by David Lipsky
A Matter of Honor
The terms of success at West Point are belonging and not-belonging. The official word for expulsion is separation; you’re nosed out, cut off from the pack, shipped far away from the brotherhood. The expression for failing an honor code hearing is being found—your secret, that you weren’t really good enough for West Point, has been discovered. Michelle Timajo, a Filipina from Spartanburg, South Carolina, is a yearling in Company H-4. She’s a yearling-year expert, since she’s doing it a second time, this one as punishment. The West Point honor code is simple: “A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do.”
Two years ago, Michelle signed out of a last-hour duty assignment, saying she had to get to economics class. Then she went to her room and slipped into an accidental, unscheduled nap. A squadmate confronted Michelle a few days later; Michelle explained she’d meant to study, hit class, then head for cheerleading practice, but had conked out instead. The squadmate reported Michelle to the H-4 honor representative. Michelle made an official statement that she’d been asleep for fifteen minutes; her roommate testified that it was more like half an hour. Her charge was lying on the sign-out sheet: “intent to deceive.”
In a typical West Point year, there are 105 honor cases: 60 percent are for intent to deceive, 30 percent for academic cheating, 5 percent each for stealing and toleration. About ten cadets will end up getting separated for honor. “They’re going to be responsible for the lives of other human beings,” says Captain Charles Stone, director of the honor program. “And there’s no time to go out and check up on each other.” Michelle entered a four-month honor process, which included an Honor Investigative Team, an adviser, character witnesses, JAG attorneys and a hearing with nine cadets serving as examiners and jury.
Michelle’s hearing lasted thirteen hours, from 0730 until 2030; she fidgeted with her rosary the entire time. Michelle was exonerated on the initial charge of lying to skip class. But she was found guilty of having lied in her statement about how long she napped. As punishment, Michelle was turned back, ordered to complete sophomore year a second time. Cadets who survive honor are essentially on parole; they can’t express unhappiness with the process, because then they will seem unrepentant. But what bugged Michelle was being found innocent of the original offense while being punished for her conduct of the honor process itself. One cadet asks, “How gay is that?”
Daily life at West Point is organized the way people in the Middle Ages believed God oversaw the universe: every encounter is supposed to develop the cadets in some way. Cadets wake up each morning at 0630; they pour through their doors looking slightly seasick. Plebes—another duty—stand in the hallways at full attention, chanting out the uniform of the day. This is calling minutes. “Attention all cadets . . . There are five minutes . . . until assembly . . . For breakfast formation . . . the uniform is . . . as-for-class . . . under gray jacket . . . wearing black gloves . . .” (Calling minutes is Cicerelle’s favorite duty. “I’ve got a loud voice—on my day, you can hear me all the way outside.”) The West Point day is about Accountability. At 0655 there’s breakfast formation in front of Washington Hall: the cadets stand at parade rest for ten minutes, heat or cold, rain or shine, while their first Accountability is taken. (In rain, no one is allowed an umbrella—too sissyish; instead, they put plastic wrap around their caps and wear ponchos. In snow, they stand while flakes fall past their nose.) Once a week there’s a haircut inspection. Upperclassmen walk the ranks, look down, look up, say “Good shoes, good hair,” move on.
Breakfast and lunch, which are mandatory, are eaten at designated tables. Four thousand cadets stand behind their chairs, a voice announces “Take seats,” four thousand cadets sit down. Plebes serve the meals: announce food, beverages, portions (“two-and-a-butt servings of rice remain”). If they make mistakes, upperclassmen get on their case. “You can’t get it right, can you, Muggs? Tomorrow morning I want to see lightning coming out of your ass.” This detail work is meant as preparation for the scattershot responsibilities of officership. (Which doesn’t entirely go over with plebes. Jasmine Rose says, “It’s like, the idea is right.” “But they say, ‘You make one mistake, you just killed your platoon,’” says Cicerelle. “You think, ‘I forgot to put tea on the table and I killed a platoon?’”) The classes leave in order of rank, which prevents a bottleneck.
