Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  “If you really try, if you know it’s there, you can see it when he talks,” Haglin says. “He took it out during Beast, though.”

  Haglin and Berliner compare backgrounds. Both Army brats, they both lived in Korea as children. For Haglin, it was part homecoming, because he lived with his mother’s parents for a while.

  Cole, who has several military history books on his shelf, has no military experience in his family. His parents didn’t want him to come to West Point.

  “They didn’t want me in harm’s way,” he says.

  “My sister did well at Cornell. They were kind of hoping I’d follow her. They wanted to make sure I came here for the right reasons. Now they support me and are proud of me.”

  When Cole leaves, Berliner and Haglin exchange glances. Cole is a little too gung ho for their tastes. They point out the long line of boots and shoes under his bunk. Beside the footgear issued to cadets, there is a shiny pair of “jump boots,” popular with paratroopers. They shine well but are no good in the field; they’re associated with garrison, with polished floors and offices. They are not the muddy boots of “real soldiers.” There is also a pair of highly shined “jungle boots,” a Vietnam-era design with canvas uppers, made specifically for hot, wet conditions.

  Berliner says Cole bought the boots with his own money even though they aren’t needed.

  “I want to be in the military and all,” Haglin reports. “Being in the combat arms will be great. But I’m not going to go out and get a high and tight [buzz haircut] right now.”

  “I don’t want to miss out completely on the college experience,” he says, leaning over his bed and pulling the blanket taut.

  “I want to be Pete Haglin as much as possible, and not just Cadet Haglin.”

  Later, in Grant Hall over an iced tea, Haglin admits to being a bit tired of the plebe game.

  “I hate being everybody’s monkey boy,” he says. “We just look like such dorks walking around. ‘Good morning sir! Good morning ma’am!’”

  He also misses being able to choose his own friends. Haglin, who grew up on army posts, knows many upperclass cadets, other Army brats a year or two ahead of him. He swam with them, played ball, rode bikes. Now, they’re off-limits because of rules against fraternization with the fourth class.

  “The hazing is no big deal,” he says. “I mean, at a fraternity people go through worse.”

  But he is tired of it: The move on Saturday into a room that was already full with two men; the fact that he can’t talk to his friends; his “monkey-boy” status, fretting over whether or not an upperclass cadet gets a plastic glass that’s a little too cloudy. Within these confines, Haglin looks for ways to assert himself.

  “You control your own destiny,” he says. “I told my squad leader that I wanted to work for a pride pass,” he says. “Pride passes are like time off for good behavior.”

  Haglin’s squad leader told him exactly what he would have to do, and Haglin succeeded. At a football game in the fall Haglin convinced some Rutgers University coeds to sit in the Army stands with the cadets.

  “‘Good motivation, Haglin,’ they told me.”

  He didn’t need their praise, but he was happy to take it because it translated to a weekend pass.

  “You tell them ‘I want to earn x, they’ll tell you what you need to do,” he says approvingly. “My squad leader is concerned with my grades. He doesn’t BS me just because I’m a plebe; he treats me like a person. Last thing in the world I want to do is get him in trouble because I’m not performing.”

  Haglin grudgingly admits that West Point has helped him in some ways. He is a better student and studies much more at the Academy than he would at another college. There is a bit of Epictetus about him, in the way he keeps his personal life, the life inside him, separate. Cadet Haglin spent Saturday night moving into an already crowded room with two cadets who would not be his first choice for roommates. Cadet Haglin doesn’t like his haircut, or the “dorky” way he has to greet upperclass cadets.

  Pete Haglin got a tattoo over a long weekend leave. Pete Haglin flirted with the girls from Rutgers and got them to come to the Army stands so that he could turn it into a “pride pass” and time off for good behavior.

  He’s winning some fights and losing some others. On balance, he says, “I’m pretty happy with myself.”

  “West Point is just something to get through,” he says. “I feel bad about saying that, but it is … We live in this bubble. Some of these people just sit around on the weekends playing computer games; they don’t try to get out and see other people.”

  As he sees it, this isn’t helping create future leaders.

  “No one is going to follow me to the grocery store unless I have a personality.”

  Haglin is trying to find a place for himself between different interpretations of what it means to be a cadet.

  “I don’t sit around and iron creases into my shirt,” he says, fingering the fabric of his class uniform. Cole, his roommate, spends time each evening pressing his shirts, which come back from the laundry already pressed. Haglin’s expression leaves no doubt as to what he thinks of this waste of time.

  “Yet I’ve got more passes than either of my roommates.”

  He leans back in the chair, palms the empty drink bottle. All around, first and second class cadets use the small cafe tables to study. In the corner, a large-screen TV is tuned to some cable sports channel; two first class cadets stand in front of the set, thumbs hooked into their belts.

  “Only twenty-nine and a butt days until Recognition,” he says, finding his smile again.

  Recognition is the ceremony that marks the end of the plebe year strictures. Plebes in each company line up like a wedding party while the upperclass cadets work their way down the line. The older cadets introduce themselves by their first names and, for the first time, call plebes by their first names. Plebes can then walk and talk like college students, or at least like upperclass cadets. They no longer have to march everywhere or formally greet upperclass cadets. They no longer have to act, in Haglin’s words, like everybody’s “monkey boy.”

