Word: beyers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shadow of the Iraq invasion in April 2003, one of Beyer's two best friends arranged to drop out. Another ally, Lisa Huntington, also started the paperwork. Please, Beyer told her as Commitment Day approached, please don't leave me here alone. They talked, day after day. "I was either going to convince her to stay," Beyer says, "or convince myself to leave with her." On Aug. 17, 2003, in the cavernous Robinson Auditorium, Beyer and Huntington stood together among their classmates and took their oath. "We were bawling," Beyer says, "but we made it through...
...after Beyer made her pledge to stay, she went to her first PL300 class on military leadership. The instructor started off by congratulating the cadets on their decision. They were all great Americans, he said. Then he opened the discussion up to the class...
Cadet after cadet spoke up. Terrorists attacked us, they said. If you were on the fence even in the slightest, if you weren't 100% sure you wanted to be in this fight, you shouldn't be here at all. Beyer didn't know those cadets or whether they knew her or whether they saw her as a laid-back swimmer type without a soldier's steel. Still, their comments cut straight through her and destroyed the frail truce she had made with West Point. "I just shut up," she says. "But I was so angry. 'What the hell...
...beginning of Beyer's darkest time at West Point. "Every day I just hated myself for staying. I hated everybody else." Everyone except her teammates and Huntington, whom she had talked into staying with her. "We got much closer. I could use her as a shoulder to cry on, and she could use me the same way," Beyer says. Ultimately, she decided that the Army wasn't going to change...
...cadets have a special gift for unconventional warfare. "They learn how to be terrorists themselves," he says. "The creative terrorist is about the same age as these cadets." He put his students up against lieutenant colonel-- grade officers, and the cadets "kicked their asses in thinking about terrorist threats." Beyer worked with counterterrorism agents leading a cell of cadet "terrorists" who drew up plans for imaginary attacks on real cities. "It just felt very relevant," she recalls...