by Ted Russ
Turtle and I looked at the Guru, trying to determine if he was setting us up.
“I’m serious about this,” he said as he stood up from behind the trunk. “They have been trying to stamp out our company motto for decades now. In my squad we uphold company traditions. It’s important. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Never use the company greeting when there is an officer nearby. And you should take care when using it if cadets from other companies are around, particularly those duty-dick Frogs from F4. But in these halls and among your company mates, both contemporaries and superiors, the greeting is ‘Go naked.’ The only other acceptable greeting is ‘Go Elvis.’ Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. ‘Go Elephants’ is a stupid motto. Don’t ever let me hear you say it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where were you two new cadets going when you so rudely bumped into my trunk and me?”
“Sir, we were going to retrieve our trunks in order to continue setting up our room.”
“Good. I will inspect your room at eighteen hundred hours this evening. Be ready. You are dismissed.”
“Go naked, sir,” we said as we moved down the stairs. The water sloshed painfully in my stomach.
Later that night, Turtle and I lay in our beds, trying to calibrate to yet another jarring transition.
Cadet Basic Training, or Beast Barracks as it was referred to by cadets, had been an endless progression of regimented drudgery: physical training, classes, issue points, instruction in the honor code, parade practice, room inspections, and plebe duties. Zack, Bill, and I had quickly gelled into an effective roommate team, and we did better than most. But it still sucked.
Mealtimes most of all. For plebes during Beast Barracks, meals are torture. Sitting at attention without your back against the chair, not being allowed to chew unless your hands are in your lap, restricted to tiny bites so that you can swallow instantly in order to respond to an upperclassman, and performing plebe table duties. The worst of which is cutting the dessert.
At the start of the meal, the gunner at each table is responsible for asking who wants dessert and cutting the appropriate number of pieces. The firsties always conspire so that an odd number of pieces must be cut. Cutting a cake into seven even pieces is difficult. Once cut, the cake is always inspected by the first classmen. If the pieces are not even, the gunner gets hazed for most of the meal. Not only does this mean he can’t eat, his tablemates also can’t eat, because no plebe is allowed to eat while a cadre member is talking. So everyone depends on everyone else’s ability to perform their duties. This makes cake cutting a high-stakes activity.
We learned quickly to use a template, a small cardboard circle marked with all of the possible piece counts from halves to tenths. It was like an Old World compass folded in half and stuffed in our hats. It was critical. And at dinner three days into Beast Barracks, I had forgotten mine.
I sat down at the table and froze in fear. I knew immediately where it was: sitting on my desk in my room. I had been double-checking the markings just before dinner. One of the cadre declined dessert, of course. I had to cut that night’s Martha Washington cake into nine even pieces. I was fucked. Worse, I had fucked the whole table.
Someone nudged my left knee. I had been a cadet for less than seventy-two hours, but I had already killed the instinct to gaze around when startled; even so, I knew it was Bill. I subtly yet quickly extended my arm under the table. Bill thrust something into my hand. It was his template. He saved me. He saved the table.
That night after taps, I thanked him.
“Don’t mention it.”
“How did you even know I needed it?” I asked.
Bill shrugged. “I just did. I could tell something was wrong.”
“So sweet. You guys are gonna make me cry,” said Zack from his bed.
That was the first instance of what quickly became a strong bond. I was good friends with Zack, of course, and several of the guys. But Bill and I had a connection. Several times over the summer, one of us instinctively saved the other. It just worked.
Still, Beast Barracks was a stressful grind punctuated by frequent moments of fear. Wilcox was a terror. Nothing we did was ever good enough for him. He and the rest of the cadre circled us like angry sharks all summer, constantly reminding us how weak we were as individuals and as a class. They let us know, whenever they could, how much worse they’d had it when they were plebes, and how bad they would have made things for us were it not for the commissioned officers staying their hand. “The Corps has,” they would lament.