  Plebes anticipate Recognition because it affects almost every aspect of their lives, but the fascination with time pervades cadet life. They are forever counting the days until some event that promises to be better than whatever they’re experiencing at the moment. They are young people whose strongest wish is that big chunks of their life would speed by them.

  Haglin checks his watch, excuses himself. He needs to study chemistry, or the menu for lunch.

  Over in Grant Barracks, Jacquelyn Messel and the other twenty-plus plebes of her company file into the dayroom after lunch. The basement room is clean and brightly painted, a long rectangle with an architectural anomaly: three huge posts, three feet square, march right down the middle of the room. The chairs and settees are arranged on either side, like a church with huge dividers running down the center aisle. Two televisions sit at the front of the room, one at the head of each set of benches. The plebes file in joylessly; they sit up straight, facing front. There are no feet on the furniture, no arms thrown over the backs of the chairs; no one turns around in his or her seat to chat with the classmate siting behind.

  A third class cadet, the newly elected Honor Representative for the class of 01 in this company, begins. He looks sixteen.

  “This class is about the NCO Honor Guide,” he says, reading from some papers. He does not explain what this might be. Instead, he introduces Cadet Todd Morelli, the company First Sergeant, who strides to the front of the room. Morelli, who has dark hair and dark eyes, holds himself tightly and scowls from beneath his eyebrows.

  “Duty, honor, country,” he begins.

  Morelli paces in the divided room, looking down one side, then striding briskly to the other. He recites the opening paragraphs of Douglas MacArthur’s 1962 speech to the Corps of Cadets. This address gets a lot of play at West Point. It’s part boosterism, part historical reminder, part cultural
manifesto. It is an icon, as familiar to West Pointers as the Lord’s Prayer is to Christians. But whatever else it is, it is not new. The plebes have not only heard it before; they are required to memorize parts of it.

  Morelli goes through a couple of paragraphs. He doesn’t tell the plebes why he’s reading it. He moves from MacArthur, without comment, to a book in which a German officer tells of his treatment at the hands of his Russian captors during World War II.

  The German prisoner was being abused by a guard; a Russian officer notices the German’s Iron Cross—an award for valor—and stops the guard. In the story, the Russian officer points at the medal and tells the guard that the German is a soldier, a hero.

  Morelli does not indicate if he is reading from a novel or a memoir.

  “Honor, courage, loyalty,” he says, “those are the things that will get you through. These will make people look up to you.”

  It is all he offers by way of explanation.

  The plebes sit straight-backed in their chairs. If any of them wonder what Cadet Morelli is talking about, they don’t show it in their body language. Morelli struts and preens in front of them, speaks in banal generalities.

  Next Morelli reads the entire text of the Cadet Prayer.

  At the end he looks up at his silent audience and, in a dramatic voice says, “I think that pretty much says it all. I can’t say it better than that.”

  And, just in case some plebe is sitting there and wondering, What does this have to do with me?, Morelli adds, “If this doesn’t mean anything to you, if you’re just sitting here biding your time, you’re in the wrong place.”

  With that warm lead-in, he asks for questions. There are none.

  “I’m not here to push you away. I’m inviting you in,” he scowls.

  Jacque Messel pronounces the class “pretty good” without the least trace of sarcasm. On the way back to her room, she says that Morelli is famous throughout the corps. “We had a birthday party for Morelli; a whole regiment of plebes joined in.”

  Birthday parties are a way for plebes to strike back at unpopular upperclass cadets. Under the guise of a “spirit mission,” they grab the offending cadet, douse him or her with shaving cream, soap, and shampoo. Then they hang the victim by feet and hands from one of the rolling laundry racks, like a lion brought back to the village.

  Morelli knew what was coming.

  “He had six friends waiting in his room to fight with the first plebes that rushed in,” Messel says. “He climbed out the back window of the barracks and was trying to get away. We caught him though; there were too many of us for him to get away.”

  The plebes of First Regiment pushed the tied-up Morelli around the cadet area until the battalion commander, a firstie, broke up the fun. The story is an attempt at levity, but Messel resents Morelli’s approach. The worst charge she levels against him isn’t that he’s hard on them; it’s that he chooses his targets randomly.

  “Somebody will be delivering laundry to his room and will disappear for an hour,” she says.

  One of the plebes who ventured near Morelli’s room got “locked up,” and had to stand at attention up against the wall.

  “Morelli asked the plebe, ‘Did you shine your brass?”’ Messel says, referring to the brass belt buckle that needs attention every day. “The plebe answered ‘Yes, sir,’ and Morelli made the plebe show him the back of the buckle.”

  Predictably, the back was not shined.

  “Morelli gave him a lecture on honor,” Messel says, rolling her eyes. “On equivocation.”

  Morelli is the cadet first sergeant, the highest-ranking junior in the company. He came up with new duties for the plebes, duties that eat into their time and, the plebes complain, are unnecessary.

