At 0520, the post has a powdery silence, a handful of sweatsuited cadets jogging through puddles. Erik “Ox” Oksenvaag, a half Taiwanese, half Norwegian cow, is leading his plebes to Arvin Gym for some early-morning physical training. Ox is five foot nine, dark-eyed, strong-jawed, hair high-and-tight. For 0520 PT, plebe Chrissi Cicerelle is entirely presentable: French manicure, gold ring, gold watch, diamond studs in her ears. Cicerelle and Ox work through sit-ups, pull-ups, push-ups, leg lifts; there’s a lot of intercadet contact. Resistance drill: Ox lays his head between Cicerelle’s ankles, grips her socks; Cicerelle stands above him and Ox swings his ankles to her chest level, where Cicerelle pushes them back. They strain and grunt (Ox: Ungh! Cicerelle: Oh!) together in this faintly sexual way. But success in a coed military environment means ignoring the fact that you are in the coed military environment. (“You know how you get these born-again Christians?” Oksenvaag says. “Here you get born-again virgins.”) When Ox kicks Cicerelle in the breasts, he apologizes, and she says, “Yeah, right, you’re making me a soldier,” and Ox offers to compensate by letting her kick him in the nuts.
Behind them, cows Jake Bergman and Trent Powell are playing a pickup game of basketball. They’ve managed to work it so they’re playing skins: they lurch around the court with their perfectly cut chests looking buff. In his second week of training, I learn, George Rash has shaved another twenty seconds from his run time. Helping Rash is like working an unfamiliar muscle group for Bergman, since Jake has mixed feelings about the Academy. “This place—to be blunt—like, sucks,” Jake says. Powell jokes, “It’s a $250,000 education shoved up your ass a nickel at a time.”
They make a strong case for not being huah. “There’s rules for everything,” Jake says. For how wide dorm windows can be opened, for book bags (all black, no visible logo). “Even when it’s not in the rule book, it’s still a rule. Like there’s a policy, we’re not allowed to chew gum in class. No one knows why. It’s college, but it’s like high school.” Jake was recruited to play football. West Point flew him in on a visit, toured him around the weight room, took him to a bar; the one military thing he saw was some plebe getting hazed in the post office, and Bergman thought it was pretty funny. “I laughed. I didn’t know that was going to be me.” Jake wanted USC. “But I didn’t really have a lot of choice. Thirty-two grand a year, my parents said they wouldn’t pay for it, you know?”
Trent Powell grew up outside Houston, part-timing at his dad’s truck stop, the Triple-T, named for the three kids: Trent, Toby, Timothy. Trent hosed down cattle trailers, scrubbed beer trucks, clinked through the smell of hops. He and his parents had a deal: they’d pay for a private high school if he got a college scholarship. Trent wanted Academy life. “There’s the glamour portion as a young kid—you know, being in uniform, having some wild, crazy time.” He laughs. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.” Trent and Jake lift two hours a day; their mornings are spent planning when they can get into the weight room. “You can make fun of it,” Jake says, “but the gym is like our social function. It’s the thing we have that we can get away from this place. Everyone says we’re addicted to it. I’m definitely in the best shape of my life.”
The Army Bergman and Powell are being developed for is, as of 1999, an organization in transition. No one seems sure what the mission is—troops have been used to put out forest fires and manage hurricane relief—and this worries them. They don’t know whom they’ll fight, can’t guess where politicians might send them. The Cold War would have been easier. “We don’t know who our enemy is,” Jake says. “We don’t know what we’re going to be doing. It’s just so vague. The scary thing is, we still train with doctrine from like ten years ago. And we’re goin’ to be fighting through cities—it’s no more like warfare with big huge divisions where there’s huge tanks.” This problem is being raised throughout the Washington defense establishment. A Pentagon administrator asks me, “What do you think we’re socializing them for up there? War-fighting. Everything is geared to war-fighting. When they leave, what do they do? Peacekeeping. When was the last time anyone did war-fighting? But they spend four years . . . in their mind, that’s what the Army is.” The official shows me studies: cadets exhibit negative attitudes toward peacekeeping and global missions.
Jake Bergman isn’t interested in Kosovo. “We want to deal with something legitimate. We don’t feel like baby-sitting. I mean, we should get trained in, like, negotiation skills and things like that. But we don’t get any of that stuff.”
Last year, for a class in the Behavioral Sciences and Leadership Department (BSL motto: “Building strong leaders”), Jake did a study. “It was about how to keep people from dropping out of the Army,” he says. “What the major problems were, why people aren’t staying in.” The model is supposed to be a twenty-year Army career, with retirement at half-pay. “West Point attrition is huge,” Powell explains. Jake wasn’t surprised by the numbers he got. “You’re probably surprised,” he says. “’Cause you probably come here thinking all these guys all want to serve twenty years. But to tell you the truth, we sit and live it every day, so I wasn’t surprised. Very few people you meet now want to stay twenty years. Like, you look at the statistics from the class of ’95,’96, and that’s what the trend is—getting out as fast as they can.”
Like many cadets, Bergman and Powell both enrolled at the Academy thinking they’d go career. “You’re not sure now?” I ask. “No, no, no,” Powell says. “It sounded like fun,” Bergman says. “You do career, wow, you’re forty-three when you’re done. On paper it sounds great. You can start a whole new career. You’re forty-three years old. You’re young! And the West Point ring opens doors for you.” For that same report, Jake did a survey of adult officers. The results fell in line: salary concerns, family stress, deployments. “You don’t get paid enough,” Trent says. “My dad’s friend is CEO of a Fortune 500 company,” Bergman says. “He’s like, ‘There’s so much market for West Point graduates.’ The pension plan’s great, but I mean, God, these companies, they can do better than that now. Seriously, you could probably make three times as much money within five years.”
And there’s the problem of being twenty-three, twenty-four years old on military bases, away from girls. “Y’know,” Powell jokes, “I’m at the peak of my testosterone level right now. I feel like my stock is going down every day I get older.” Military deployments will take guys to places like the Balkans or Korea. “That’s prime time for meeting your spouse or somebody,” he says. “You’re in one of those places, who are you gonna meet? And if you do meet a woman, who’s to say what she’s going to do when you’re spending nine months in Kosovo? How is she going to have a career when you’re changing posts every three years?” “Not many girls want to be with a guy that, like, at any moment’s notice is going to be in Haiti for six months,” Bergman says. “How much would that suck if you picked up and left? Girls nowadays, they don’t want to have to play with that.” This surprises me, after the many official presentations about responsibility and selfless service. “A lot more people here than you’d think, think like us,” Powell says.