Duty First (20 page)

Messel heads to the second floor and Hayes Gym, a huge room on the second floor, where her class will practice one of the most grueling physical tests West Point offers: the Indoor Obstacle Course Test, or IOCT. Messel and the other women line up behind the men at the beginning of the course. As each pair of runners takes off (there are two parallel tracks), the cadets in line shout encouragement. Soon the huge old gymnasium is filled with shouting and grunting as cadets negotiate the obstacles.

Messel stands in line, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet with nervous energy. At the “Go” signal, she throws herself down on the wrestling mat in front of her and crawls for twenty feet beneath a wire mesh stretched a foot or two above the mat. She runs through parallel lines of tires, the old football practice drill. Then an “elephant vault” over a padded frame that stands a good four feet over the polished floor.

From there she sprints to an eight-foot-high horizontal shelf. She grabs the edge, hangs, throws one long leg up over the lip of the shelf. Women tend to have more problems with this obstacle, as they do not have the upper body strength the men do. Messel uses her height advantage; she kicks, pulls, swings her way onto the shelf.

The cadets climb from the shelf over a railing and onto the second-floor track, then swing through a series of bars until they can jump back down onto the gym floor. More running. They race to launch themselves through huge truck tires that hang like tire swings
from the ceiling. (One instructor said that the largest cadets, especially the football players, have a hard time fitting through.) After the tire they make their way—”walking” on outstretched arms, legs bicycling in the air—along two sets of parallel bars placed end to end.

By this time even the best-conditioned cadets are winded; they suck in huge gulps of the old gym’s dusty air. The long muscles of their arms and legs suddenly feel wrapped in lead.

Thirty feet to the next vault: an eight-foot vertical wall. The technique is to jump for the top and place one foot as high up as possible on the wall. The sound of cadets kicking and crashing into the plywood wall punctuates the entire test.

Messel’s height gives her an advantage, but eight feet is still eight feet. She drags herself over the top, drops down behind. Tiring, she runs flat-footed, her athletic shoes slapping the wooden floor. She climbs a padded step and reaches for the first rungs of a thirty-foot-long horizontal ladder. She swings out, legs churning as she grabs each rung and makes her way through space again. (Some of the gymnasts, their arms like steel cables, blaze through barely touching each bar.) Messel drops off the last rung and stumbles to the bottom of a frayed white rope. The cadets must climb sixteen feet to another shelf above their heads.

Messel grabs the rope, pinches it between her feet as she has been taught, and inches her way upward. She is not the fastest, but she moves forward relentlessly; it is, as the sports announcers say, a game of inches.

Sixteen feet is marked with an orange band. Messel touches the band, then swings her legs over to the shelf, climbs the railing again to the track. There is a canvas cart filled with leather medicine balls. They are just large enough and, at about twelve pounds each, just heavy enough that even the biggest cadets have to use two hands. There is no way to run smoothly with the medicine ball; it’s like running while carrying a case of beer.

One lap with the ball (twelve laps to a mile on this track), then trade the ball for a baton, then a last lap empty-handed. An instructor with a stopwatch calls out the times as cadets cross the finish line;
they report this time to a recorder on the first floor. They are on their honor to report the correct time.

As they wait in line to report their scores, they rest, hands on knees. There is little talking. Messel has only a few minutes to shower and change after class. Books under her arm, hair still wet from the shower, she hurries to Thayer Hall for psychology, another required course for plebes.

The classroom is crowded and hot, and when she sits down, it is the first time she has stopped moving all day. Within a few minutes, several of the plebes, including Messel, are having trouble staying awake. This is a common problem at West Point, especially forplebes. Cadets operate on little sleep; they stay up late and get up early. If they sit down and remain still for more than a few minutes, they will nod off. It isn’t unusual to look into a classroom and notice one or two cadets standing in the back of the room, struggling to stay awake.