  “Morelli has us cleaning and mopping the common areas in the company, wiping down the baseboards on stairwells. We have to clean the CQ [Charge of Quarters—a barracks orderly] area, the study room, and the dayroom.”

  Messel isn’t complaining because she is afraid to get her hands dirty. The government pays civilian employees to clean the common areas so that cadets can use the time for their primary duty: study.

  Morelli also dictates that the plebes do this work in the evening, just before study barracks. This negates the administration’s plan to give cadets control over large blocks of time.

  “You can’t start studying or go work out. You can’t get the work done ahead of time, you have to wait until that time to do it,” Messel says. “It’s just a lot of extra crap he thinks we should be doing now.”

  The duties, as she understands it, will not extend past Recognition Day. Instead of being a cause for celebration, she sees this as an affirmation that the duties are mere harassment.

  Most of the problems plebes have, Messel says, depend on “who you mess up in front of”

  “If you get on the First Sergeant’s shit list, he’ll follow you around and wait for you to mess up some more. He’ll ask you more questions about your knowledge and give you more opportunities to mess up. You get higher visibility when what every plebe wants is lower visibility.”

  “I don’t have a problem with hazing,” she says. “I think it teaches you traditions. Upperclass cadets have to make corrections when they see things are wrong, but it shouldn’t be random.”

  The first thing a visitor notices about Jacque Messel’s room is that it smells a lot better than Pete Haglin’s room. It isn’t perfume; more shampoo, maybe. Like Haglin’s room, it is also built for two, but is home to three. There is a bunk below the windows in what was meant to be open floor space; you have to step around it as soon as you enter. On the floor below the beds are the same shoes, clean and polished, lined up in a neat rank. This lineup includes black pumps with a modest heel, also shined to a furious sparkle, right beside the combat boots. One of the bookshelves holds a small teddy bear beside the neatly aligned books.

  The fact that they can live this way astounds many of the plebes. These are the same American teenagers who, when they lived at home, left laundry piled up, mixed clean and dirty clothes in a wad at the bottom of the closet, who left shoes throughout the house. They left dishes in the sink and on the coffee table, returned the car with an empty gas tank.

  There are changes that are highly visible, and other, more subtle differences.

  “My parents treat me differently,” Messel says, thinking of her visit home at Christmas.

  “My mom and I were pretty good friends, but my dad and I used to fight about random things. Now I guess they see me as more of an adult. I’ll call and say I’m going to New York City, and instead of giving me a bunch of instructions they say, ‘Have a good time, tell so-and-so I said hi.”

  Like many college freshmen, Messel was a bit shocked by college work. High school wasn’t hard for her, and she didn’t study much. Instead, she devoted her time to an array of activities. Messel played volleyball, basketball, and ran track. She sang in a choir and was president of her school’s National Honor Society, a finalist in the National Merit Scholarship competition. She didn’t belong to any of the groups in her school, she says—the “scurvy” kids or the in-crowd with all the clothes and the drinking or the jocks or the band and choir. She had friends in each. She does admit, reluctantly, to being voted “Biggest Brain” in her senior class. She misses her friends, as well as the freedom she had.

  Messel was a top candidate for admission. Because West Point was her first choice (and the only school she applied to) she received early notification: She learned in October of her senior year in high school that she’d been accepted. All of this seems ironic to her now, during the second semester of her plebe year, because her first semester average was a disappointing 2.75.

  “I had a lot of trouble accepting that I wasn’t going to be tops. I’m only going to be average here, so why try hard? I could spend an hour and a half editing a paper, or I could spend a fraction of that time to go to the gym or relax or hang out with my friends. I could even decide to go to bed
so that I’ll be able to stay awake in class the next day.”

  Messel’s take on the constant time crunch reveals a problem, not just with the cadet schedule, but perhaps with Academy expectations. West Point demands that cadets do well in very many things: Jacque Messel and Pete Haglin go from discussing poetry in English class to a roadmarch with full field pack during Unit Training Time in the after-school hours, then right back to studying. But the culture is not one that encourages cadets to excel in any one thing; instead, they are conditioned to handle multiple tasks. The result is an education that, some critics say, lacks depth. With so much on their plates, some cadets learn how to get by with minimum effort in many areas.

  “It’s hard,” Messel says, “to balance all the requirements. And I miss being able to just sit and talk to people. I look for anything I can do to put this stuff out of my head for a while.”

  On a recent Friday night, Messel called a high school friend, now away at college, to wish the other woman a happy birthday. Her former buddies were just getting ready to go out, but Messel wasn’t even near the end of her duties on a day that had started at 5:30. While she talked to them on the phone, she sat polishing her shoes and brass for inspection the next day.

  “I’m getting the ‘West Point attitude,’ ” she admits a little reluctantly. “That all college students are slackers. Mostly, I’m jealous.”

  This is a defensive reaction, similar to what old grads tell themselves to feel better about what they went through: I had it tough and these kids today don’t have it as bad.

  Cadets work hard and play hard, and they know it. It is a life that makes for hardworking, dedicated, aggressive soldiers. But there is a danger here, too, one that Jacque Messel acknowledges with her slightly embarrassed smile. It is elitism.

  In an essay for an English class, one cadet lampooned this mind-set.