Duty First (43 page)

Another aspect of the problem, as Bradley sees it, is that the use of discretion will vary from Superintendent to Superintendent. His memory of General Graves, Christman’s predecessor, is that more cadets were separated. And whether or not this is true doesn’t really matter; the corps believes it’s true.

Bradley feels that part of the problem with the Honor Code is that most cadets think of it as an institution, rather than a set of values, as something that exists—or does not exist—inside each of them. “We don’t have a lot of interaction with the Honor Committee. They could be living right down the hall and you wouldn’t know it unless they put a little sign on the door. How do we know they represent us?”

But the aspect of the Jones case that weighs heavily on his mind is the non-toleration clause. Discussions of the incident in his company, among his classmates, have focused on that again and again.

“It’s not a hard question,” Bradley says, “unless it’s a close friend.”

The honor system calls for someone who believes another has violated the code to confront that cadet. Bradley says he would have confronted Jones immediately if he had known of the plagiarism. The tough part comes if the accused cadet refuses to own up; the other cadet is bound to report the incident to the Honor Board. This critical aspect of the code is contained in its last words, “or tolerate those who do.”

“I don’t know what I would have done in that situation,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s always a question on emerging leader boards.”

“Emerging leader boards” are interviews with cadets being considered for high-ranking positions.

“I told my board that it was the right thing [to turn someone in] and that I hoped I could do the right thing.”

Bradley is miserable. He is everything West Point tries to produce, a thinking man, a person of character, dedicated to his profession, thoughtful and articulate and selfless. The epitome of the Academy product.

“I wouldn’t be able to turn in my best friend,” he says at last.

In Central Area, cadets in BDUs haul heavy duffel bags to waiting trucks. A sign at the head of one line reads “PCS.” The PCS line is for graduating seniors, who will do a permanent change of station. The other sign reads “TDY,” for temporary duty. This line is for underclass cadets headed to Army posts around the world for summer training.

The cadets walking through Central Area give each other elaborate handshakes. They hug and call out duty stations and promises to stay in touch. For the under class, this is better than a football Saturday. For the seniors, it is also stressful.

Kris Yagel says he wants to spend time with his friends, and he feels a little guilty because he’s thinking of his family as another responsibility to juggle. The Academy grounds are not designed for entertaining; the cadets are not used to having dozens, even scores of visitors to drag around post.

Still, West Point puts on its best face for graduation week, and the formal garden beside the Superintendent’s quarters is clipped and swept and pruned to perfection for the reception. Roses bloom along the ornate brick wall. There is a wooden guardhouse, about the size of an old-fashioned telephone booth, painted white and green. During the nineteenth century, cadets used it to stand guard during summer encampments on the Plain. The formal garden is a showcase for plants and flowering shrubs donated by parents’ clubs from around the country: azaleas from California, climbing hydrangea from Michigan, tulips from Arkansas, grape holly from Oregon, bluebells from Virginia.

The receptions are organized by battalion; the first class cadets from three companies at a time are to show up with their families at
the appointed hour. With twelve battalions in the corps, it is a long two days for the Superintendent and Susan Christman, who greet every single guest in a receiving line.

Military social gatherings are peculiar in that everyone shows up at the hour specified on the invitation. In Army units, it is customary for the commander to have the officers and spouses to visit. If the invitation says fourteen hundred, all the couples are on the front steps of the commander’s quarters at a few minutes before two. These may be the only parties in the world where there are fifty guests and only one knock at the door.

True to form, cadets in their starched white uniforms gather in front of Quarters 100 at the appointed hour, waiting for their families who must contend with the shortage of parking. Many of the cadets look impatient. One young man scans the distant sidewalks for his family, doing everything but tapping his foot.

“They’re running late,” he tells me. “I told them it would be tough to park.”

Kevin Bradley looks a little nervous, too. It isn’t that anyone is checking off names at the gate, but a command performance is a command performance.

Bradley once stood up his family in a similar circumstance. During his plebe parent weekend, he was to meet his parents for a reception. He went to his room, got dressed and, noticing that he had a few minutes to spare, did what any cadet would do: he took a nap. Forty-five minutes after he was supposed to have met his family, a cadet was shaking him awake.

“Dad was really pissed,” he says now, smiling at the memory.

Dave and Marge Bradley make it on time, and they line up with the other families. At a table set up on the lawn, women from the Officers’ Wives Club are selling West Point memorabilia and homemade crafts: Christmas tree ornaments made to look like cadets, note paper and postcards and cookbooks and pins made out of cadet buttons.

At the head of the receiving line, a cheerful sign in gold with black lettering instructs the cadets on the proper way to negotiate the receiving line. (They’ve had this lesson before, in etiquette classes.)

The sign tells the cadet how to arrange his or her family: mother and father first, then grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings. No helpful hints for firsties who show up with mom and dad, and mom’s new husband and dad’s new wife. They’re supposed to be able to think on their feet by this time.

Most firsties have been in the Supe’s house at least one time (there was a reception earlier in the year for first class cadets). Most of the parents have only seen the home from the parade field. Some are clearly in awe of the surroundings.

The Christmans stand under a leafy arbor. The Supe’s aide, at the head of the line, learns the first names of each guest from the cadet and passes it along. Dan Christman gives each family the same big smile he passes around so generously to cadets, the same hearty handshake. (He has removed his class ring for these trials, so that his fingers don’t get crushed.) Then Christman leans over and passes the name to his wife, Susan, who smiles charmingly and offers a few pleasantries, just as she will do for thousands of other guests.

“Welcome to West Point, you must be so proud. This is a great day for your family.”

Just off the sunroom where the Christmans eat lunch is Sylvanus Thayer’s sundial, ordered from London and installed here in 1831. In the 1850s, when Robert E. Lee was Superintendent, the grounds had a pond and a boathouse.

Under a white tent fly, the families gather and eat cookies and drink punch. There are officers from the staff and faculty here, along with their spouses. It is one of the social duties that come with high-ranking positions at West Point.

Ann Stromberg, whose husband Peter is the senior member of the academic board, confides that this is must be her “ninety-seventh appearance” at one of these.

“And the only really dreadful ones were when they served Jello punch.”

A full colonel introduces himself to the Bradleys after noticing that their son wears armor branch insignia. The colonel was an armor officer before becoming a professor. His wife tells stories of moving
about from post to post, of their favorite assignments and best quarters. The couple doesn’t talk about the moves in terms of endless uprootings. And although the newspapers are filled with speculation about intervention and a possible ground war in eastern Europe, no one mentions Kosovo.

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.”