Imagine an Oberlin where first-years carrying M14s guard each dorm. Imagine an Oberlin where at 6:30 a.m. someone stands outside your door yelling, “YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES UNTIL FORMATION! DRESS CODE IS!...” Imagine an Oberlin where, instead of a sexual consent policy, members of the opposite sex weren’t allowed to share the same horizontal surface, unless it’s the floor and they’re standing on it.
It’s called West Point Military Academy, and it’s in West Point, NY. And it’s about as far outside the Oberlin bubble I’ve ever been without leaving the country.
I went there last week for an annual conference on US foreign affairs that brings together politics geeks from around the country to discuss US foreign policy.
Even events leading up to my departure were a little offsetting: the letters they sent me appeared almost intentionally designed to weird out a civilian.
For example, dress code was explicitly dictated for every event. The working sessions for the conference were to be “casual,” but, they explained, “casual” means no jeans, no sneakers, a collar, “etc.,” which is not what casual means where I come from, where there’s one guy who wears a full bear suit to class every Friday.
In three different letters there appeared the phrase “YOU SHOULD REMEMBER TO BRING A BATHROBE TO WALK TO AND FROM THE SHOWERS IN THE CO-ED BARRACKS” in large, bold print. The morning I left, I almost drove out to Great Northern to buy one, but decided I was just being paranoid.
How different could it be, right? They’re college students, too. Just more heavily armed.
So I walked into the main conference hall on the first day perhaps only slightly apprehensive about what I was getting myself into. I’d heard more than a few stories about freshman (or “plebe”) hazing, about kids dropping out after mental breakdowns from doing pushups till their arms convulsed. In the auditorium the other delegates were watching some sort of West Point recruiting video, featuring brawny cadets about my age throwing each other into the mud, fast-roping out of helicopters, scuba-diving with massive weapons strapped to their backs and every couple of minutes blowing something to smithereens. Tanks shot rounds into barns on the downbeat of “Enter Sandman” and Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin,’” which blared through an oversized PA.
I thought back to the Bill Cosby video Oberlin gave me when I was a prospie. Not one darn thing blew up in that one, boy.
The music stopped and a guy about my age took the stage, practically beaming with calm, self-assurance and good posture.
“Good evening,” he said, “and welcome to West Point. My name is P.J., and I’m the commanding officer of this conference.”
“You have left your civilian lives behind you now,” he continued deadpan, strolling across the stage with his hands behind his back.
A slide came up on the screen showing a young man getting a buzzcut.
“First, you will all receive haircuts,” he said.
I gulped.
“Second, you will learn to march before dinner this evening.”
More slides, now showing tanks, planes, Blackhawk helicopters, the like.
“By God, we’ll make soldiers out of you all.”
Just then the cadets started giggling.
A new slide came up.
It said, “Just kidding.”
Phew, I thought.
Actually, West Pointers are an agreeable bunch — perhaps the most polite group of students I’ve ever run into. People were perpetually holding doors open for me, and the freshmen called me “sir” before checking my ID and kindly pointing their M14s at the floor.
The conference itself was divided up into groups of ten or so, each with an individual topic. The assignment was to reformulate US foreign policy in the wake of Sept. 11.
Surprisingly, the cadets were perhaps the most idealistic in my group. We were assigned Central Asia, and as the conference began, they jumped right into figuring out the best way to help these countries develop economically and democratically. Finally, one of the student delegates cleared her throat and said, “Wait a minute. Shouldn’t we be asking what the United States’ interest in the region is?”
“Right,” one of the cadets said, seemingly a little crestfallen.
The hazing, though, I have to admit, threw me a bit. Most of the cadets seemed to be on their best behavior, surrounded as they were by civilian representatives. They yelled at the freshmen and ordered them to perform strange and demeaning tasks. In one case, two plebes were ordered to perform an impromptu skit for my benefit. Not so bad, from the looks of it.
But I heard a few stories.
Sitting around having a beer in the West Point Senior’s club, the closest thing to a bar on campus, one upper classman remarked with a knowing grin, “Yeah, we can’t really hit them anymore, but we find ways around that.”
Like what?
Physical training to painful exhaustion, apparently.
There is, though, a certain logic behind hazing. In the military case, it’s not just frat-house machismo. These students are, after all, training to fight and win wars — to throw themselves deliberately in front of bullets and still keep their cool.
As one cadet told me, “A friend of mine went through West Point and later fought in the Gulf War. One time, when everything was going wrong, he just burst out laughing. It occurred to him that nothing over there would be anywhere near as bad as freshman year at West Point.”
So there you have it. It’s not exactly fun, but if the goal is grace under pressure, there are certainly less effective ways of doing it.