Duty First (21 page)

“Coach Hazzell is great,” Jett says. “He’s the best coach I’ve ever had. He never talks about personal stuff during practice. It’s all football. The coach we had two years ago used to fall asleep during meetings.”

From Washington Hall Jett makes his way to MacArthur Barracks and the dayroom of Company C4, which has been his company only since the end of August. In between their second and third years,
cadets are “shuffled,” assigned to new companies. The administration found that when cadets stayed in the same company for four years, as was the practice in the past, the companies developed “personalities.” They could turn into subcultures that might or might not share the institution’s values. Some companies were known for athletics or academic prowess; some were known for being hard on plebes, others for being easy on the fourth class.

From the administration’s point of view, this meant a cadet who spent four years in one company might have a dramatically different experience of West Point than a classmate in another company. What’s more, some of these subcultures were at odds with administration policies and even Academy values. Now cadets get to know more of their classmates. More importantly, attitudes across the corps are evened out, and the developmental experience is more uniform.

The dayroom, a combination meeting room and television room, is a windowless basement room with a pool table, a television, and VCR. Thirty or forty government-issue padded chairs crowd the space. One wall is decorated with a giant pencil sketch of a cowboy, the company mascot. Jett falls into one of the chairs.

The room is hot and close and crowded with second class cadets, none of them enthusiastic about this mandatory meeting about alcohol and drug abuse. A firstie asks the platoon sergeants for a head count and gets an “all present.” Less than a minute later a cadet walks in.

“Good report,” someone complains.

A second-class named Walt Hollis, who is the company First Sergeant, begins. “Welcome to another class on alcohol. Here’s the plan. I’m supposed to show you this video, which lasts about twenty minutes, and then we’re supposed to discuss it. I have a list of questions and discussion points. But the VCR is broken, so I’ll just tell you about the video.”

He reads the lesson plan from a set of printed notes. In the video he isn’t showing, a student goes to a frat party and gets drunk to the point of alcohol poisoning.

Hollis looks up and asks, “Why do people drink?” There are a
couple of chuckles, some whispered comments. There is still something in the air of the sophomoric fascination with drinking.

“People drink to escape reality,” a cadet in the front row says.

“To hook up,” offers another.

“Because we think we’re much cooler when we drink.”

“When does a person’s drinking become a problem?” Hollis asks.

“When there’s not enough to go around,” offers a cadet slouched in a chair.

Someone in the back of the room asks, “Why do you all have to act so stupid?”

“A lot of people say that West Pointers get into the Army and don’t know how to act,” Grady Jett says. “They have a drinking problem because they’ve never been allowed to do it normally; it’s always such a big deal.”

The juniors talk about a cadet who graduated a few years back. He used to return to the barracks drunk and fling open the plebes’ doors and shout at them before stumbling off to bed. They generally agree that this person was a sad case and no kind of leader, but there are still a few lingering sniggers.

The juniors talk about the resources available on Army posts to help soldiers with these problems, then Hollis ends by quoting the lesson plan: “Alcohol and drug abuse are inconsistent with military service.”

“Alcohol is a problem at West Point,” Hollis offers. No one disagrees.

“There’s binge drinking and underage drinking and DUI. How can we work against that?”

A young woman offers, “They’re on the right track in giving cadets more freedom. People take responsibility for their own actions. It’s not like before, where cadets got out and just exploded.”

A firstie closes the class. He is soft-spoken, makes little eye contact.

“Have a good time this weekend [in Philadelphia at the Army-Navy game], but be smart about it. Think about what you’re doing before you get into trouble.”

Later that afternoon Jett heads to Michie Stadium for practice. He has spent three hours in class today. He will spend four and a half at the football complex.

The training room buzzes with dozens of conversations. Jett climbs on a table and shaves his recently injured ankle with an electric razor; a trainer will wrap it in a small cast made of white athletic tape. While he waits he removes his BDU blouse; he is not big for a Division I player, just a shade over six feet and 180 pounds. Army recruits from a small pool of talent: kids who can play Division I football and handle West Point’s academics. They are the same athletes being recruited by Navy and Air Force, by Brown and Penn and Duke. Players recruited by the academies must also consider the service commitment of at least five years.

The cinder-block walls are decorated with paper signs, most of them martial.

“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”

“Tomorrow’s Battle is Won During Today’s Practice.”

A large plaque lists the years in which Army won the Commander-in-Chiefs Trophy, awarded to the major service academy that defeats the other two in football. Army last won in 1996.

Jett is closer to the young men in this room than to anyone else at West Point, but he also talks with some envy of his friends who aren’t on Corps Squad. “They have the time to go out with their buddies, to make other friends in the corps. I know my roommate, when he comes back from dinner, he has some time to hang out with other people and make other friends. I get back and have to get to work right away. I wish I had time to know more people.”

The trainer works quickly, unrolling tape and tearing it into neat strips.

“People who know what we go through respect us. Then there are those people who think we just come up here and joke around and that we get out of a lot of stuff, like drill and formations, that we’re just get-overs. They don’t understand how hard we work.”

“On the faculty you see both attitudes. Some of them know what
we go through. Some of the Tacs went through our strength-training workout one day. The coach said a lot of them couldn’t even finish it,” he says with obvious relish. “That changed a lot of attitudes. A teacher traveled with us when we went to a hotel the night before a game; he was amazed at how intense our schedule is. We go from practice to meetings. He never knew that we went through all this prior to games.”

