”

The conversation turns to what happened on leave; asked what he did for fun, the male cadet gives a half-hearted, “Not much.”

A “good angel” appears by one shoulder, advising him to tell both women everything. A “bad angel” appears on the other shoulder, and with a few winks at the audience, advises him to keep his mouth shut.

“As long as you don’t actually lie to either of them, it’s OK,” the bad angel says.

During the discussion that follows, the men in the room laugh and poke one another like high school boys. The talk centers around whether or not the cadet’s actions, so far, have constituted an honor violation. No one asks whether he behaved honorably.

This is a common complaint among many cadets and faculty members: cadet concerns about honor aren’t about honorable behavior, they are about whether or not some action is a violation of the code. The proliferation of rules, and one could even argue the nature of the litigious society the cadets come from, has created legions of guardhouse lawyers who are able to justify behavior that is outside the spirit—if not the letter—of the code.

One cadet, a woman, raises her hand.

“This wouldn’t even come up if you respect both of these women. You wouldn’t treat someone like that if you really try to respect people.”

No one agrees or disagrees, and her comment passes.

“No, it’s not an honor violation to have eight girlfriends,” the junior leading the group adds. “In fact, it’s pretty impressive. But it isn’t right.”

Recently, a cadet chosen by his class to chair the Honor Committee did not get the job because it came out that he was dating a cadet woman and was practically engaged to a woman back home. The two-timing cadet did not get the job, nor was he sanctioned by the Honor Committee, which has set a precedent of not getting involved in cadet dating lives.

“If we did get involved [in dating spats],” D-3’s rep says, “there’d be a danger that some jilted girlfriend or boyfriend would bring someone up on honor for something we could never figure out: ‘He said he loved me,’ She said she wasn’t sleeping with anyone else.’ ”

The cadets run their own honor classes and teach each other, exploring the questions raised at their own pace. Because they are inexperienced, because the presentations are ungraded (which means low on the priority list and not much prep time), the whole process is inefficient. As with leader development, it may be much more time-efficient for the senior leader to just say, “Do it this way,” but then the lessons and the rules belong to the leader, not to the led.

But sitting in the classroom, with the clock ticking and every cadet aware that this is ungraded, that there are another half dozen graded requirements before the end of the day, makes it tough for the cadets to give this lesson its due.

Lieutenant Colonel Scott Snook, a leadership professor, says that real character development cannot take place in the classroom.

“We
train
people in the classroom. We can teach them the things a leader needs to know, and what a leader needs to do.”