Duty First (44 page)

“After a month of Beast, I had no idea who I was or what I was doing. By the academic year it started to look a little more like a college with military training thrown in. There are some people who let themselves be defined by West Point, then you take that away and they’re lost.”

That reminds her of a story about cadets who can’t get away.

“A bunch of us went to New York City last weekend, after exams, with the guy who was leaving our company. We went in this place and half the people there were cadets; you could just tell,” she says, laughing.

On a manicured athletic field beside the road, a dozen cadets are playing “ultimate Frisbee.” Just to the right is the Confidence Obstacle Course Jacque and her classmates will negotiate this summer, with its forty-foot tower and its fifteen-foot drop into the lake.

“There was this one guy, he had on a BDU belt with his civilian clothes.”

The government-issue black web belt is both functional and ugly. But the regulation says a cadet can’t leave without a belt. Since this cadet apparently didn’t own a civilian belt, he wore his BDU belt.

“A chick magnet,” and she laughs again.

This is what she must have been like a month or so before R-Day when she was enjoying her high school graduation and her friends.

“The biggest compliment we got when we were in Mexico [on Spring Break] was when some guy would say, ‘You guys are cadets?’ We were paranoid. We’d look around and say to each other, ‘Look,
there are
real
college girls.’ Of course, when the guys found out we were West Point cadets, they wanted to know how many push-ups we could do.”

The highlight of her year was joining team handball. She grew close to her teammates and got to travel away from West Point. Team handball looks a little like indoor soccer, a little like basketball. A tall former volleyball player like Messel is a good fit.

She wasn’t surprised to find that sports turned out to be a saving factor. During Beast the previous summer, second class Greg Stitt, her platoon sergeant, talked to her about sports and activities to help her imagine what life would be like in the academic year. He helped her see past basic training, to put it in perspective.

Stitt had a pizza party after second-semester exams for the plebes of his former platoon. Messel still talks about him with some awe in her voice; he took the time to figure out how to communicate with her.

If team handball was the highlight of her year, the low point came in the spring, when a first class cadet on her table was reported missing at taps one night.

“Everyone who knew him knew right away what had happened,” she says, lowering her voice.

Cadet Eric Roderick’s car turned up abandoned in the parking lot of a small restaurant five miles south of West Point, a half mile north of where the Bear Mountain Bridge spans the Hudson. There was no suicide note, no indication that he was depressed or upset. In fact, the senior, twenty-two years old and just over a month from graduation, had just been accepted at medical school at Ohio University.

“I sat at his table,” Messel says. “He was pretty cool. He had his stuff together. He worked out hard, he studied hard, he was so psyched when he got into medical school. He could crack a joke, and he would talk to you like you were a person.”

Messel had a chance to talk to Roderick after she was picked to serve on an Honor Board. Since no plebe in her company had pulled this duty, she asked Roderick about it. When she told him she was
worried that her questions were stupid, he put her mind at ease and said, “No, just ask.”

It is still hard for her to reconcile that this young man she saw every day is gone. Harder still because his motivation is so difficult for her to understand. Eric Roderick was a thrill-seeker.

“When he was in high school he used to jump off bridges and into mineshafts. He used to brag about it to people.”

“There is every indication that this was a thrill-seeking activity that went bad,” Captain John Cornelio of West Point’s public information office told a local newspaper. “He had mentioned to classmates that he wanted to jump off the bridge.”

The roadbed is over 160 feet above the water. Roderick’s body was not found.

Messel describes the midnight “Taps Vigil,” the corps’ traditional way of saying good-bye to one of its members.

At the end of the evening study period, the corps assembles on the concrete apron beside the parade field, and the lights are all out in the barracks. The four thousand cadets are silent. There is just the shuffle of leather-soled shoes on concrete, the sound of the barracks doors opening and closing. In front of them, out in the darkness along diagonal walk, a bugler plays taps, then a bagpiper follows with “Amazing Grace.” Finally, the corps sings the alma mater.