Lake Frederick, the capstone training event, was a one-week bivouac. The contrast between the field and the garrison was dramatic and welcome. The garrison had been briefings, classes, and drill periods followed by late nights of polishing, shining, cleaning, memorizing, and reciting. The field was tactical training: rifles, machine guns, hand grenades, land navigation, and first aid. Best of all, since we were out in the field, there was no New York Times to memorize daily, and the incessant knowledge quizzes abated slightly. When we were tested on our plebe knowledge, the questions focused more on military stuff than, say, how many gallons of water were in Lusk Reservoir.
But the march back to West Point had been tough, and not just physically. The sense of dread got heavier the closer we got to post. The entire Corps had converged back on West Point from summer training assignments around the world and was waiting for us.
Most of the march back was tactical, but when we entered main post at the back gate off Storm King Highway, we formed up into companies. There were people waiting for us: families, friends, faculty, and tourists. All cheering as we marched toward the barracks to join the Corps.
The band intercepted us at Keller Army Community Hospital and marched in front of our column as the crowd thickened. The cheering became louder and more raucous, the flag and sign waving more vigorous. The closer we got to the barracks, the more upperclassmen I saw in the crowd. By the time we passed by the superintendent’s house and the Plain, the clusters of yearlings, cows, and firsties were thick. The math had turned against us. Upperclassmen now outnumbered us three to one. Academics didn’t start in earnest for a week. They had nothing better to do than haze us, their new plebes.
Billeting on the same floor as the Guru and having him as our squad leader was terrifying, but Turtle and I quickly realized that it also granted us status, even with upperclassmen. No one hazed us too much because they knew the Guru was constantly riding us, and it seemed like they didn’t want to irritate him by doing so. This also applied to the firsties, even though the Guru was only a cow.
The other plebes were terrified of him and wanted to know more.
“So what’s the Guru like?” asked Zack.
“What did you hear about him?”
“I heard he’s a third-generation legacy,” said Creighton Patterson, Zack’s new roommate. “His father and grandfather were grads. His father was killed in Vietnam.”
Creighton was the first son of a renowned black armored cavalry officer. His father named him after General Creighton Abrams, a West Pointer who fought under Patton in World War II and was regarded as the best armor commander the country had ever produced. Creighton’s father had worked for General Abrams in Vietnam after achieving his own fame as a smart and aggressive armor officer.
If family and professional expectations weighed on Creighton, it did not show. We learned quickly that he was a lifer. There was no other school for him than West Point, no other place for him than the U.S. Army, and no other branch for him than his father’s. Armor.
Creighton was black and of average build, but in the super-fit environment of West Point, he seemed smaller than average. Wearing glasses did not increase his stature, but he had an advantage over all of us. He was a natural cadet. He wore the uniform and moved through the cadet area with ease. He was a master of military history, which enhanced his sense of self and place. He kne
w why he was here, what to expect, and how to optimize himself within the system.
“The yearlings on my floor were talking about him,” said Bill. “He sounds pretty cool.”
“I don’t know about all that, but cool is definitely not how I would describe him,” I said. “My stomach still hasn’t recovered.”
“Where did he get the balls to go by ‘the Guru’?” asked Zack.
“I heard he had a habit of correcting firsties and being right,” said Bill.
“Okay. So that is ballsy,” acknowledged Zack.
“No kidding.”
“Supposedly,” Bill continued, “a firstie freaked when Stillmont corrected him on how Edgar Allan Poe got kicked out. The firstie was in his face: ‘What? You think you’re some kind of damn guru?’ But Stillmont wouldn’t cave. The firstie put him through a couple hours of uniform drills, trying to get him to back down.”
