Authors: Ed Ruggero
“I expected a lot of motivated young people excited about becoming Army officers. I don’t see that. You do have a percentage of ‘high speed-low drag’ cadets, then you have the great majority who are trying to get by. And another small percentage who aren’t doing anything and are still here.
“Some cadets are here after doing things that would get a soldier thrown out of the Army. I’ve busted my butt to become an officer. For someone who’s worked as hard as I have to get where I am, it pisses me off to see people scraping by and still here. There are lots of kids out there, just as smart, who would love to have this chance, and some of these kids are just cruising here.”
It is the end of the period, and the plebes glance at the clock as they stomp into their shoes. Anderson gathers her clipboard as the cadets race off to the next requirement. “They know they’re going to make it. The government brings you here and spends all this money, they want you to graduate. The message is to push people through.”
The Department of Physical Education is the department cadets love to hate. It’s just too easy to make fun of their tight uniforms, their big sports watches, the go-to-hell stance they adopt in the department photo hanging just inside the door to the gym.
“Nobody likes them,” Bob Friesema says of DPE. “And I’m not just talking cadets. My math professor told us about this lunchtime
basketball league the faculty has. Nothing gives him a bigger thrill than beating DPE.”
The DPE instructors are drill-sergeant picky about uniforms, military courtesy standards.
“In high school if you played to your ability you got a good grade,” Friesema says. “Here, it’s ‘You meet the standard’ or ‘too bad.’ You have to be an outstanding athlete to get an A.”
Friesema’s comments aren’t the complaints of a teenage couch-potato. Although he had no experience boxing, he intimidated opponents just because his height gave him an advantage. At six four, he can outreach most opponents. He was a competitive runner and swimmer as a kid. Now he works out every day with some combination of running, lifting weights, pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups, for forty-five minutes, just to stay proficient and able to pass the tests.
West Point tells prospective cadets that the academy is a physical place. The admissions website specifies that candidates must have “above average strength, endurance and agility.” A commercially published handbook for candidates shows a photograph of cadets playing a game of pick-up basketball. The caption reads, “If you don’t like athletic competition, you will be a misfit at West Point.”
The beginnings of this emphasis on athletics came from Douglas MacArthur’s observation that young soldiers in World War I respected officers with athletic ability. When he became Superintendent after the war, in 1919, MacArthur decreed “every cadet an athlete.” Participation in sports, either varsity, club, or intramural, has been mandatory for most of the twentieth century.
Athletics have gone from a good idea to a religion at West Point. And, like religion, it can have its excesses.
One woman who graduated in the late eighties says she was bulimic before she went to West Point, was bulimic her whole time as a cadet, and stayed that way until she became pregnant with her first child (she is now the healthy mother of four).
The pressures to conform to an ideal body type, already heavy on
young women in America, are exaggerated at West Point. This woman, who won a varsity A in track, said that West Point did little or nothing to help women with eating disorders. She mentioned a classmate who was an All-American athlete, but who also had an eating disorder. She contends that coaches and officials ignored the signs because the woman was such a successful athlete. “They figured, ‘If she’s winning, she must be healthy’ ”
Some cadet women are afflicted with “exercise bulimia”, they eat, then exercise feverishly to work off those calories. This behavior is the easiest to disguise, since exercise, in West Point’s culture, is always a good thing.
“I used to get up and run at 0515,” the former bulimic says. “And there were a surprising number of people out there. And a good number of them were women.”
But the presence of eating disorders is no longer a dark secret at West Point, if it ever was.
Colonel Maureen LeBoeufs office in Arvin Gym is long, narrow, and windowless. There are neat chairs upholstered in blue and a small couch in front of a polished coffee table. On the walls hang mementos: a flag bearing the ivy leaf patch of the Fourth Division; a guidon with the winged wheel of the Transportation Corps and the unit designation of a helicopter company. A handsome, framed print shows Federal and Confederate cavalrymen clashing at the Battle of Brandy Station, Virginia in June 1863. The original was commissioned by LeBoeufs class at the U.S. Army War College. At one end of the wall hang framed diplomas—a master’s degree and a Ph.D.—both from the University of Georgia.
