Word: cadet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cadet stands in full battle dress, his face smeared with black-green camouflage grease, sweltering in the August sun. Just two months earlier, David Craft, 19, of Rockford, Ohio, was a high school stud. Now, in cadet slang, he is a beanhead. "It's kind of degrading," he allows. "We were the top of our class. Now we're dirt, scum. They're always on you. Whatever you do is wrong." Craft's best friend from high school, who accompanied him to West Point, has already dropped out. "He couldn't take the loss of freedom," explains Craft. "No McDonald...
...unable to fill its class of '72 with qualified applicants. Last year, at a time of renewed patriotism, it received 12,644 applications for some 1,400 places. Although only 12% of newly commissioned U.S. Army lieutenants are West Pointers, 37% of the Army's generals once wore cadet gray. The academy sets the tone for the officer corps; it regards itself as a repository of martial virtue and soldierly professionalism. By its own claim, West Point's success at imbuing its graduates with these qualities will determine America's success in future wars...
Like any high church, West Point relishes pomp. On crisp autumn Saturdays, tourists flock to the vast greensward known as the Plain to watch the corps of cadets parade by in their gray swallowtail coats adorned with gold braid. The essential West Point, however, is never on public display. It is hidden behind stone battlements, in bleak inner courtyards of black asphalt. In these forbidding surroundings, the rite of passage into the Long Gray Line begins every July with a seven-week ordeal that is officially labeled Cadet Basic Training but is better known as Beast Barracks. Plebes are weaned...
...their first year, cadets "learn how to follow," says West Point Superintendent General Willard Scott Jr., '48. "In the next three, they learn how to lead." Management skills are taught so rigorously that a group of visiting professors from the Harvard Business School, after sitting in on classes last year, pronounced their own institution to be "the West Point of capitalism." Cadets learn leadership firsthand by giving orders to those they outrank in the cadet chain of command--their classmates as well as plebes. "It isn't easy ordering your roommate to shine his shoes," shrugs one cadet sergeant...
...purpose of overloading cadets, says History Professor Lieut. Colonel Robert Doughty, is to "teach them to prioritize under stress, to learn what is important and what is not." The pressure also teaches selflessness by creating a kind of foxhole camaraderie in the corps. "Cooperate and graduate" is an unofficial cadet motto. The deep bonding between cadets has survived the entry of women, who now make up 11% of the corps of cadets. "At first, a lot of guys say, 'What are women doing here?' " says Cadet Borgerding. "But they become buddies...