Duty First (19 page)

Major Rob Olson is fond of saying that leading peers is one of the toughest challenges, because there is no authority from position or rank. Plebes will work for a classmate because they know their time in charge is coming, and because they respect the person put in charge.

“My roommate had the other plebes getting up at zero five hundred when they had until 6:30 to do a few minutes’ worth of duties,” Friesema says, shaking his head in disbelief.

The long hallways in Thayer Hall are full of cadets wearing the class uniform of long-sleeved gray shirt, black tie, gray trousers with black stripe. Name-tags go on the right pocket. Most wear bulky sports watches.

The classrooms are nearly identical: nineteen or twenty desks arranged in a horseshoe, an instructor desk and lectern, a TV monitor. There are no windows; the four walls are lined with high, freshly washed blackboards. (Each room has a bucket of water and a sponge, which the instructors use to wash the boards after each lesson.)

When Lieutenant Colonel Joe Myers, Friesema’s math “P” (for professor), enters the room, the cadet in the first desk calls the group
to attention, salutes, and reports any absences. Class begins exactly on time; every class starts the same way. This class happens to be all men.

Myers, a fortyish man with a small smile, begins by encouraging the plebes to bring their parents to the department open house during upcoming Plebe Parent Weekend.

“Your folks want to see what it is you do with your time,” he explains.

At the visitors’ desk is a black binder with a copy of the course syllabus. Friesema is in an advanced math class. On the board in the center of the room is a single sentence in Myers’s neat hand, “Bacteria reproduce at the rate of thirty per hundred per second.”

“What are some other uses for a continuous function?” Myers asks.

One cadet suggests the compounding of money. Myers talks fast, and the cadets take notes; inside of five minutes the front board is covered with equations. Every few seconds the P looks out at the cadets. In the horseshoe, everyone has a front-row seat, and Myers can spot a lost look in an instant.

“Are there any questions on the homework problems?” he asks.

Several cadets raise their hands, and the class works through the problems together.

Math instruction at West Point still bears the marks of the system instituted by Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer in the early days of the nineteenth century. Thayer, the “father of the Military Academy,” decreed that each cadet would be graded every day. A key element of this system was the recitation, in which a cadet would be called upon to stand and explain some problem and its solution to the class, according to a very specific choreography.

Under a system used until just a few years ago, math instructors would take the report, then ask for questions. If no cadet asked a question, the next command was, “Take boards.”

This sent each cadet to a section of blackboard (they were numbered at the top). Using a long ruler, the cadet divided the board in half from top to bottom. Then, still using the straightedge, he or she drew two rectangles in the upper left-hand corner. Name in the top
box, problem number in the bottom. Yellow chalk was for the work; white, green, and blue chalk for the drawings. The answer was to be underlined twice in red and labeled “ANS.” Naturally, the boards were graded for neatness. At some point the instructor would command, “Cease work!” All chalk went down immediately. The cadets stood by the boards as the instructor looked for a likely candidate to recite. Some instructors just looked at the work; others would also inspect a cadet’s uniform, shoes, haircut. This was not Columbia, after all.

“Mr. Jones.”

The cadets not chosen sat down.

Stand at attention next to the board; begin by saying, “Sir, in this problem I was required to find the area under the curve defined by the equation …”

Pick up the pointer; talk the class through the problem. Sometimes a helpful classmate might say, “Sir, I believe Mr. Jones made an error in the fourth step of the equation …”

These people were not popular, except as targets in plebe boxing. They all went on to Stanford and Harvard Business School.

Some instructors were interested in teaching math. They would gently ask questions about the method, about the reasons for using a certain approach. Others believed they were preparing the cadet to stand in front of a general at some future date and brief the plan for the next D-Day invasion. In that case, the cadet had better be ready to defend his work.

Murphy’s law dictates that a cadet would be called upon to recite on exactly those problems she understood least.

“And why did you choose that method?”

Because it was my best shot, sir. The least complicated, the calculus equivalent of counting on my fingers and toes.

The system made cadets work, if only to avoid being humiliated in class. But it had its critics, too. West Pointers’ reputation in the Army—they always looked for a definite answer, underlined twice in red—traces its roots back to that math board.

After class, Friesema heads back outside. Everywhere, it seems, there are cadets running, singly and in groups. This is a constant at West Point, the sine qua non of cadet life. Some of them wear shorts and T-shirts; others wear sweats against the chill. They wear reflective bands like bandolleers across their shoulders. There is tremendous pressure on the women to be good runners, thus women are over-represented among the cadets who pass.

Friesema is excited about Plebe Parent Weekend, just a few days away. His parents are driving fourteen hours from their home in Racine, Wisconsin, to visit. They are, he says, very proud of his choice.

“It’ll be nice to show them around here, give them an idea of how I live, what I do.”

He is only a few months removed from the high school senior they knew, but he has a keen sense of how much he has changed. For one thing, being away from home has made him more aware of how much family means to him.

“My older brother, Andy, goes to the University of Wisconsin. We shared a room, and when he left I used to lie there and look at his empty bed. I really missed him.”

It was Andy who got a mailer from West Point; and although his father tried to talk to Andy about the Academy, the card went in the trash. Bob Friesema fished it out and sent it in.

“My parents have my two younger brothers in private school, so my getting a scholarship helps. But it was harder for them to send me here than to send my brother to Wisconsin. R-Day was the first time I ever saw my dad cry.”

Friesema, the second of four boys, is fairly self-aware for a teenager.

