Duty First Read online

A few of them may even be aware of the significance of this moment. Many of them have spent months dreaming of the lofty phrases of the admissions literature. They came, as one cadet wrote, “for parades and rifles,” dazzled by the name, by the history, by the knowledge that they stand where many of America’s great captains stood. Others of them (and these will be the most unhappy) are here because their parents want them to be here. For some, this is simply the best school they could attend for free, or the only Division I school to recruit them for sports. Under the gray sky they all look the same: the ones who will become generals, and the ones who will drop out in time to start classes at some other university.

  “New cadet, you are allowed four responses: ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘No excuse, sir,’ and ‘Sir, I do not understand.’” Then, with no pause, the red-sash demands, “New cadet, what are your four responses?”

  It takes a couple of tries before the neophytes learn the code. It will take a little while longer for them to stop trying to explain things. In that phrase, “No excuse, sir” (or “ma’am”) is an early, critical lesson. Take responsibility for your actions. Always. No matter what the consequences.

  It is a lesson they will hear repeated for four years. Most of them will get it.

  The new cadets have been warned about the first day; some of them by family members who have gone through this, some through careful attention to the recruiting literature, books, and documentaries. They were even given helpful advice that morning at the official welcoming station, Michie (pronounced mike-ee) Stadium.

  For most of the morning, a long line of candidates and their families stretches out behind the back gate of the football stadium. They enter in small groups, waved through a few hundred at a time by cadet ushers. They file in quietly, as if under some invisible instruction that this is a place of order, and sit in a section of the lower stadium seats. Before them, dressed in green “Class A” uniform of coat and tie, stands an Army colonel and a firstie.

  “I’m Colonel Maureen LeBoeuf, head of the department of physical education.”

  LeBoeuf’s official title, “Master of the Sword,” dates from a time when West Point taught swordsmanship because it was a combat skill. She is five ten, with dark red hair cut short and stylish, the lean build of a runner. A few people in the crowd exchange appreciative glances; a couple of the fathers suck in their guts.

  “Cadet Basic Training is both intensive and rigorous,” she says in a gross understatement. “It requires dedication and motivation. I urge you to keep three things in mind during the coming weeks.

  “First, remember to listen and do as you’re told. If you’re told to step up to the line,” she says, turning her body so that she can take a long step on one of the bleacher seats, “step up to the line. Not over the line …” she takes a dainty step too far, “not short of the line, but UP TO THE LINE.”

  “Next, maintain a sense of humor.”

  “Third, remember that you are not alone. Every member of your class, every cadet before you, every member of the Long Gray Line has gone through this day. Experience tells us that it’s best to take it one day at a time. With each day you will gain strength and confidence.”

  Although Colonel LeBoeuf is not a West Point graduate (she was already in college when West Point started admitting women), she is here in part because she is a model West Point would like all these young people to aspire to. A pioneer in Army aviation, a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, the first woman to head a department here. Smart, successful, charismatic, with a sense of humor. This is how it can turn out, West Point says when she takes her spot this morning, with the sunlight glinting off the brass and silver and gold of her uniform. She is the same age as many of the younger parents in the stands, a perfect model for the loco parentis they all want to see.

  LeBoeuf nods to the firstie beside her, who centers himself before the parents and candidates. Unlike LeBoeuf, who speaks naturally and from the heart, the cadet’s speech is rehearsed, right down to the inflection. “West Point is a beautiful national landmark,” he tells the families without a trace of enthusiasm.

  And so it is. From the home bleachers one can see the low mountains across the Hudson River. There are long, unobstructed views up and down the valley, with Storm King Mountain rising to the left, New York City some forty miles downstream to the right. In fact, Michie Stadium was chosen by Sports Illustrated magazine as one of the most beautiful places in the world to view a sporting event. All over the bleachers, people crane their necks to take it all in.

  “We urge the families here to enjoy your visit today.”

  Then he addresses the candidates directly. “At this time I’d like to ask the candidates to prepare to move down the stadium steps with your baggage.”

  He turns and indicates another cadet who has suddenly appeared far below, at the very bottom row of seats, beside a gate that leads from the stands and onto the football field. The distant cadet is at “parade rest,” feet shoulder-width apart, head and eyes to the front, hands clasped in the small of his back.

  “You will form a single file directly in front of the cadet you see standing there,” he says, pointing. Then he turns back to the crowd. No more “please,” no more “I’d like to ask …” This time it’s just, “You have ninety seconds to say your good-byes.”

  A little ripple of shock rolls up the bleachers.

  In the back row, Billie Wilson, a big football player from Texas, stands and palms his small bag. His little sister climbs up on the seat next to him so she can reach his neck for a hug. When her face appears above his shoulder, she bursts into tears. His mother’s eyes are already red from crying, but she bites her lip to hold it together. Billie hugs his parents, shifts his bag to the other hand, and makes his way into the crowd moving down the bleachers.