From 0730 to 1600 there are academic classes. The march to class is immensely cheerful, an academic troop deployment—the post feels like a small town under jolly martial law. You see plebes greeting upperclassmen, cadets saluting officers. Cadets on the disabled list—on profile—wear sneakers, walk with crutches. The injury level is about what you’d expect from a pro football team at midseason: casts, slings, limps. In history class, there’s a weapons cart to show which arms were used in what battles; between classes, professors play period music like “Remember Pearl Harbor” to keep cadets in the mood. People hang coats and book bags outside their classrooms (theft isn’t a problem at West Point; dorm rooms stay unlocked), and inside they stand at attention as the instructor enters and Accountability is taken again. Most professors teach in uniform; I’d never seen a cardigan sweater with epaulets before West Point. Classes are an introduction to why the back of the shaved human head has never been prized for its beauty. Many different styles of short hair—the overhead stripe, the buzz-cut temple, the whorls from the center—and always a brain-paunch hanging over the back of the collar.
During free periods, some cadets jog, a few watch the day room TV (eight uniformed cadets staring at a Jerry Springer show: “I’m Taking Back My Man”), but most head back to their rooms to sleep. It takes a while to figure out why shades are always drawn and the rooms have soft lighting. The rooms never quite wake up. Cadets get about five hours’ sleep a night and make up the other three in daylight, same as they’ll do in the regular Army. Males brag about naps the way they might about meeting some unbelievable woman. (Your blanket is called a green girl, since that’s who you sleep with most.) Cadets are so ready to sleep that even at honor hearings, with careers on the line, JAG attorneys go on sleep patrol, nudging shoulders, checking eyelids.
As long as they’re on post, cadets are being judged. Start cursing with your buddies and an officer might appear with tips on deportment. “I was in the bookstore talking to a guy last week,” Harley Whitten says. “The worst I let slip was a damn or hell. An officer came up to me and said, ‘Hey, listen: in the past two minutes of your conversation, I heard you swear twice and make one sexual innuendo. You know, that could be offensive. You should watch what you’re saying—you’re not alone in barracks.’”
After four, when they’re not at drill—parade practice—cadets are required to participate in athletics. All cadets must have what’s called a lifetime sport, and if they’re not on a varsity squad, they must compete intramurally. “Athletics teaches a lot of lessons,” Colonel Pierce says. “Leadership, unit cohesion, sacrifice, the group goal is always more important than the individual.” Dinner is not mandatory; cadets order a lot of takeout. The line to meet the pizza van is often fifteen cadets thick, and the restaurants know the West Point meal schedule—when it’s cod night, they fire up extra pies. (“Those guys must really hate that beer-batter fish.”) At night, plebes and yuks study for a required three hours (Evening Study Period), but juniors can go to the Officers’ Club, and seniors have the Firstie Club: beer, jukebox, ping-pong, karaoke night. By 2230 cadets are setting off for their rooms. Cadets are sentimental about any departure; there are hugs, back slaps and complicated handshakes. The corps feels like one huge team exiting the locker room. At 2315 tattoo is played, 2330 is taps, and midnight is official lights out. A CDO, company duty officer, walks the halls making Taps Check, taking the day’s final Accountability from room to room. “You get a pretty good feel for the company when you see what people are doing late at night,” says John Pandich, the H-4 company commander. “It’s funny. The same yearlings and plebes are watchi
ng TV, same people are working, same people are always on the phone. And then the big tough football guys are all curled up under the blankets like little kids.”
Gray Trou and Hudson Hips
Michele Timajo hangs around a lot in the room her boyfriend Curt Byron shares with Mike Ferlazzo. The room is generally pretty hopping. Ferlazzo is a smoker, part of the H-4 smoking circle; a firstie named Jessica “Coop” Cooper sort of irritates him by using his room as a 12 x 23 ashtray. Ferlazzo is also an apprentice Goodfella, a close friend of Whitey Herzog’s. He was one of Herzog’s plebes last year, and they bonded over cigarettes. “Whitey was tough on me for a long time,” Ferlazzo says. “He was an awesome platoon sergeant, because he was one of the guys who actually cared, who’d actually come around, attend to morale and shit like that. He’d come in, tell us not to get down, we had a lot of good stuff coming up.”