Jett jogs off to change into his practice uniform, then moves to the warren of meeting rooms, which are shabby, with low ceilings, holes in the walls, burned-out lights. The floor is thick with folding chairs, and after the players start to assemble, with piles of shoulder pads and gold helmets. The linemen lumber through the room; a few of them have stomachs like middle-aged men and will have to lose weight to fit within the Army height and weight standards before they can be commissioned. There are more motivational posters hung unevenly around the tight space. One could be Coach Hazzell’s motto.

“Success is not an Accident; It’s a Planned Event.”

Hazzell coached at the University of Western Michigan, where he “had a lot more time,” he says. “It took a while to adjust to the cadets’ schedule. We coaches have to understand what these guys go through, because their lives off the field are so hectic, there are a lot of demands. But they’re outstanding guys to work with. They have this tremendous willingness … they want to work, on a consistent basis. A lot of places you gotta pull teeth to get things going, but not here. You can’t ask for a better coaching situation.”

Hazzell is five ten, with a neatly trimmed mustache and a black Army Football nylon warm-up suit, a baseball cap with a simple “A” on the front. He begins the session with his minutely detailed overview of the upcoming practice session, then he goes to the white board and sketches the plays they will work on today. He talks fast, quizzing the players and shuffling through a pile of papers on a rolling table.

Grady Jett, who was up until midnight or 1:00 the night before, who was up this morning at six, and who just returned from a Thanks-giving
leave where he got “no sleep,” is fighting to keep his eyes open. Yet he answers every prompt.

At 4:20
P.M.
they are on the field for warm-up exercises. The practice field sits in the right angle formed by Michie Stadium and the Holleder Center. (Sports venues are named for cadet athletes later killed in action. Dennis Michie, USMA 1892, brought the new sport of football to West Point in 1890. Michie was killed fighting the Spanish in Cuba in July 1898. Don Holleder, USMA 1956 and Army quarterback, made the cover of
Sports Illustrated
magazine during his last season. Holleder was killed in action in Vietnam in 1967. He was thirty-three years old.) The big lights come on and the temperature starts to drop; when the players stand on the sidelines and remove their helmets, steam lifts off them in clouds. Beyond the bare trees the mountains to the east are outlined against a dove-gray sky.

The practice field is two hundred yards long and seventy-five wide; it is covered with players, some in white practice jerseys, most in black. There are more than a hundred and eighty cadets in this system, more plebes than upper class. This week’s practices are emotionally charged: because it’s the Navy game, and because it’s the end of football for some of these players.

“Seniors,” one of the coaches says, “This is your last Monday practice.”

The entire two-hour practice is run like the two-minute drill at the end of a clutch game. The coaches read from identical copies of the time plan. They move squads and subsquads here and there on the field at a run, bringing together the backs, then the receivers and quarterbacks, then the linemen.

“Everything is designed to get the most out of the time we have with them,” Head Coach Bob Sutton says, “because their schedule is so tight.”

And it works. The parts all come together like rapidly spinning gears, like a complex field operation, like a battle drill. This is due, in part, to meticulous preparation. But none of this would be possible without the tremendous resources available to this program. There are two elevated platforms, raised by hydraulics, at one end of the
field. Three video operators spend the entire second half of practice shooting footage from fifty feet up. There is a squad of managers in yellow sweats, a dozen trainers and coaches.

Football gets the most attention at West Point—many feel too much attention. It also generates revenue that supports the rest of the varsity sports program. Football is the national spectacle, the perfect mix of violence and glory and sex for our society. Maybe it works at West Point because it is a military metaphor, a surrogate for war. Or it may be that football, in spite of commercialization, retains some of the magic Cadet Michie saw when he organized the first games on West Point’s muddy Plain.

Late in practice, Grady Jett catches a touchdown pass, the ball floating into his hands in the artificial light, in the crisp air. It’s a Hollywood play, of course. The defenders aren’t running full-speed and the point is execution, but the play is beautiful nonetheless, and the players on the sidelines cheer wildly. This is Navy week.

After practice, the players shower and gather in the big hallways of the Holleder Center, where long tables have been set with dinner (the rest of the corps has already finished eating). The meal set for them is huge: plate-bending servings of chicken tacos. As with the Mess Hall meals, there is a scarcity of fresh vegetables. The closest thing here is shredded iceberg lettuce, which is nearly white under the fluorescent lights. Jett eats sparingly for someone so active.

“A lot of people who know what we go through up here respect us for it. Up here,” he says, nodding at the practice field beyond the dark windows, “we’ve worked together through all those practices: when it’s hot, when it’s freezing cold. Teamwork is about pushing other people to get better for the sake of the team, about pushing yourself to make yourself better individually. … That’s the kind of leader I want to be, not just bossy, but someone who earns respect. Not by being their best friend, but by being approachable.”

Jett is slowing down. His day started early and he hasn’t stopped moving—rapidly—since.

“I’ve got a group coming to my room at 8:00,” he says, looking at his watch. It is 7:30. “We have a fluids design problem due this week.
We have to come up with a way to check the viscosity of an unknown fluid.”

He’ll be up until midnight, or later. And at 6:30 tomorrow morning, the plebe minute callers will be outside his room, signaling another day.

Like Grady Jett, Shannon Stein, the second-detail Beast squad leader, is also a varsity athlete. Recruited to play soccer, she is the workhorse of the team in the contest against Navy just days before the Army-Navy football game. Stein, who is five three and weighs a hundred pounds, plays as if she weighed two hundred. She is a fierce competitor, throwing herself at the ball, at the opposing players, rolling and tumbling, everywhere at once.