  The candidates start to line up. The first young man holds a guitar case in one hand, a suitcase in the other. The cadet at parade rest suddenly looks a little like Charon, preparing a boatload of souls to cross the river to Hades. When he is satisfied he has all that are coming, he turns smartly and steps out onto the playing field, leading them in a precise file across the fifty-yard line. A door opens in the opposite bleachers. Only one young woman in the line looks back over her shoulder. As they disappear under the visitors’ stands, the families break into applause.

  Maureen LeBoeuf appears again, standing next to the aisle as families file by on the way to the buses that will take them to their tour. Many of the parents thank her. One father chokes on, “Take care of my boy,” and she says, “We will.” When the younger brothers and sisters walk by, LeBoeuf frequently reaches out and touches them on the shoulder. One little boy of about ten, his face wet with tears, looks up at her.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she says. “You’ll see.”

  Many of them don’t meet her eyes. Others try brave smiles. Some blink and squint as if in bright sunlight, although it is a cloudy day. On the other end of the home bleachers, another group is being processed by another colonel, another set of cadre members. Moments later another cadet, a woman, tells this group, “You will move out in ninety seconds.”

  Pete Haglin waited until the last possible minute to turn himself over.

  “I was in the last group to go through at Michie Stadium,” he says later. “I was so excited and nervous I don’t remember much. I do remember walking across the fifty-yard line, and I could hear yelling coming out of the tunnel in front of us, but it was dark in there, and you couldn’t really see what was going on. I wanted to look back, but I didn’t.”

  Haglin has straight, almost-black hair inherited from his Korean-American mother; his height—about five eleven—comes from his father, a 1975 graduate of West Point. The elder Haglin, also named Peter, coached his son on what to expect on R-Day. He’d even made Pete practice reporting to the cadet in the red sash.

  “‘Here’s what you have to do,’ he told me. So I knew. When they said, ‘Drop your bag,’ I dropped it. I d
idn’t step on the line. It made things a little bit easier.”

  Haglin received his acceptance letter only weeks before R-Day. His parents had already made a deposit for housing at another college. Haglin knows the late notice means the admissions office had to work its way down the list of candidates before it got to his name. But none of that matters on R-Day. Haglin wants to be an artillery officer, like his father, so he takes a long-range view of the Academy: West Point is something to get through on his way to the “real” Army, the one he knows from his father’s stories, and from his experience growing up an “Army brat” on posts all over the world.

  The Haglin family—Pete, his parents, and two sisters—traveled together from Kansas City for R-Day. At the end of the briefing at Michie Stadium, when the ninety-second warning was given, his mother and sister dissolved into tears. But Pete was completely focused on what lay ahead.

  Jacque Messel showed up at Michie Stadium by herself. She and her family had gotten the crying out at home.

  “My parents said that it didn’t make much sense for them to come along, that they couldn’t really spend any time with me … but I think they were trying to make it easier on me,” she says.

  Messel is tall at five nine, with light brown hair and a résumé of clubs, honors, and athletics behind her. Her father is also a West Point graduate, class of 1968. On the night before R-Day, she stayed with the family of her father’s classmate, a retired colonel who works at West Point. Jacque spent the evening watching television and trying to relax in someone else’s home.

  “He had to go to work early that day, so he drove me to the stadium. He stayed with me for a while, but then he left. Everyone around me was with their families.”

  Messel’s father also tried to give her advice, but she wasn’t as receptive as Pete Haglin. There were no practice reporting sessions or shoe-shining clinics.

  “He did tell me it was all a big mental game,” she says. “He was always big on teaching me responsibility and discipline. He’d make me get up in the morning and go running with him. This was in the summer, when all my friends were still sleeping in. And I always had jobs around the house, stuff I was responsible for.”

  Unlike Pete Haglin, who is headed into Beast willingly, Messel is reluctant, her commitment to West Point is not as strong. But once the acceptance letter came, and the family started talking it up and everyone started congratulating her, she felt like she couldn’t back out.

  On the morning of R-Day Jacque Messel spent an hour and a half waiting in line at Michie Stadium, plenty of time for the anxiety to sink in. And it will never quite leave her, at least during basic training.

  Bob Friesema remembers sleeping most of the way as he drove, with his parents and two younger brothers, from Wisconsin. The family spent part of the weekend before R-Day hiking at Bear Mountain State Park, which is just south of West Point. On Sunday, they went to church in the Cadet Chapel.

  “It’s this huge church, really impressive,” says Friesema. “And it was good to know there was a nice church I could go to.”

  Church life has always been important to Friesema and his family, but the service wasn’t exactly comforting. “The chaplain asked all the incoming new cadets to stand up, and everyone was looking at us. There were lots of cadre members there; I tried not to make eye contact with any of them.”

  Friesema spent his first hours of R-Day waiting in line outside the stadium.

  “There were officers, admissions officers, I guess, going up and down and talking to families and candidates. They were being real nice, I guess so we’d know there were nice people in the Army.”

  Then came the shock of the ninety-second warning. “Mom started weeping right away. Then my little brothers started crying. I knew I had to get out of there before I lost it, too. I gave them a quick hug and left.”

  Friesema lined up quietly near the entrance to the field.

