Worried They Will Miss the War

"If you ask an officer here for career advice," says Andrew (A.J.) Pulaski, the 2009 class president, "they say the first thing you need to do is get out there and get deployed. Because pretty soon the war's going to be over, and you won't have that legitimacy, being an officer—like the only one in the Army—that hasn't served."

A few weeks shy of 27, Pulaski was the oldest cadet at West Point this year, an ex-sergeant and one of about 30 former enlisted soldiers who have already been to war. He skipped the Sosh Run that spring day, gathering with about a dozen classmates in a conference room to talk about what lies ahead. "I know what the Army is like, and I'm good at it," Pulaski says. He jumped out of an airplane with the 173rd Airborne Brigade during the invasion of Iraq, and he served a second tour there with the 82nd Airborne Division in 2004. Two of his fellow soldiers were killed in action.

"A lot of people say, 'If it ever stops being fun, then I'm getting out'," Pulaski continues. "Anyone who thinks that the Army is always fun has obviously never been on the receiving end of an improvised explosive device, or a firefight in the middle of the night."

Pulaski and the other cadets are at pains to emphasize that they don't feel they're pushed to conform their thinking to the military's party line. I mention an Army officer who taught in the social-sciences department years ago, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling. Every cadet learns about him soon after arriving, as they are all required to read his 2007 article, "A Failure in Generalship," in which he called out the Army's top leaders for utterly failing to plan for the war in Iraq. Pulaski mentions a recent visit from Col. Joseph P. Buche, the commander of the Third U.S. Infantry Regiment. Buche said he expects his junior officers to disagree with him on something important—and tell him about it—at least three times per quarter.

In exchange for their taxpayer-paid education, West Point alumni normally owe five years on active duty in the Army, plus another three in the reserves. But the academy touts statistics showing that the number of its graduates who stay on is remarkably consistent since the end of the Cold War: roughly half of all graduates stay for more than five years. Still, with the number of troops overseas, the Army needs more officers to stick around. One solution has been to encourage new lieutenants to agree to take longer active-duty commitments from the very start.

Cadet Seán Tolliver did just that, trading six extra years—until May 2020—for a guarantee that he'll be assigned to an infantry unit in Hawaii. While he has yet to serve in the "real Army," Tolliver says he's convinced that this is what he is meant to do. "I deliberated on it a lot," Tolliver says. "I knew I wouldn't be happy doing anything but the infantry; it's the only fit that would have worked."

It's easy to get caught up in an undercurrent here, a constant comparison of the relative worth of civilian and military roles. Cadets speak about the important contributions civilians make in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the idea that officers commissioned through ROTC programs can be just as good as West Pointers. But there's a sense that it's a military form of political correctness.