Ferlazzo is a blond, thickly built kid from Valley Stream, Long Island. His father was a Brooklyn fireman, then a fire marshal, then an arson investigator, and Mike spent a lot of high school playing hooky, tagging along as his dad’s muscle, excavating sites. Mike’s brother graduated from West Point in 1995; his father was a Marine in Vietnam. “My dad grew up, rolled with a terrible crew in Brooklyn—I mean, I don’t even wanna know what they did, they were bastards—then joined the Marines. Just because of the era—everyone went to Vietnam, unless they were a bunch of college pukes.” He laughs. “I guess my prejudices are slipping out, huh?” His dad worked the crash crews at Khe Sanh, the encircled Marine base in Vietnam, putting out aircraft fires on the landing strip. Came home, stayed in the fire business. “So I’m definitely not a military brat,” Mike says. “Pretty much why I came is because I wanted this radical experience. I was at a point where I was like, You know what? I’m eighteen, I wanna do something that in a couple of years I’m gonna look back on and go, ‘Yeah, that was pretty extreme, that was pretty radical, I’m pretty proud I did that.’”
Plebe year was even more radical than he’d anticipated. Ferlazzo’s accent is a compound of Brooklyn and Long Island, the national cadence for “Are you fuckin’ with me?” “I got totally busted on for it,” he says. “Because no matter what I said, it sounded like I was being a wiseass.” Ferlazzo would say “Yes sir,” and what came out sounded pretty much like “Are you fuckin’ with me?” Upperclassmen would say, “Ferlazzo’s got an attitude problem.” So he had his harassment, but that was pretty much the radical stuff he’d put in for—“the whole big game.” He laughs. “You know you’re gonna suck down shit.” That isn’t what bothered him: “For me, the biggest thing to suck down is girls, not finding a female.”
Women first arrived at West Point in 1976, but they’re still here only in small numbers. Step into the Academy from the civilian world, it’s very hard to live in an environment that’s 85 percent male. Ferlazzo points to the empty picture frame on his desk; it represents his quest, which is for the woman who can fill it. Most male cadets go off post for women. There’s a strange prejudice against dating female cadets. They’re referred to as gray trou, because of the gray pants that cadets wear. Sleep with one, it’s probably because you were wearing gray goggles. Tell your friends about it, you’ve earned your gray wings. The women are teased because the carb-intensive diet (four thousand calories a day) fills them out, producing Hudson hips—though this didn’t look quite true to me.
On-post dating is a tangle: you’re not allowed to kiss in the barracks, have sex in the barracks or do anything physical in the barracks. If a male and female are in a room together, the old 1950s college rules apply: the door must be left open, and they can’t sit on the same piece of furniture. (“That’s how it is with a lot of issues at West Point,” Whitey says. “They’re barracks and they’re dorms. But they are barracks, so I don’t think there should be sex in ’em.” You also can’t drink in barracks, can’t have a VCR in barracks; many cadets play video games on their PlayStations, since there’s no clear policy for those machines yet.) Caught having sex, you’re separated. Or, rather—males believe—the male cadet will be separated, and the female will be turned back, because there aren’t enough to spare. “White men like me, we’re a dime a dozen, you know,” a G-4 cow named Trent Powell explains. Ferlazzo says the real reason males don’t try to date female cadets is simple competition. There are more than eight males to each female. “If they don’t like the way you sneeze, they can turn around and they got ten other guys ready to knock down their door. Any girl that’s halfway decent here gets to think they’re a friggin’ goddess.”
The odds are even longer than they look on paper, because one whole class—plebe women—is off limits. Plebes can’t talk to upperclassmen; they certainly can’t date them. “Don’t let me even talk about that, that’s dangerous,” Ferlazzo says. “Because you can’t. “And once plebe women become yearlings, they’re not going to be on tap for guys like Mike anyway; they’re targeted by seniors. As the saying goes, “Firstie brass gets yuk ass.” Which is why, for the first couple of years, a lot of cadets stay faithful to girls back home. “You keep shit carrying over from high school,” Ferlazzo says. “You try to hang on to that as long as you can.” Mike gave it his best shot. His girl went off to Johns Hopkins: phone calls, buses, things petered out. “It’s hard shit,” he says. “She’s seven hours away with a school full of guys chasing her. You can’t blame her. I mean, I don’t think I’d do it.”