“There’s a three-year difference between me and the next youngest, Dan. In the months before R-Day [the younger ones] really looked up to me, asked me a lot about hunting and fishing. I haven’t really gotten along with John, the youngest, well. But in the short summer before I came here things got better.”

Every few steps he greets an upperclass cadet with, “Beat Air Force, sir!”

“I picked on him a lot,” he admits. “He was overweight. I was pretty ruthless. I feel bad about it now. He bawled his eyes out on R-Day and he writes me e-mail more than anyone else.”

The upcoming weekend will be a time to visit with his family. It will also mean a much-anticipated chance to leave the post. Although plebes do have some free time, they are limited in what they can do with that time, especially first semester. They cannot: wander into town, drive to a movie, wear civilian clothes, listen to music in their rooms, go to nearby New York City, visit friends at other colleges, have friends visit them overnight.

They can: play sports and work out. And study.

“I don’t like the fact that there’s no social life,” Friesema says. “Zero.”

If the lifestyle at West Point is dramatically different from his home life, the values are not. Friesema, a graduate of Racine Christian School, is completely at ease with the honor code, because it’s in keeping with the values he was raised with.

“Some people don’t take it too seriously, they think they can get away with little white lies. They don’t always think that there are implications to what they’re doing. Sometimes, with my roommates, I point out that there’s a connection between their doing something and the honor code, and they’re surprised. It just doesn’t always occur to them.”

In English class that afternoon, Major Julie Wright takes the report from the section marcher and has the cadets open their copies of
Newsweek
magazine. An article talks about the rise in co-habitation as an alternative to, or precursor to marriage. There are a variety of reasons for this change, the writer claims: decreasing stigma for couples who have children without marrying, rising divorce rates, decline of marriage as an ultimate goal, women’s increasing financial independence, men’s increasing independence from the idea that they need a housewife to take care of the home.

Wright asks the cadets to respond in their journals. Then she sends them to the boards to summarize their responses in groups of
two or three. Bob Friesema’s group writes on the board, “Marriage is a holy union of 2 people and should not be desensitized [sic]; it is necessary for family stability; unstable families lead to societal problems such as crime and are detrimental to children’s development; cohabitation without marriage is the result of breakdown of morals and religion.”

Other responses around the room are just as conservative. Wright does not comment on the content, but focuses on the rhetoric and the structure. Later, Wright says that the reaction was “not an anomaly.”

“I definitely think they are more conservative than some of the enlisted soldiers they will encounter in the Army.”

This is not surprising, given that the admission standards reward young men and women who have played by the rules, who have succeeded by all the conventional measures in academics, sports, and leadership. But the difference does contribute to the problems many young West Point graduates have communicating with soldiers and NCOs.

The long days of classes lead directly to athletics. Cadets who don’t play on a varsity team (called Corps Squad) or on a club sport must participate in the extensive intramural program. During parade season (spring and fall), intramurals take place every other day; the alternate afternoons are spent at drill and ceremony practice. On any afternoon, thousands of cadets are out playing sports. Colonel Maureen LeBouef, head of the department of physical education (which oversees the intramural program), says that West Point has more sports opportunities for its four thousand students than Ohio State has for its forty thousand students.

This period of athletics extends into the evening, and cadets are still on the parade field as dusk gathers. A steady wind comes off the river and pushes yellow leaves into the artificial light from a practice field. There is a diamond-chip moon overhead, and clouds sail down the river valley. Under the lights of their practice field, the Army rugby team churns the turf into mud. Wearing throwback uniforms of
striped jerseys and thick, knee-high socks, they slam into each other at full speed. When they pause, they breathe like horses after a gallop.

On the Plain, there is a heartbeat of a drum as plebes drill for Plebe Parent Weekend, which officially begins tomorrow, Friday. The windows of the Supe’s house are warmly lit. A van drops off some MPs and a bugler for the simple ceremony that ends each day: The bugler plays “To the Colors,” the retreat gun cracks over the valley, the flag comes down. People stop their cars and get out to stand at attention. The rugby team stops and faces the flag, and for an uncharacteristic moment, West Point pauses.

Just after breakfast on Friday morning, Jacque Messel heads off to the gym, carrying her athletic uniform in a mesh laundry bag. Like Bob Friesema, she is more at ease than she was in Beast, and has lost the fidgeting nervousness that followed her during the summer. The change is profound.

“The lowest point was my birthday [her nineteenth], August 17th. We were just starting the academic year, so I had all these new classes, and I had been through Re-orgy Week, and my parents had just left after their first visit.

“But it was also a big breakthrough, too. My Dad and I finally got to talk about my coming here, about my staying here. They said they would support whatever decision I made. I knew that all along, of course, but the visit just reinforced it.”

She had been focused too much, she says, on Beast Barracks. Like many cadets, she had a hard time imagining West Point would be any different during the academic year.

“Platoon Sergeant Stitt helped me out there,” she says, mentioning the universally respected first detail platoon sergeant. “He got out a copy of
Bugle Notes
and started looking at all the clubs and activities; then he asked me what kinds of things I’d like to do if I was still around West Point in the fall. He didn’t try to convince me to stay; he didn’t talk about my dad or anything. But he did help me see that there was life beyond Beast Barracks.”

Messel hurries into Arvin Gymnasium. Parts of this old building resemble a cathedral or a monastery: hallways topped with barrel-vaulted ceilings, doorways guarded by bas-relief carvings of athletes. On a high wall near one entry is MacArthur’s decree about the connection between athleticism and soldiering.