Worried They Will Miss the War

Colonel Meese and I talk about the phenomenon. We first met four years ago, because he had been the faculty sponsor to a soldier whose story I featured in a book about the academy's class of 2002. That young officer, Lt. Todd J. Bryant, was a California native who was killed in Iraq, and Meese has stayed in touch with Bryant's parents. The colonel served earlier this year in Iraq, where he was a senior adviser to Gen. Raymond Odierno (West Point class of 1976). When he came home, he says, he wrote an e-mail to Bryant's parents, telling them he hoped the policies he'd worked on would honor their son's sacrifice.

Nearly 70 West Point graduates have been killed in action since 9/11, many of them Meese's former students. "It was important that they know," Meese says, referring to Bryant's parents, "and that others know—it's almost too trite—that they did not die in vain."

There is something humbling in Meese's words, as if it were mildly embarrassing to ask a nation to remember and honor its war dead. I ask Tolliver about this. "Most of America seems to have forgotten we're still at war," he says. "I hope this reminds people that we're still here. After all, when Rome forgot her legions, her legions forgot her."

In March, the second-highest ranking cadet, Sally White, went home to North Carolina as part of a program, visiting high schools and talking about West Point. "I was shocked at how little [the students] knew about anything that was going on in the world," she says. "I was just throwing out information about Iraq that we all know and take for granted, and I had to ask, 'Do you guys know what's going on in Iraq and what happened with the surge and everything else?' And they were like, 'What? I mean, I know there's a war, but what?'?"

Today's cadets arguably have more contact with the outside world than any of their predecessors. But sometimes their glimpse of civilian reality can be unsettling. For a few days this spring, West Point was up in arms over a column that journalist Tom Ricks wrote in The Washington Post. Cadets were getting only "community-college educations," Ricks wrote, and proposed that it and the other military academies ought to be shut down to save money. Though most cadets dismissed the article as an attention-seeking stunt, some took it as a further sign that they are defending a country that doesn't understand them, and maybe doesn't appreciate them. They seem concerned that West Point has a giant bull's-eye painted on it, a sentiment never so strong as earlier this year, when the biggest media story out of the academy had to do with the suicides of two cadets and the attempted suicides of two others. Tragedies, yes, they say, when I ask. But they also wonder, how many students commit suicide at civilian colleges? Others react with frustration, even anger, at the cadets who took their own lives for bringing disrepute on the rest of the corps. Mostly they seem frustrated at the idea that their class would be remembered as the one that graduated during the year in which two cadets killed themselves.

For all its tradition, West Point has the capacity to change, and quickly. Its professors and alumni did some of its biggest intellectual and strategic heavy lifting in redefining the military's counterinsurgency strategy in recent years. But perhaps the most striking and obvious example is the way the academy has adapted over 30 years—a historical blink of the eye—to accept its female cadets. In 1976, the 119 women in the first coeducational class were welcomed by Gen. William Westmoreland, who declared, "Maybe you could find one woman in 10,000 who could lead in combat. But she would be a freak, and we are not running the military academy for freaks."

Half the women in that class were gone by graduation, but now, both the academy and the Army seem to have adapted. (In 2005, the Army awarded the Silver Star, the nation's third-highest medal for valor, to a female sergeant, and last November the Army tapped its first female four-star general.) Roughly 15 percent of cadets are female today—the same percentage as in the Army itself—and the West Point women say they're harder on each other than the men are. "I just read a book by one of the first female graduates, and it was very eye-opening to compare her experience with mine," says Cadet Caroline Miller, whose family lineage includes seven consecutive generations of West Point alumni, going back to 1836. "I have so much respect for those women. I can't imagine doing what they did. Now it's like I have a thousand brothers."