But there are consolations; the West Point name carries some erotic weight. Go off post, you can generally swing a one- or two-night hookup. There was a girl in Mike’s town, homecoming queen, during high school he never had a chance with her. “She was definitely digging the Military Academy when I came home for Christmas,” he says. “Shit was cool.” Whitey and his roommate, Harley, have logged an anthology of one-nighters up and down the East Coast: meet a girl at a bar in Atlanta—you’re finishing Airborne school three hours away—she sees the uniform, next thing you know you’re squinting your way out of a hotel room. Visit some married friend in D.C., he’s got a sister-in-law, in the morning you’re heading back to post with a hangover and a story. You talk to a girl at some family cookout in Hilton Head, her parents start asking sly questions about how much money Army officers make. (“That was wack,” Whitey says.)
“There are girls who go after people like us,” Supko says, “because graduating from West Point, they know we have a successful future. At least—y’know—for a little while.” Whitey and Suppy dated twenty-four-year-old roommates from Connecticut; after a couple of weeks, there were pictures of Whitey and Suppy in every room. Spooky shit. Walk in the living room, two framed pictures; head for the kitchen, hit the bathroom, two framed pictures. “They scared us, man,” Whitey says.
Of course, plenty of people see the uniform, the crewcut, they start making assumptions. At the Firstie Club, cadets tell me how they often hold back announcing they’re from West Point as long as they can. “It’s a rare occasion when I’ll actually say it,” firstie Bryan “Soup” Campbell says. “Not that I’m not very proud of where I am. But it gives people the wrong impression. A stereotype—conservative, stuck-up.” I talk to some members of the Mountaineering Club, who ask carefully, “Do you think we’re a bunch of social rejects or introverts compared to normal colleges? Because we don’t quite fit in with every other group of people there are.”
They go to college parties and the stereotype is waiting for them again: “An intense personality,” another climber explains. “Doesn’t know how to have fun. Does not know how to treat a woman. They think you’re this Marine who’s going to be an ass to them.” So people won’t say “West Point”; they’ll say they go to a school in New York State. “You come here because you want to do something different,” Trent Powell tells me. “But then when you go out, you want to kind of blend. Just be like a college kid, you know? But no matter what you do, you can spot a cadet a mile away. Like our hair, the way we walk. And when cadets go out, it’ll be six guys in a trail.
And when they leave, six guys leave.” The most negative cadets, if they’re pressed, will say they attend the South Hudson Institute of Technology, whose acronym is SHIT.
And of course cadets can have a hard time dealing with people on the outside—getting out of the West Point head, shutting down the West Point response system. First Sergeant Eric Parthemore, the topranking junior in G-4, is so huah it’s caused problems on vacation. “My brother threw stuff on the bed, pissed me off, and I just started hazing him,” he says. “It was instinct.” Chrissi Cicerelle went home, her sister gave her a bear hug from behind, and suddenly it was close quarters combat—going for the hands, worrying the finger joints. Her sister was on the floor. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I am so sorry,’” Chrissi says.
Right now, Ferlazzo has to decide whether he’ll stay at West Point. The first two years of the Academy are a free pass: drop out, no hard feelings. Leave any time afterward, you’re going to owe service to the Army as an enlisted soldier. The first week of junior year, Ferlazzo will be asked to make what’s called Cow Commitment: walking into an auditorium, raising his hand, swearing an oath. “Before I came here,” Ferlazzo says, “I was totally my own man. My parents respected me. I was in my own car, doing my own thing. Came in here with my bag of underwear, I lost everything. I became an absolute nobody. That’s the whole philosophy of West Point—you’re literally a bag of underwear. Everything you had before, you’re pretty much walking away from it.”
A lot of cadets make the Army their religion, but Ferlazzo isn’t sure about that. “It’s not enough,” he says. It’s like the middle of Scarface when Al Pacino has suddenly climbed to the top of the Miami underworld. “He goes, ‘Is this what it’s all about? Eating, drinking, fucking, snorting?’ It’s funny, ’cause in the military every mission has an end state, and when you reach that end state, you know your mission has been accomplished. So where’s my end state? At least here, you can fall back on graduating from West Point—I’m gonna be part of something great.”