United States Military Academy
22 quotes
Biography
"Although the states were capable of delivering raw manpower to the military when required to do so, there was no substitute for well-trained officers. In addition to policing Indians, the peacetime army also served as a vehicle for creating a cadre of professional military leaders capable of fighting wars. The US Military Academy at West Point, New York, was established in 1802. Although the academy has had its detractors, including none other than frontiersman and Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett (who unsuccessfully introduced as "Resolution to Abolish the Military Academy at West Point" on February 25, 1830) and more recent luminaries, 523 USMA graduates served in the US-Mexican War, of whom 452 were promoted or decorated for gallantry. The majority of notable Civil War officers, Union and Confederate, were West Point graduates, with 294 serving as Union generals and 151 as Confederate generals."
"The motto of the United States Military Academy at West Point is "Duty, Honor, Country." This motto becomes firmly fixed in the minds and characters of the graduates through daily association and practical application. For generations many of the military leaders of the nation have used it as their guide to proper standards of conduct. This motto has generally permeated throughout the military forces since the Naval Academy at Annapolis is also in accord with this code. Under the honor system lying, quibbling, evasive statements, or technicalities in order to shield guilt or defeat justice are not tolerated. This code requires courage and honesty regardless of consequences."
"Recruited by 15 colleges, I made campus visits to The Citadel, Providence, and Holy Cross before Jack Riley, the West Point hockey coach, read an article in the Boston Globe about a state championship game in which I scored 44 points and collected 28 rebounds. He gave the newspaper clipping to George Hunter, the West Point head basketball coach, who invited my parents and me to visit the academy. I was not at all interested in a military school, but my father and mother wanted to see the campus because they enjoyed watching the TV series The West Point Story with Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, and Clint Eastwood. After we drove to West Point, I walked the grounds of this historic institution, had discussions with Coach Hunter and members of the Army basketball team, and met with All-American players Pete Dawkins and Bob Anderson. I came away impressed with West Point's history, tradition, and institutional values. After returning home and reflecting on the last passage of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," I was positive that I wanted to be a cadet at the United States Military Academy."
"The United States Military Academy was born of necessity. In its earliest days our Nation found itself reliant on Armed Forces to first establish and then maintain itself in the face of external military challenges. Lacking experience and expertise in that realm, we were often obliged to look abroad for examples and guidance. Fortunately, men of genius and dedication came forward such as Lafayette, von Steuben, and Kosciusko, yet America clearly needed her own school for professional officers. General George Washington had been advocating establishment of such an institution for many years, as had other senior officers of the Continental Army. Events in his presidency convinced Thomas Jefferson of the necessity, leading him on 16 March 1802 to sign a bill establishing the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Developing and commissioning leaders of character for the United States Army has been West Point's mission ever since, with the inspiration and the challenge of its Cadet Honor Code setting a high standard for those who would choose to earn the right to lead America's Soldiers."
"Developed and refined over two centuries, the Cadet Honor Code is a foundation for a lifelong commitment to doing what's right."
"President Gerald Ford signed Public Law 94-106 on October 7, 1975. One hundred and seventy-three years of tradition were changed in an instant with the stroke of a pen. Women could now apply to West Point. Women throughout the country rejoiced when the announcement was made. Most felt it was long overdue, and all that needed to be done was to have women start applying. In reality, nobody outside the military had any concept of thousands of decisions and the mountain of work that needed to be done. Normally, a student starts the admissions process during the second semester of their junior year of high school. Members of Congress are making decisions on the nominations for the class that enters in July during the late fall. President Ford signed the bill in October, so women who wanted to enter the Academy in the summer of 1976 were far behind in this long and complex process."
"I came to love, really love, road marching. It's called a suck or a haze at West Point, but I think the cadets aren't being fair to it. There's something wonderful about being in a column of marching people: the gravel popping under soles, the leather flexing in boots, the kind of saddle-top sounds as the ruck (what a backpack gets called in the Army) frames settle. Occasionally someone, out of sheer misery, sighing Oooh, or just blowing out air, which in the general silence is like a whale breaching and then slipping back under the surface. You can watch a leaf float down from a tree or stare at the guy's rifle in front of you. The boiling of life down to its basic questions: Can you do this? Can you hang with the rest of us? Those questions don't get asked much, in the civilian world."
