Worried They Will Miss the War

A festive crowd gathers on a beautiful spring afternoon at the United States Military Academy. Camouflage-clad cadets, middle-aged professors, assorted civilians and even a few children line the road to the academy's social-sciences department. Before long, the action starts, and a parade of costumed cadets trots by: a shark costume, an Uncle Sam getup and three young men in form-fitting bodysuits—as if the cast of Blue Man Group were training to be our next generation of military leaders. "That man is naked!" a little girl cries out, giggling. She's not quiteright, but still: it's startling to see a cadet jog through the crowd, wearing nothing but a Speedo and a smile. (Article continued below...)

This is West Point's "Sosh Run," in which cadets in a mandatory class make a colorful show of turning in their end-of-semester papers right at the deadline. It's an annual tradition: "Thirty minutes of creativity and blowing off steam," explains Col. Michael Meese, the department head.

 

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All storied institutions have their customs. West Point's seem calibrated to reinforce to its cadets that they are perpetually connected to those who came before. Grant. MacArthur. Eisenhower. Every officer who left the academy and went on to martial greatness wore the same uniforms they do, marched in the same parades, told the same jokes.They were like you. You will be like them.

Composed largely of former high-school class presidents, team captains and National Merit Scholars, the latest class of cadets to graduate from West Point could make up the student body at almost any elite college. But there is an important difference. At least three times, these young men and women have sworn to serve their fellow citizens in the military—taking oaths at the beginning of their freshman (or "plebe") year, at the start of their third (or "cow") year and, on May 23, as they were commissioned lieutenants in the United States Army.

The cadets have never really known an America that wasn't at war. Ask where they were on 9/11, and most answers will have to do with homeroom and gym class. They arrived at the academy in May 2005, just after then–vice president Dick Cheney predicted that the insurgency in Iraq was in its "last throes." They studied and trained as Iraq plunged into civil war, and they watched as some of the American political leaders most associated with the invasion—chief among them, former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld—left the battlefield.

The cadets entered their third year amid signs of the success of the surge; as their time on campus came to a close, the nation's foreign-policy focus had decidedly shifted, with a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and talk of a fresh push in Afghanistan. They are grateful that they have graduated in time to go.