Zack groaned. Uniform drills were painful. The cadre would say simply, “Report back to me in three minutes wearing your full dress uniform,” and you were off on a doomed quest to meet their timeline. Each time you reported back, the cadre would shake his head and give you a new assignment. “Not fast enough. Report back to me in three minutes wearing your class uniform under raincoat.” A couple rounds of this and not only were you exhausted but your room was destroyed from your spastic efforts to get in and out of different uniforms quickly. Firsties could dial up the cruelty easily by adding small requirements. “Report back to me in three minutes wearing your battle dress uniform under field jacket and holding your mattress cover.” Bed destroyed.
“They say each time Stillmont reported in new uniform the firstie would ask him if he wanted to admit that he was not a guru. That he was wrong and correct himself. Stillmont never did. Finally other upperclassmen told the firstie that Stillmont was actually right. So the name stuck.”
“I heard a different story,” Creighton said. “A crazy one. I heard he got the name in the House of Tears.”
We all shuddered, remembering one of the worst segments of Beast Barracks: NBC, or Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical, training. The goal was to teach us how to use, and have confidence in, the army’s protective gear. The method was to file us, by squad, into a small, one-room cinder-block building known as the House of Tears. The structure was full of CS gas, a powerful riot-control agent. We were sent in wearing full protective gear, including our gas masks. After a few minutes of demonstrating that the protective gear worked, we were told to take off our masks and recite “The Corps.”
The effect was instantaneous. Sandpaper scraped our eyeballs, and breathing felt like inhaling molten glass and thumbtacks. Our lungs rebelled and tried to stop the inflow of poison, but our bodies demanded oxygen. Long ribbons of snot poured from our noses, and our eyes burned. They held us in there for a long time. The room filled with grunting noises and strange shrieks as our respiratory systems tried to reject the CS gas while we choked our way through the sacred verse.
Finally we completed our recitation of “The Corps.” By the time we were released, we had been reduced to a retching, heaving gaggle of blind people. My eyes felt like they were dragging across the cement floor as I stumbled toward the light. The cadre ushered us out and made sure no one fell over. It took hours for the effects to wear off.
“They said Stillmont didn’t miss a beat. Said he belted out ‘The Corps’ like he was reciting it back in the barracks. Everyone else was reduced to choking tears, and he was fine. One of the cadre members, in his gas mask, looked at Stillmont and said, ‘Look at this stubborn plebe, the fucking guru of the House of Tears.’ And the name stuck.”
Both stories had the ring of truth to me. That’s how nicknames happened in the Corps. They sprang forth from moments of embarrassment, rage, or hazing. The universe assigned them through upper-class revelation, and they stuck when their essence was true. Stillmont’s had not only stuck, it had spread. He was known Corps-wide as the Guru.
“They also told me why he is on the area,” Bill said. Being forced to walk the Central Area for hours in full dress uniform was a common form of punishment. “This summer at Air Assault School, he organized a group of cadets one night and they painted a giant cadet insignia on the big rappel wall!”
“How did they get caught?” asked Zack.
“A pair of Apache gunships were in the area and spotted them on their FLIRs.”
“That’s actually a really cool way to get busted.”
“They said the Air Assault instructors were super pissed! They wanted to kick the Guru out immediately, but the school commandant wouldn’t let them. He was a grad. They put the Guru on restrictions instead.”
“What did they write him up for when he got back here?”
“Conduct unbecoming of a cadet.”
“Conduct unbecoming? Really?” mumbled Zack. “Seems like you would want cadets to be just like that: proud, ballsy.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” answered Bill.
Like the rest of us, Zack was still coming to terms with the reality of West Point and its emphasis on professionalism. Plebe summer had been bewildering. It was difficult to connect most of what we were put through to our quest to become warriors. It was hard, but in a tedious, pedantic way. We accomplished something by surviving it. But we weren’t sure what.
This dissonance stayed with us long after the summer ended. We were still grappling to understand it, Zack most vocally.
* * *
The start of the academic year did not alleviate any of the pressure of our plebe duties. Our first week back, I was assigned “paper carrier” responsibility with Emily Simons, a female plebe from Ohio. In high school, she had been class president and captain of the basketball team. Here, like the rest of us, she was a scared and sweaty human with closely cropped hair.
