Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(63)
On the last day of the summer, just before the plebes marched back from an encampment to formally join the corps, newsmen descended to interview almost all the women but only two of the men. This caused more hard feelings. And upperclassmen were saying that these newcomers had destroyed the corps by bringing in women.
Those who survived Beast Barracks found that the hostility persisted through the school year.
“Good morning, sir,” a woman would say.
“It was a good morning till you got here, bitch.”
The men would march behind them in ranks, muttering, “Oink, oink.” Things like that.
Andrea Hollen, graduating with a Rhodes scholarship, recalls: “I stood there saying to myself, I will not cry. I will not cry.”
At the same time that they were being berated by upperclassmen and told they were worthless, some of the women plebes began receiving letters from them. Something more powerful than male autarchy and rules against fraternization was at work. There were women in barracks. There were cadets with beautiful, boyish hair, like that of a shipmate on a cruise. It was an appeal that touched fantasies—on a clear autumn morning or in the winter dusk the image of a tender cheek beneath a military cap, the trace of a smile, the womanly figure in rough clothes, these brought together the affection for a comrade in arms and the aching dreams that dwelled in barracks rooms, allowing one, in a single embrace, to possess a woman, a brother, the corps.
Conservative cosmetics may be worn but not false eyelashes or excessive mascara. Dating or the establishing of any emotional relationship between upperclassmen and plebe women is forbidden. Still, “Ninety-five percent of the women were fraternizing when we were plebes,” one of them estimates, “and they’re doing it now.”
“Before I came here,” Becky Blyth says, “my father told me how blacks were treated in his time and I expected something like that, but I also expected a higher level of accepting change.”
She is tense, dark-haired, beautiful, the daughter of a West Pointer. One brother graduated in ’77, another is a year behind her, and a third is applying for entrance. She had always wanted to be in the Army. Her voice is low and she speaks in swift, articulate bursts.
“I’m not the same person emotionally,” she admits. “I used to be very mellow. Now I tend to get upset at things. I guess I’m trying to wean myself off this bitter trip. One thing was the rumors, the talk. Someone would start a story and it would go around. When I was a plebe, they began telling about a football weekend and I was in this hotel going from room to room. An upperclassman called me in and said I was a disgrace to the corps and a lot of other stuff. I asked if I could make a statement. He said yes. “I wasn’t at that football game,” I said.
There are women wearing jump insignia, women who have fired mortars and driven tanks. There is a whiff of China about them, the deep socialist states. They have made astonishing achievements at West Point. Still, they will always be a minority, perhaps 15 percent in an overwhelmingly male school. “I think they perceive us as a separate class,” one of them says. “There’s the class of ’80 and there’s the female class.”
“I’m not women’s lib or anything, that’s not my ideological foundation,” Andrea Hollen says, “but this is a last battleground. I have a keen appreciation of the issues separating men and women.”
“Most of you are still carrying a grudge,” a man observes.
“That’s true,” they agree.
The bitterness passes and there seems to come a strange affection, born who knows where but slowly effacing the scars. The women’s class rings are smaller than the men’s. They usually wear them on the right hand. The men wear theirs on the left, the hand nearest the heart.
One last barrier remains: women are not allowed to choose combat arms, the branches that would put them in the front lines. For some this is a final ambition. They know they are tough, intelligent, and physically qualified. They not only have no hesitation about being given command in combat units, they desire it.
Lillian Pfluke, the top woman in her class physically, is slight, with pale blue eyes and brown hair. She can do seven pull-ups and run two miles in combat boots in just over thirteen minutes. She wanted infantry. “I knew I could do it, but they won’t let me try.”
Captain of the women’s lacrosse team, Pfluke wears no makeup and is marrying a lieutenant from the class of ’79. “I think I’m very confident, aggressive, and very physical,” she says. “I work well with people. I think I’ll be a good leader.”
One thing that may be happening is that men are feeling less inhibited about their career choices. It used to be otherwise. “Guys are going noncombat arms now—you’d never see that before,” a lieutenant colonel says. “The women made that possible.”
There is not as much spit and polish as there used to be. There are fewer formations and parades, and breakfast, except for plebes, is optional. There has been a ruthless pruning of outmoded traditions, but what lies at the heart remains untouched.
“They still come here for the same reasons they did thirty or forty years ago,” says the director of admissions, Colonel Manley Rogers. “Education is still number one.”
A free education at a world-renowned school, the promise of glamour, an Army career. The profile of those admitted is markedly more conservative than at other colleges. West Point gets the achievers, the solid performers, the practical youths. Eighty percent call themselves middle-of-the-road or conservative in their outlook. Half were varsity captains in high school. Almost a third are born-again Christians.