"Applying to West Point is a clerical road march. Fifty thousand high school juniors step off together, filling out the official request-for-information form. From there it's a test of stamina, a battle of attrition. Twelve thousand candidates complete the application. Six thousand make it to the physical aptitude examination stage, a fitness pop quiz- push-ups, pull-ups, standing long jump, three-hundred-yard dash. Service academies are the only institutions in the country that will measure how far you can toss a basketball from a kneeling position. (A little under seventy feet is the minimum.) Four thousand candidates are nominated by their senators or congressmen. The congressional nomination is a round-robin event, ten candidates competing for each slot, elected officials taking a turn as admissions officers, sifting through transcripts, recommendations, and clean-cut photographs. (Especially ambitious parents will snag jobs at a congressman's in-town headquarters, hoping to gain their kids an inside track.) If your parents are career military, you can jump the line and apply directly to the president. If one of them happens to be disabled, deceased, POW or MIA- or a recipient of the Medal of Honor- your file skips all the way to the superintendent's desk at West Point. Then the folks at admissions get down to the elimination round, stacking valedictorians against team captains, yearbook editors against debaters. Two thousand hardy candidates are pronounced qualified for admission, but only about twelve hundred get offered actual West Point places. They receive a plaque in the mail. In many small towns, friends and neighbors stop in for viewings."
"For ten minutes there's nothing. Because this is a way to commemorate loss: with an absence, with stillness, with nothing. A steady sprinkler noise of insects rises off the grass, treetops rustle like the sound of approaching water. A truck bumps down a distant road, dragging a hole through the quiet. The cadets stare out to where they sky ends behind the dark, bulky hills. The drill team fires a twenty-one-gun salute. Seven rifles, three shots apiece, each volley followed by a fluffy spreading echo. Then there's the night with its chilly smells of granite and grass and powder. The first slow notes of a bugle, a mournful taps: up the scale, over the scale, down the scale. Then the cadet bagpipe team begins. Matthew MacSweeney is with them, playing "Amazing Grace," with its frills and edges. Faraway music, crimped by sadness, to escort the week's losses over the Plain. After a moment, the cadets sing the alma mater. The sound is close to breathing, the faintest way four thousand people can sing one song. Then the cadets file out- the snap and click of shoes, a rush of gray and white, faces going visible in the light from doorways- and the night is left alone with itself. A quarter hour later, Josh Rizzo is back in his room, staring at his hand. "I didn't know if I was ready," he says, "until this shit happened. I mean, I came here originally to play baseball. But I know now, I'm here to defend this nation. I have no fears, no qualms about going." He runs his fingers over his ring. "It's weird. When I first got this ring, I thought, 'Look at this cool ring. I can get any job I want.' Now I look at it and I think, 'We are called.' I've got a job to do. I've got to defend my home.""
"The graduates return to barracks for the final uniform change, then spread out across the post for their swearing-in ceremonies. George is sworn in by the rabbi. Captain Parades swears in a bunch of Guppies on the Plain. At a tent by the water, before his parents, Huck is sworn in by Major Vermeesch. His mother and father thank the officer for what he's practiced on their son. It's a long march to bring Vermeesch and Huck to this spot together. Before he leaves, the major hands Huck a gift, a copy of the military novel Once an Eagle. "Next to the Bible," Vermeesch says, "this is probably the best book ever written. Just read it, OK?" A couple months later, when Huck actually starts the novel, a memo on official West Point stationary falls from between the pages. He's not going to read it- he assumes the major stuck it there as a bookmark and then forgot about it. Then he glances at the subject line: it's the official record of their counseling session, from February 2000. There were all the TAC's warnings about "discipline" and "separation" and "questioning your desire to be an Army officer." In the upper right corner, beside the date 6/1/02, Vermeesch has scribbled in, "What a transformation. Continue to make us proud.""
"At West Point, the Army is doing it right. You can't go far, in that beautiful stretch of forest overlooking the Hudson River, without hearing about morals and ethics as they apply to leadership. Both a strong body and a right mind are needed to ensure that we have the kind of commanders who make the right decisions where things really matter: down at the platoon level."
"I don't know what West Point was like in 1998, when I was entering the Navy, but if I had to do it over again, it would be tempting to heed its call. I had always thought of West Point as a cold, sterile place, a gray-walled castle on a hill. But it's more modern, dynamic, and gritty than that, and its emphasis on preparing young warriors for ground combat will warm any special operator's heart."
"On Wednesday, June 2, 1976, I graduated and my father commissioned me as a second lieutenant. Our graduation ceremony was where we'd begun our cadet experience, at Michie Stadium. As I sat with 834 other members of my class, out of an original 1,378, waiting to receive our diplomas, I realized I was very different from the seventeen-year-old boy whose friend had dropped him off a few years earlier. I wondered if I could, or would, be the kind of military leader I admired, and I was eager to try. When the ceremony ended, in accordance with tradition, we launched our hats into the air and congratulated one another. I rapidly looked for Annie- and the exit. As quickly as possible, I threw everything I owned into the used Chevy Vega I'd bought and set course with Annie down the hill away from campus. As we neared the last bend before the academy gates, I turned to her. "Hey, look back at West Point." "Why?" she asked, twisting in her seat to look at the tips of the parapets getting smaller behind the hills. "Because that's the last time we'll ever see it.""