Paper carriers retrieve the New York Times each morning from the Fourth Regiment drop-off point in North Area and deliver them to each cadet barracks room before morning formation. Of all the cadet duties, paper carrier is the most visible and stressful. Everyone wants their paper in the morning: plebes because they have to memorize it before formation, and upperclassmen because they want to quiz and stump plebes on it.
Emily and I failed miserably our first morning. The paper drop-off was on the opposite corner of North Area from the Lost Fifties. At 0605 hours, when we arrived to grab our allotment, there was only enough for about half of E4’s rooms. We panicked and had no system for prioritizing our deliveries. Plebes we missed were pissed because they got slaughtered at morning formation. Upperclassmen we missed were incensed: “You gave a paper to a damn yearling before you gave one to me?”
Emily and I took heat all day, from upperclassmen and fellow plebes alike. The worst for me, though, was the Guru’s rebuke at lunch formation: “You’ve really let me down, Avery. What happened?”
“No excuse, sir.”
“I don’t want to hear that bullshit. What happened?”
“Sir, we left our rooms as soon as we could, right at oh-six-hundred, but most of the papers had already been taken by the other companies.” Cadets were not supposed to leave their rooms before 0600 hours. It was the academy’s effort to try to offer some protection from too much hazing and too many extracurricular challenges during the academic year. In situations like this, however, it was an obstacle to getting things done.
“Do you really think I don’t understand the rules here, Avery?” he said, glaring at me.
“No, sir. We will be sure to be there in time tomorrow morning.”
He leaned forward.
“Does that solve your problem?”
I looked back at him, my mind flailing. I had no idea what he wanted me to say or do.
“My plebes are problem solvers, Avery,” he said before walking away in disgust. He ignored me the rest of the day.
Emily and I held a war council after classes.
“We’ve got to get to the drop-off point earlier,” she said. “I know it’s a risk, but
I think we should leave our rooms at oh-five-forty-five to get the jump on the rest of the regiment.”
“That won’t solve our problem.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’ll just have to do that every day from now on. And once the other companies get wise, they’ll just do the same thing and we’ll just have to get up earlier and earlier.”
Emily frowned. “Okay, smart guy. Do you have a better idea?”
“I think so.”
The next morning at 0400 hours when the New York Times delivery contractor pulled into North Area, Emily and I were waiting for him. As he came to a stop and hopped out, we stepped out of the shadows and Emily made our offer.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Mornin’, cadet. What do you want?”
“We’d like to request a daily delivery of fifty papers each morning to the Lost Fifties.” Emily pointed at our barracks.
“No way. That’s not the deal. I drop ’em here and in Central Area.”
He tried to push past Emily, but she blocked him.
“How about for fifty bucks a month?”
He straightened up at that, surprised.
“For real?”
“Yes, sir. Fifty bucks now and then fifty at the completion of each month, based on performance.” She raised her hand, holding the money we had collected from each plebe in E4 after dinner the previous night.
He took the money and counted it slowly. Then he smiled. “Show me where you want ’em, cadet.” For the rest of the year, plebes happily coughed up the small fee, and E4 had its papers every day.
A few days later, the Guru asked what we had done. After I debriefed him, he smiled and nodded. “I would have started at twenty-five dollars a month, but you solved the problem. Good work.”
* * *
As the semester ground on, the Guru regularly pulled us aside to teach us arcane aspects of cadet lore. His lessons were always a little skewed from the party line and much more interesting. He was connecting us to the ancient heretical spirit of the Corps. We loved it.
On the Friday of Ring Weekend, the Guru strode up to breakfast formation. I watched him approach out of the corner of my eye. He was of average build but stronger than he looked. His gait was always slightly off tempo from the disciplined and purposeful movements of the Corps in general. Even in parade formation, it looked to me as if he was struggling to restrain himself.