Then the cadets go back to their rooms. Messel tells the story as she walks to the end of the camp and some picnic tables placed beside the lake. The evening is cool, and she pulls her knees to her chest as she sits on the bench.

She is looking forward to leave, to seeing her friends and her family, to revisiting one of her family’s summer spots at the Lake of the
Ozarks. Boating, skiing, swimming, and “touristy” stuff; the simple pleasures of being able to drive again, to sleep in a little, to decide her own schedule. Pete Haglin had planned to come and visit her over the summer. She saw a lot of Haglin during the spring semester, she says, “because he had a crush on my roommate.” But Haglin will be in summer school.

“He landed in STAP by .3 percent,” she says. He’d let stuff go too long, and then he’d work really hard to try to catch up. But he didn’t make it with chem. He always talks about quitting; I know he was really looking forward to getting out of here this summer. But he’ll be back.”

And so will Jacque Messel. West Point is a different place for her than it was ten months earlier. She and her classmates have finished the intense period of learning how to follow. Now they begin the climb to leadership positions.

“Since Recognition we’ve gotten more and more responsibility,” Messel says. “And that’ll increase once we’re out here [at Camp Buckner]. We’ll rotate through as team leaders; one of my classmates is acting squad leader right now because the squad leader isn’t here. It’s scary and exciting.”

Whatever lessons Jacque Messel has learned about leadership—good and bad—have come from observing others. She feels lucky to have had, during the academic year, good team leaders. Each had strong qualities she wants to emulate.

“Dan Young was my team leader first semester; he always stuck up for me. I had friends whose team leaders were afraid to approach the squad leader, the platoon sergeant, the platoon leader. This spring my name came down on this list saying I needed to make up a road march [from Beast]. But I knew I had done enough to qualify.”

Including the last few hundred meters of the march back from Lake Frederick, going up the ski slope. Her team leader explained this to everyone in the cadet chain of command. All they said was “Your name is on the list, you gotta do the road march.”

The march presented no great physical challenge. It would be an
inconvenience more than anything. But the list was wrong. Messel didn’t want to go along with the program just to excuse bad recordkeeping, and she had every right to be taken at her word.

“My team leader went to the Tac. I think she was impressed he would do that. She said, ‘If you’re qualified, you’re qualified.’ ”

At the same time, her team leader did not try to shield her from trouble when she messed up, or did not know her plebe knowledge. She is glad he took this approach, since it is important to Messel that she stand on her own feet. Many of the cadet men get a “big-brother” mind-set and want to do everything for the women, but Messel knew that approach would come back to haunt her. So she did things on her own.

“Being a woman here isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I thought we’d be isolated, but it doesn’t happen much, mostly when the guys are afraid. Sometimes they worry too much about offending us. I figure if you offend easily you’re in the wrong place anyway.”

As Messel heads back to the barracks, a three-quarter moon rolls along the treetops. Along the road leading away from the camp, cadet guards walk their post. They wear BDUs, pistol belts with canteens, and they carry flashlights. A van pulls up and three cadets, second class women in starched whites, climb out, still laughing about some story they’d been telling. An officer passing by chats them up; they have returned from a dinner for the women’s crew team.

This is a place of groups and subgroups. A cadet belongs to a team and to a certain platoon in a particular company, to a class, to a group of friends. Belonging is the defining feature of cadet life. This is how the whole is held together, by the crosshatched and overlapped connections that run like tape wrapped around a package.

Bob Friesema emerges from Pershing Barracks two days before graduation, wearing the white over gray summer dress uniform. He looks like an upperclassman, though he still wears the plebe’s brass “U.S.” on the shoulders of his dress white shirt. He is relaxed, confident, and nothing like he was during Beast. He handled every challenge thrown
at him, most very well; yet he had a wild-eyed, nervous look throughout Beast.

Nine months later, his hair has grown to the point where he can comb it, and he no longer moves as if he’s had too much coffee. He’ll be a good model for the admissions candidates he will meet at home over summer leave.