On this spring morning LeBoeuf is dressed in her “Class B” dress uniform of green slacks, light green shirt, and small tie. The black epaulets on her shoulders bear the silver eagles of a full colonel. Her dress coat, with its medals, insignia, and pilot’s wings, hangs on a rack for a meeting later in the day. Her computer screensaver says, “Surround yourself with good people, delegate authority, give credit and try to stay out of the way.”
On the coffee table in front of her are three binders; one of them is titled, “Eating Disorder Task Force.”
“That’s something new,” she says. “Somebody briefed the Comm, told him this was a problem. The Comm told us to put together a task force to study the problem, see how widespread it is, and set up some support mechanism for cadets so they can get help, so we can identify the ones who need help.
“Eating disorders might be a little more common [among cadets] than in the general population,” she says.
“Look at what we do. We bring in people who are very competitive, who are even prone to obsessive behavior. Then we put these young women in what is basically a man’s uniform.”
She touches the belt of her own uniform. “You put a young adolescent girl in a uniform with a belt and she better be pretty slim.
“And of course there’s all the pressure from our culture. We associate fitness and thinness when really there isn’t necessarily a connection.”
The Eating Disorder Task Force includes representatives from the medical command, the dental command, the nutritionist, counselors from the Cadet Counseling Center. LeBoeuf represents DPE.
“It’s amazing how a young woman will look at herself in the mirror and see only the bad things, while a man will look and see the good things. You’ll see a guy with a big gut and a fat rear, but he’s wearing spandex because he thinks he has great biceps,” she laughs. “And he just looks in the mirror as he’s working out and says, ‘Man, what a great bicep.’ Women look at themselves and only see what’s wrong.”
As part of her doctoral work, LeBoeuf studied the experiences of women in the classes of 1980 (the first with women), 1985, and 1990.
“At the end of all these standard questions I asked each woman: ‘Did you have an eating disorder while you were at West Point?’ There was this one woman I remember, she must have paused for thirty seconds before answering. She said she’d never even told her husband, but she had been anorexic.”
“I knew I was dying,’ she told me. ‘I stood in formation and could
feel the other anorexics around me. I used to look down on bulimics because they were weak—they ate.”
“I asked her what got her out of it,” LeBoeuf said. “She told me that she’d been dating this guy and he dumped her. A lot of women stop eating when something like that happens. She said, ‘I started eating and haven’t had a problem since. ”
But not everyone will be shaken out of the behavior. Women die from this disorder; cadets can be dismissed. One of the biggest obstacles officials face is getting cadets to admit they have a problem. Cadets are concerned that self-reporting will lead to separation. LeBoeuf mentions a woman who was having a dental exam. When the dentist took one look inside her mouth—she had a bunch of sores from vomiting—he told her, “I know what you’re doing. I want to see you again in thirty days. If those sores haven’t cleared up, I’m turning you in.”
Fear—of exposure, embarrassment, even dismissal—weigh heavily on cadets’ minds, but the physical culture is so powerful that it can be almost impossible to resist. Prejudice against people who are out-of-shape or overweight is the only acceptable discrimination in cadet culture. And, not surprisingly given the ratio of men and women in the corps (approximately ten to one), male attitudes dominate. LeBoeuf has made educating the men her mission.
“I talk to cadet men about eating disorders, and they don’t really get it,” LeBoeuf says. “One group of guys told me they’d say things to the plebe women like, ‘You’re not going to eat that dessert, are you? Or ‘You look like you’re putting on a few pounds.’ And I tell them that’s dangerous behavior. ‘But we’re only kidding.’ ”
She shakes her head. “That’s their defense. I asked them, ‘What do you think is going through the mind of this little seventeen- or eighteen-year-old, as she’s sitting there surrounded by these older guys, all of them in great shape? Don’t you think she’s going to try to do whatever she thinks will please you?”
The prevalence of eating disorders at West Point may be a perversion of the physical culture, but is isn’t surprising. Athleticism is a
secular religion at West Point, and Maureen LeBoeuf is the high priestess. The Academy uses every opportunity to tell cadets that, in the regular Army, soldiers don’t care who was number one in history. They want a lieutenant who can finish the run and max the physical fitness test. They want a lieutenant they can brag about.