"[You] have become a team. And you're going to be drawing upon each other for the rest of your lives."
"You are what makes the United States undaunted by the difficult, and motivated by the impossible."
"My other biggest challenge at the academy revolved around the honor system. Honor, to me, is a simple do or don't. USAFA had gone through some recent cheating scandals, which threw a sharp focus on the system of dealing with honor violations and demoralized the wing. At the academy our honor system seemed bogged down by specifics and nuances of meaning. It was treated like a court of law, which shocked me. At the Point, honor was simple; it wasn't thought over, it wasn't discussed, it wasn't codified, analyzed, beaten to the ground, or weakened by myriad interpretations. We just lived with it, accepted it; we didn't lie, didn't cheat, and didn't steal. Not lying meant you didn't make falsehoods, known falsehoods, deliberate falsehoods, or little white falsehoods. You didn't cheat on exams or in the classroom. You didn't steal. That just meant you didn't steal. Period."
"The 1960s might be called the burnt-over decade; strife over civil rights set American cities alight; women demanding greater rights torched their bras; and the draft cards of many antiwar protestors went up in flames. The youth revolt assaulted all the bastions of tradition; the sense of innocence that pervaded American culture gave way to a cynicism that polarized- and still does- American society. While West Point appeared as an oasis of order and discipline, it could not entirely escape the turmoil and demands for change. The cadets, after all, were products of that same overindulged baby boomer generation."
"While a conservative, I was no troglodyte- a claim some of my charges might contest. West Point is a kind of monastery tucked away on a bluff overlooking the Hudson, far removed from the hustle and tussles of modern life (ironically within an hour's drive of Manhattan). Tradition was its bedrock. Cadets still wore the gray uniforms of the Battle of Chippewa in the War of 1812, and many of the practices dated back at least that far. For decades, adherence to hoary teaching practices- rote memorization, daily recitations, arcane grading methods- left the Military Academy trailing the best civilian universities. West Point was in the midst of changing its pedagogic methods and modernizing the curriculum, but that, too, widened old fault lines. I agreed with those who wanted to make tempered adjustments when called for but also believed in preserving the best of the old system and enforcing the rules as written, which applied equally to officers and cadets. The tactical officers bore responsibility for the discipline and military training of cadets; the former demanded most of our energies."
"Of all Army schools, West Point is the most resistant to change."
"Of all the institutions in this country, none is more absolutely American; none, in the proper sense of the word, more absolutely democratic than this. Here we care nothing for the boy's birthplace, nor his creed, nor his social standing; here we care nothing save for his worth as he is able to show it. Here you represent, with almost mathematical exactness, all the country geographically. You are drawn from every walk of life by a method of choice made to insure, and which in the great majority of cases does insure, that heed shall be paid to nothing save the boy's aptitude for the profession into which he seeks entrance. Here you come together as representatives of America in a higher and more peculiar sense than can possibly be true of any other institution in the land."
"An officer corps, my West Point education emphasized, must have a code of ethics that tolerates no lying, no cheating, no stealing, no immorality, no killing other than that recognized under international rules of war and essential for military victory. Yet I also learned to my chagrin that there are those who fail the standards and that the code must be constantly policed. I saw failures at West Point, and for all my preventive efforts, I also saw failures among those who subsequently served under my command. Yet if an officer corps is to serve the nation as it should, firm dedication to a high moral code must always be the goal. One of the most exciting events of my plebe year was the commencement address by the Army Chief of Staff, General MacArthur, who was much as any man extolled such a code. Already a distinguished soldier even before World War II and the Korean War, General MacArthur spoke at a time when pacifism and economy imperiled the military services and the nation's security. While warning against misguided pacifism and politically inspired economy, he spoke of West Point as "the soul of the Army". "The military code that you perpetuate," he said, "has come down to us from even before the age of knighthood and chivalry. It will stand the test of any code of ethics or philosophy.""
"Returning home on leave following my second year at West Point, I called on a great-uncle who had joined the Confederate Army at the age of sixteen and had fought in a number of major Civil War battles, including Gettysburg, and had been with Robert E. Lee at Appamatox. My Uncle White was the younger brother of my grandfather. He hated Yankees and Republicans, not necessarily in that order, and talked derisively about both. When I visited, he was seated in a wheel chair, in grudging acquiescence to the infirmities of age. Tobacco juice decorated his shirt and stains around a spittoon on the floor testified to the inaccuracy of his aim. Flies buzzed through screenless windows. "What are you doing with yourself, son?" Uncle White asked. I answered the old veteran with trepidation. "I'm going to that same school that Grant and Sherman went to, the Military Academy at West Point, New York." Uncle White was silent for what seemed like a long time. "That's all right, son," he said at last. "Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson went there too.""