“I wanted to know the small details,” he says. “That’s what I’ll talk to them about. Like the fact that my family addressed all my mail to ‘Cadet Friesema’ instead of to ‘New Cadet Friesema.’ And every time I got a letter, some upper class would say, ‘So, you think you’ve already made it though Beast, huh?’ I did a few push ups for that.”

Still, he says, life was relatively easy during Beast. “You get yelled at, you do some push-ups. But you didn’t get hours [on the area] or Article 10s [administrative punishment]. Of course the crisis times were my fault. I’d procrastinate on some assignment and get behind. That was stressful, as opposed to scary. I came into the semester thinking that if I just stayed out of summer school I’d be happy. I try not to think like that any more.”

Like Messel, Friesema went to the pizza party Greg Stitt had for his former charges at the end of the year. He arrived late, but he stuck around after the others left to talk to Stitt. The widely admired junior talked to Friesema about when to do a West Point detail [as Beast or Buckner cadre], about how to pick a major. He also told Friesema to keep his military grade as high as possible because that grade affects all a cadet’s assignments.

“Afterwards I talked to him about his perspective on Beast, because I knew they [the cadre] saw it differently. They were up later than we were and got up earlier. They were accountable to the Tacs and the chain of command; we were only accountable to one person, the squad leader.”

The prospect of increased responsibility doesn’t make him nervous; it’s what he most looks forward to.

“You have to know that tough times are necessary, and it’ll be better for you in the long run.”

Then he quotes one of Stitt’s favorite sayings: “Pain is just weakness
leaving the body.” In a year or two, some other class of plebes will be talking about Friesema and quoting it as his.

His experience with Stitt, Grady Jett, and Shannon Stein, with his own team leaders from the academic year, has shaped what Bob Friesema thinks about leadership. Not one of the plebes mentioned a lesson in leadership from an academic setting, from a classroom. Few of the plebes mentioned any officers (from whom they are separated by layers of upperclass cadets). Their whole experience in this most formative year came from other cadets. In particular, from the cadets they were closest to. Not the Kevin Bradleys, up there in the rarefied air of company command, but the team leaders and squad leaders they saw every day.

“My first detail team leader was from Wisconsin [Friesema’s home state]. All the plebes hated him because he was tough and could be mean. He wasn’t that way to me. He used to ask me what kind of music I liked, and he’d have that on when I came around to his room for some duty.”

Even though he was the benefactor of this small kindness, Friesema thought the favoritism was wrong.

“You shouldn’t have favorites or different ways of treating people. He did look out for me, though. He made sure I was squared away and knew my stuff so that I didn’t get in trouble with the squad leader or platoon sergeant. He used to ask me if I was getting enough to eat, not because he wanted to be my buddy, but because he knew that plebes sometimes don’t get enough. Sometimes he’d have these little boxes of cereal in his room, from the Mess Hall, and he’d give me some.”

His second-detail team leader was more laid-back and interested in Friesema’s intellectual development. He had Friesema read
A Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Flies
, and
Blackhawk Down
(an account of the disastrous American military operation in Mogadishu, Somali in 1993), then they’d discuss the books. Although he enjoyed the dialogue, he also recognized that the second-semester team leader was extremely cynical about West Point, about the endless rules and requirements.

Friesema tried to take a longer perspective. “This stuff just gets old if people don’t know why they’re doing something. I mean, some things you hate wouldn’t be so bad if you knew why you were doing them. I’m sure someone somewhere thinks there’s a reason for it.”

Friesema has lunch in Grant Hall, where the little snack bar is preparing for the onslaught of graduation week visitors. They’re building sandwiches assembly-line fashion, stacking them in shiny plastic boxes in the cooler. Afterwards he walks around Trophy Point, with its displays of cannons captured in the nation’s wars. At the foot of the flagpole, a couple of dozen pieces lie on steel rails. They range from a few feet long to fifteen-foot monsters; some are shiny with fresh black paint. Sunlight drifts downstream on the river’s surface. The weather is perfect, with just enough clouds to show a contrast with the blue sky. The hills are touched with green, the air light and dry and still, so that the view up the river is unobstructed.