After psychology, Messel has a free period, so she heads to her room. Like a lot of plebes, she lives with two roommates in a room designed for only two people. There is barely enough room to pull the chairs out from the desks. On the bookshelf above her desk is a large frame filled with smaller photos: a group of girls making faces at the camera; a small photo of Messel with her parents. In the photo she looks mature in an evening gown, makeup, jewelry. At West Point, there is no opportunity to dress that way.

“I’ve just tried to fit in, be one of the guys, I guess. I don’t spend a lot of time with makeup or any of that. Even when we’re allowed to wear civilian clothes, a lot of the girls choose not to let their hair down or wear makeup or jewelry. Some of them do take advantage of any chance, though, like at football pep-rally dinners.”

(At the mandatory Thursday night dinners during football season, cadets sometimes wear various costumes, which may include civilian clothes.)

“I feel more comfortable just fitting in. A lot of girls, it really bothers them that we have to dress like the guys and all. Every time they go out they buy something feminine to wear or to decorate their room.”

“Decorate” may be too strong a word to describe the individuality allowed cadets. Beside the one framed picture per roommate, the only other thing that qualifies as a “decoration” are a couple of two-inch plastic pumpkins tucked away on a bookshelf.

Messel checks her watch repeatedly as the morning slips by. Plebe Parent Weekend begins at lunch, and that’s when she’s due to meet her parents. She puts on her hat and goes outside to wait by the big clock outside her barracks. Her parents arrive a moment later, as if on cue.

Jerri Messel, Jacques mother, is petite and pretty, a quiet woman. Physically, Jacque Messel favors her father, who is tall and broad. She does not have his booming voice and tendency to dominate the conversation.

Messel’s demeanor changes around her parents. As she leads them into the Mess Hall for the guest lunch, she becomes quiet. Throughout the meal, the two women sit quietly as they hear stories of Robert Messel’s cadet days. He talks about West Point in the 1960s, about playing Army basketball, about the great football teams, about the new buildings and the old way of doing things, about everything except his daughter’s experiences in her new world.

At times, Messel seems confused about the role her father played in getting her to West Point. At times, she says he “encouraged” her, telling her stories about his experiences, about people he met and places he’d been. At other times, it seems that she became a cadet to please him. “This was his dream,” she states flatly.

T
he football season goes a long way toward making West Point a tolerable place to be stuck on fall weekends. Each week there is the buildup to Saturday, the pageantry of the pre-game parade, and the carnival atmosphere of the game itself. All cadets must attend, and tradition dictates that they stand for the entire game. The cadet section of the home stands is a solid block of noisy gray, and cheering for the team is a release for pent-up energies.

In many ways, the entire season is just a prelude to the Army-Navy game, which is played on the first Saturday in December. This final contest is almost a separate season. An Army team can go into this game with a losing record and still salvage a great deal by beating the midshipmen. (The Army-Navy rivalry is so central to sports at West Point that academy officials talk about the success of the athletic program in terms of percentage of wins over Annapolis.)

If football is a metaphor for war, then the Army-Navy game is the climactic battle. For the entire week leading up to the game, the corps wears battle dress uniform, part of the pep-rally feeling of one
of the biggest weeks of the year at West Point. The barracks are decorated with huge bed-sheet posters hanging from windows (inside the quads; nothing is visible on the parade field side); plebes sound off with, “Beat Navy, sir!” at every turn. There are nighttime “spirit” missions and push-up contests and floats being made for the game. The Supe’s house displays an eight-foot “GO ARMY” banner on one side of the porch, a “BEAT NAVY” banner on the other. The school colors of black, gold, and gray are everywhere. Formations are energized; plebes break ranks and climb on statues and balconies to lead cheers. All the months of hard work, all the routine and regulation, give way to college pranks. Bedlam reigns.

Except at the football tables.

While the corps is outside celebrating, the team is already eating in a corner of the Mess Hall wing dominated by the Washington stained-glass window. The players are excused from lunch formation so they can eat quickly and squeeze in some team meetings before afternoon classes. Their tables are piled with double portions: huge platters of gray meat, loaves of white bread in plastic wrap, lukewarm corn piled in rectangular steel dishes. The football players eat head-down; there is little conversation.

