Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  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 upd
ates 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.

  “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.”

  THE HARDER RIGHT

  Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life. Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half truth when the whole can be won.

  from The Cadet Prayer

  A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.

  The Cadet Honor Code

  In a speech to the yearling class, Retired General Norman Schwarzkopf told the assembled cadets about his first week as the numbe
r-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.”