  “I had my bag in my left hand,” he says later, “because that’s what everyone else was doing. We stepped out onto the field and there were these cadets walking along beside us. They started whispering under their breath, with their teeth clenched, saying things like ‘Don’t look around! Keep your head and eyes to the front! No talking!’

  “And I thought, ‘If they’re doing this right out here on the field, where all the parents can still see us, I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when we’re out of sight.’”

  By 11:00 in the morning the last new cadets have arrived from Michie Stadium. The large quadrangle of Central Area echoes with commands and martial music. Junior and senior cadets in white shirts and hats move about like border collies, shepherding new cadets here and there. Hundreds of new cadets are led in hurrying files back and forth to issue points in invisible basement rooms. They are issued big blue nylon bags full of supplies for their new life: underwear and socks and towels and shoe-shine equipment and boots and shoes and hats and gloves and belts and gym shorts. They are hurriedly fitted for gray trousers and white shirts. They are sent for quick haircuts and to drill stations to learn to march, to salute, to do facing movements. They are shepherded to lunch in waves; meals are measured in minutes. As the day wears on the big Alpha Company tote board (with the company motto “Aces Are Wild” across the top) fills up. The little white boxes beside the names of new cadets fill with check marks as they make their way through the stations and toward the parade. In between these stations, the new cadets check in with the cadet in the red sash.

  “Sir, New Cadet Paley reports to the cadet in the red sash for the second time as ordered.”

  Paley needs three tries to get this right. She stumbles over the order of the words and is told to do it again because her voice has too much inflection.

  “This isn’t a conversation, this is a report,” the red sash says.

  Beside Paley, another new cadet renders a passable salute; his fingers tremble beside his eye. Behind her, other classmates move their lips silently as they practice the new language. All around them cadre members in white shirts bark orders. There is no yelling, but there is nothing pleasant about the sound or the experience. It is meant to be jarring, and it is.

  The instructions come rapid-fire from the upperclass cadets, who end every sentence with, “Do you understand, new cadet?” No one speaks up or claims to not understand.

  A large young man, his shirt soaked in sweat, moves his body with every word he speaks, as if he’s using all the muscles of his chest to squeeze them out. “Hold still,” a white shirt says. An upperclassman stands behind another new cadet and gives instructions. No inflection, no hint of human concern, just a rapid-fire string of words that is meant to impart information, but only to someone who can process things quickly. The new cadet keeps his head and eyes locked straight ahead. A tiny, nervous smile comes to his lips.

  “Did I say something funny, new cadet?” the red sash snaps.

  One new cadet is so tall that when he steps up to the line, he can’t see the eyes of the cadet in the red sash, which are hidden beneath the black hat brim. He lets his eyes wander just as the red sash looks up.

  “Is there a set of instructions for you on that wall behind me? Is there someone holding up a billboard to tell you what to say?”

  By this time all the new cadets have been processed through a brief medical screening (one of many they have endured to get to this point). They have been issued a basic uniform of black socks, black gym shorts with gold letters that spell “ARMY,” a gray T-shirt with the Academy crest, a plastic ID tag on a chain (worn around the neck), and a long paper tag with a list of in-processing stations to be checked off that day.

  The new cadets don’t look down at their own cards. The upper-class cadets check the list, mark the appropriate boxes (“HAIRCUT” or “UNIFORM ISSUE 1”) and record each new cadet’s progress on a large board that sits beside this barracks entrance. These new cadets are to join Alpha Company, but none of them know that yet. It’s on the card, of course, but no one has given
them permission to look down. With their paper tags dangling from white string, they look like a group of second-graders preparing for a class field trip.

  “New cadet, are you wearing sunscreen?” a red sash asks in a tone that suggests there is some moral failure involved in being unprotected from the sun. The new cadet is sent to one of the green wooden tables nearby; a dozen bottles of Army-issue sunscreen and a stack of paper towels are piled there. He slops the cream on, rubbing it in with both hands on his freshly shaved head. Every few minutes the new cadets are sent to another table that holds metal canisters of cold water. During basic training the new cadets are constantly being told to drink water. Dehydration and heat injuries are preventable, and the chain of command is determined to ward off preventable injuries.

  Other new cadets are sent to stand inside a rectangle taped on the pavement, where they wait in line. A thin second class—junior-cadet in white over gray strands nearby, collecting new cadets who haven’t yet been to the barber shop. For the remainder of the summer, the new cadets will be escorted or travel in a group nearly everywhere they go. There is no sight-seeing, no strolling about the campus, no taking in the historical markers, no time to slow down and think.

  “I will be moving very fast,” the cadre member tells them. “You will keep up with me. You will keep your eyes on the back of the head in front of you.”

  These sentences could be placed alongside the Academy’s official motto of Duty, Honor, Country. Everything here happens at the double-quick; there are always too many requirements and not enough time.

  The new cadets stand in a tight file, feet spread shoulder-width apart, hands clasped in the small of the back. They do not talk, look around, or reach up to wipe sweat from their eyes. In the space of a few minutes, three different upperclass cadets ask, “Does anyone need to use the latrine?” They’ve been drinking ice-cold water by the cupful, yet no one raises a hand. It’s unclear whether the new cadets know what a latrine is.