The Obligatory VMI Puff Piece

By John

Activate the way-back machine, all the way to yesterday.

McCain Likely to Find Friendly Audience at VMI:

LEXINGTON, Va., April 10 -- In recent years, Virginia Military Institute, with its turreted buildings and surrounding mountains, has been a scenic and suitably martial backdrop for supporters of the Bush administration to report on its foreign policy hopes and achievements.

President Bush came here in April 2002 to announce a reconstruction effort for Afghanistan modeled after the Marshall Plan for Europe. Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gave a graduation speech last year in which he defended his oversight of the Iraq war. On Wednesday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the most outspoken supporter of the war in the field of 2008 presidential candidates, will argue that success in Iraq is essential to the nation's security.

McCain will find an audience generally receptive to the message on which he is staking his presidential campaign. But the 1,200 cadets at the state-run military school are hardly unaware of the uncertainties about the U.S. mission in Iraq that threaten McCain's candidacy.

I was at the Bush speech in '02. Pre-Iraq, simpler times. Still, I remember the speech being sold as a "reaffirmation of the President's vision for the Global War on Terror." Yeah, 8 months in and the public already needed reminding.

n-e way....

Good article, but the WaPo just couldn't resisit this old song and dance:

It is a mark of how long the war has lasted that the cadets graduating this spring will have spent their entire time here under its shadow. Several said the war has helped shape, in one way or another, their thinking about the major decision facing them: whether to accept a military commission.

All cadets must be enrolled in the reserve officer training corps of one of the service branches, but after graduation only half have decided in recent years to join the armed services. (A small fraction of cadets serves in the Reserves or National Guard while enrolled.) More than 1,000 VMI graduates have served in Iraq, and eight have been killed. That is fewer than the 10 cadets who died in a single day of fighting in 1864 at the Battle of New Market in the Civil War, and far fewer than the 180 alumni lost in World War II.

Yup, body counting. Press loves it for some reason. What they didn't count was the commissioning rate, which has gone up -significantly, I hear- since 2003. Now part of that is a renewed pledge by the VMI administration to up commissioning rates from the 40% norm, wheels that were in motion prior to OIF. But then there's the cadets who just want to get in the fight. My brother is one of them, pursuing a Marine commissioning track at the Institute as we speak. That's got to be worth a mention. Not my brother, he's a dork....the commissioning part.

Pressing. I always love the standard party line on how much the place sucks:

Amenities are limited to a gym, a PX and a single TV room. Cadets cannot have cars on campus until their fourth year; they have serious restrictions on cellphone use, and they are not allowed televisions in their rooms (or microwaves or coffee makers).

They typically live four to a room, in spaces so cramped that two of the cots are folded up each day. They wear dress uniforms at almost all times -- the street clothes they arrive in can't even be kept in their closet but must be stored in a separate locker. First-year students, or "rats," endure a toughening-up period in their first six months.

Actually you've got to fold all four of your racks up, unless you have the much coveted "hay down," where the damn thing is authorized to remain in the down position. But that's a small nit to pick. Especially given how much I loved this guy referring to the ratline as a "toughening up period." Heh, that's one way of putting it.

Charlie and I beat most of these rules using the Cadet Newspaper, where we reigned as editators (not, mind you, an editocracy). Our fat regulations book, the Blue Book, had volumes on what was authorized and what was unathorized in barracks. Nothing on academic buildings though, which is where we kept our publication offices. This was a loophole that we fully exploited. TV, DVD player, xbox, couches, a ping pong table, microwaves, a pizza oven (couldn't make that up if I tried), stereos. It was heaven. And it was a great place to store those unauthorized civilian clothes. Most of our staff wore pajama bottoms and a various assortment of weird hats, if I remember correctly.

Part-time cadets, it was great. The rankers in barracks, you know....the type that takes themselves very, very seriously....gravely seriously, actually... hated our guts. Tried their best to destory our empire. We won out, the bad guys weren't too skilled at outside the box thinking...But, I suppose, that's a story for another time.

What that has to do with the article, nothing. I just like traveling down memory lane.

April 11, 2007 07:32 PM VMI

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Comments

The same exists at West Point. Many of the lower ranking cadets end up doing better in the Army than their "super cadet" classmates. It is as you said it, the lower ranking guys are the ones who become the most adept at gaming the system, while the ranking cadets have a hard time thinking outside of the rules set before them.

Firefox · April 13, 2007 12:51 AM

Man, go away for a few days...miss out on so much...NOT!

I always thought that those guys who ran the Cadet had such a sweet life...but then again, I was the one who picked Mechanical Engineering for a major. Like what we say in the Navy: choose your rate, choose your fate...

bullnav · April 13, 2007 04:54 AM

BN, my first class roommates were both enjineerz. I didn't see them very much, something about studying in the "dungeon" on the bottom level of Nichols Engineering Building.

Which, I hear, is fully remodeled now. My sweet mom, who is on the parents council, toured the place during the last meeting I guess. She was impressed.

John · April 14, 2007 12:33 AM