Word: platoonic
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...board and room add up to a hefty $4,700, life at the small (enrollment: 175) coed boarding school is almost as rigorous as that of a Marine boot camp. Many of the students are troubled, and short-tempered Gauld treats them like a drill instructor faced with a platoon of left-footed recruits. He occasionally slaps and routinely humiliates the kids-with their parents' tacit consent-in a no-holds-barred effort to toughen them up and build their characters. "The rod is only wrong in the wrong hands," Gauld likes to say. When he finds that...
...been rejected by the Army and Air Force before he somehow passed the Armed Forces Qualification Test in San Antonio, after failing it in Lufkin. Sent last year to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, he was quickly tagged a "problem recruit" and assigned to a "motivation" platoon. When he defied orders to participate in a pugil-stick fight (a simulated bayonet drill in which 12-lb. poles padded on both ends are used as weapons), Bronson ordered other recruits to whale away at McClure, even after the 115-lb. youth fell to the ground screaming for mercy...
...nation's proudest fighting force is the target of a fusillade of criticism -the worst since 1956, when another D.I., Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon, marched a platoon into a swamp at Parris Island, S.C. Six of the recruits drowned, and McKeon, after a brief prison sentence, was restored to good standing. Bronson's acquittal and the likelihood that charges will be dropped against others involved in McClure's death heighten fears that the corps will not be able to reform itself...
...prime reason for having an honor code, instructors frequently note that one combat officer must always be able to rely on the word of another. To illustrate this point, the cadets are often told a story-perhaps apocryphal-of a company commander who radioed one of his platoon leaders to move his unit out of a particular area. The platoon leader, deciding that his men were too tired to stir, later radioed back that the maneuver had been completed-but he actually let his troops stay in place. Relying on this false statement, the company commander ordered an artillery unit...
...cadets who violated the honor code by cheating on a relatively insignificant exam knew that West Point graduates had not hesitated to lie in Viet Nam-falsifying body counts, concealing the bombing of Cambodia, covering up My Lai. Indeed the commander of the Americal Division, which included the platoon led by Lieut. William Galley at My Lai, was headed by Major General Samuel Koster, who became superintendent of West Point in 1968. Two years later, Koster resigned after he was accused of taking part in the campaign to cover up the facts about the massacre at My Lai. Koster...