The Army emphasizes physical fitness and a healthy lifestyle for practical reasons. Soldiers perform better when they are physically fit; and that isn’t just the tasks requiring strength and agility. Well-conditioned soldiers fight better, especially in the kind of round-the-clock operations that characterize modern combat. Their bodies handle stress better, and they are more resistant to sickness. The question is whether West Point has carried MacArthur’s intention—every cadet an athlete—to an extreme.
Fifteen percent of a cadet’s overall standing is determined by physical performance; 30 percent comes from military grades (which include leadership evaluations throughout the year). Fifty-five percent of a cadet’s standing is based on academics. Yet a recent survey of cadet time use shows that cadets spend 22 percent of their “discretionary time” (that is, time not spent in class or at mandatory events) working out. It is difficult to draw a direct line between an extra hour of study and one’s semester grade in physics; it is much easier to calculate the effect of an hour spent practicing the indoor obstacle course. And no one high-fives the cadet who gets the top grade in chemistry.
Cadets admit it is more acceptable (among cadets) to fail an academic test than it is to fail a physical test. The first is a test of intellectual effort; physical tests—and they are legion—are test of mettle, tests of character. They are, in the crude patois of the infantry, ways of “measuring dicks.”
On another table in LeBoeufs office is a copy of
Bugle Notes
, the “plebe bible.” This one is dated 1949–1950. This may be a bit of irony, as it was the “old grads” who were most vehemently opposed to having a woman as the head of DPE. They launched an e-mail campaign,
predicting the end of everything form physical fitness to the “warrior ethos.”
LeBoeuf ignored most of what was said about her. “I just didn’t want to waste the energy worrying about everything people might say.” She got “incredible” support form the Superintendent, and from the Commandant at the time, Brigadier General (now Major General) Bob St. Onge.
In the spring of her first year as Master of the Sword, LeBoeuf went out on the speaking circuit for Founder’s Day, when alumni associations around the world celebrate West Point’s birthday with formal dinners. Tradition dictates that the oldest grad and the youngest grad in attendance give a speech. USMA leadership—most notably the Superintendent, the Dean, the Commandant, and various department heads—travel around the country to speak at these dinners. It is part celebration and part public relations, as the leadership updates the alumni on what’s going on at West Point.
Many old grads see these dinners as a time to sharp-shoot high-ranking officers and complain about changes at West Point. This scenario became so predictable that Lieutenant General Christman sent out word to his hosts that he would not take questions from the podium at any of his appearances.
“I’ll stand by the bar all night and talk if they want to listen,” Christman said as he urged the other speakers to adopt the same strategy. “But I’m not standing around for some old grad to take potshots at me just for fun.”
Maureen LeBoeuf stepped into this skirmish.
“Once they see that I don’t have an eye in the middle of my forehead, once they hear that I have a sense of humor and that my knuckles don’t drag on the ground, they get over most of their problems. I’m a lot harder to hate in person,” she says, her face lighting with a smile. “Then they ask me questions like, ‘How are the girls doing?’ ”
Because she can’t help teasing the old grads, LeBoeuf used a routine that had been a favorite of a former Commandant. She produces
a slide with several bar graphs: there is a pair labeled “push-ups,” another for “sit-ups,” another marked “Two-Mile Run,” which shows finish times for that event. The scores for cadets in every other class, beginning with 1981 and ending with 1999, are compared to the scores for cadets from 1962.
The Class of ‘62 beat only one of the ten younger classes in pushups (thirty-seven to thirty-six against the Class of 1983). All the younger classes beat ‘62 in sit-ups; the closest margin was eleven (1962 averaged sixty sit-ups in two minutes; 1981 averaged seventy-one. The Class of 1995 averaged eighty-eight). The older grads beat all the younger classes in the two-mile run.
“Then I uncover this,” LeBoeuf says. The top of the slide is labeled “Women”; the slide compares the all-male class of 1962 with the women of the eighties and nineties. She laughs, enjoying the joke. She also agrees with the assessment, dogma among cadets, that women have to excel in order to be accepted.