There is a notion popular among cadets who do not play intercollegiate sports that the athletes have life easier. No parades, fewer formations, all those road trips. Plebes on the football tables can relax, while a few tables away their classmates on company tables sit up straight, do table duties, eat in silence, and answer questions thrown at them by upperclass cadets.

The athletes are quick to point out that they undergo a grueling practice schedule. They return to the barracks exhausted and begin their studies late. There is no such thing as leisure time during the season.

Second class cadet Grady Jett, the Beast squad leader who stressed teamwork above all, sits at a mostly empty table in the stained-glass wing of the Mess Hall. His short hair is parted in the middle. The gold chain he wears around his neck looks out of place against his GI
T-shirt. All around him, plebes move cartons of milk and platters of food. Jett is disappointed with the team’s record so far, but mentions his only touchdown, which came against Louisville the previous last game.

Football dominates his life. It is not the only thing he is concerned about, but it takes the most energy. And it is through football that Jett wound up at West Point. A successful high school player in football-crazy Texas, Jett worked hard to get a scholarship to ease the financial burden on his parents. He didn’t know anything about West Point until Academy recruiters contacted him.

“At first, I was like, ‘No way’ Then I started looking into it, into the possibilities for the future … it seemed like a good fit for me.”

The biggest challenge for Jett was leaving his family; he is very close to his parents and sister. Amazingly, Jett’s father attended every Army game of the season, flying to New York from Texas for the home games, flying around the country for Army’s away games. The whole family will join him in Philadelphia after the Navy game.

But Jett has a few obstacles to clear before the weekend of celebrating. “This time of year the screws are really on,” he says. He isn’t talking about game pressure; he’s talking about academics, about the projects and papers due near the end of the term.

Jett graduated eleventh in his high school class of six hundred, but at West Point he hovers around the midpoint of his class of just over nine hundred. He knows his grades could be better if he had more time to study.

“If I didn’t have football, my grades would definitely be better, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And it’s not just football, but the friends I made, the experiences I had; highs and lows, working with a great bunch of guys.”

Jett loves playing, but the time commitment isolates him from the rest of the corps. It is especially apparent to him this semester. In spite of the time drain of football, he was made a squad leader in his company. He is concerned that he cannot give the cadets in his squad enough attention.

“One of my guys had an older brother, a firstie, who died recently.
He’d gone on sick call and they told him he was dehydrated. They gave him some fluids and sent him back. His roommate tried to wake him up in the morning, but he was dead. I tried to help my guy get through that. But it’s hard because I’m not around all that much. I try to stop by in the evening and see how the plebes are doing, but upper class aren’t even supposed to be around the plebes during study barracks.”

Jett eats quickly, then climbs six flights of stairs to one of the huge drafting rooms above the Mess Hall. Coach Darrel Hazzell smiles as he greets the players, then begins the meeting by reading a moment-by-moment breakdown of the upcoming afternoon practice. He hands out a photocopied sheet of neatly printed formations and pass patterns, then begins a rapid-fire patter that is almost completely jargon.

“Most of their guys are wrist-banded. In this non-crackable position,” Hazzell says, pointing to the paper in his hand, “if his feet are inside it doesn’t matter what alignment, you guys got to get inside. So make the switch signal. If we’re in spread alignment, the back is not going to engage.” The partial illustrations on the sheet have names like, “Rhonda 168 Hammer Smoke,” and “Larry Special Left Pass.”

They’ve been in the room less than ten minutes when Hazzell, still talking continuously, puts a tape in the VCR. The screen shows a practice. Hazzell is all energy, pacing and pointing. The cadets stay awake but have few questions; every once in a while they nod in agreement or understanding. Twelve minutes later the video is off and the cadets hurry out of the room, and on to their next requirement. As Jett enters the stairwell, the cattle-drive sound of the corps leaving the Mess Hall fills the building.