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My Breakout
By Charlie
John said: "Then we marched 3 more miles out to the mud hill and clawed up that awful cow-shit filled pasture. It was a full effing weekend. I still remember tipping my jungle boots upside down and watching a slow trickle of blood flow out, courtesy of all the open blisters on my feet. Anyway, if you're going to half-ass it, why even bother?:"
I've got my own story to tell, as does every VMI man. Back when I thought I could write a novel on my VMI experience, I transcribed my breakout experience, which I have posted below the fold. The pictures posted here are actually from my Rat's breakout, the VMI class of 2004+3. Our rats had the last mud hill climb, before the "new corps" came into fruition (which I claim total responsibility for holding off, the administration couldn't scrap the Ratline while I was there due to my tireless and effectively argued op-eds in the CADET newspaper.)
So there's the image. The event, in my scraped-together novel attempt (which I wrote right after I graduated) , is below the fold:
Breakout
Luke : You've failed, your highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.
The Emperor : So be it... Jedi.
-Return of the Jedi
1500 Hours, February 24th 2001
My heart thumped in my chest as I looked at the rising hill in front of me. How the hell had I gotten to this point. How the Hell was I going to make it up this thing. I was more tired now than I had ever been in my entire life. Cheers and shouts rang down the rolling hills of McKethan Park. We stood in our sweat soaked BDUs, the winter sun shining down on us. We stood alone together, a company that had relied on each other to get us through to this point. I knew all of the faces that stood in the platoon that day. We had fought, argued, pushed, strained, worked, lived, and laughed together for seven of the longest months of my life. Release was what we all wanted, glorious satisfaction of what we had conquered. Our lives up to this point had been a prelude to what we would find at the top of that hill.
The RDC member, Mr. Just, who had led us during the long march out here, started yelling for us to do "high knees." as we ran in place, he raised his arms as we began to shout. Our volume began to rise and rise until the cacophony reached a fever pitch. Movement, noise, light, the crunching of the dry grass underneath our combat boots all surrounded us.
"Go get ‘em, Delta." Just shouted. We charged forward to meet our fates head on.
0600 Hours, February 23rd 2001
"Get on the stoop, Rats!"
I rolled out of my rack energized. Wellington must have felt this way when he first saw Napoleon’s line start to break. It was the beginning of the end. We took at Rat Bible test in the freezing morning on the stoop, as RDC members trolled the line of us sitting in our chairs we had drug out on the stoop. We stood holding the chairs straight out in front of us, straining for at least 10 minutes before we began the test, but I was beyond caring. Class after that was an afterthought.
The prospective cadets arrived in the afternoon, to see a college that was so far off the reservation I’d be surprised if any of them gave a second thought to attending VMI after that brief visit. The Rats looked like abused POW’s. Many were limping from the constant wear of combat boots and frequent force marches. All were hollow-eyed and massively fatigued. We were so beleaguered that we broke the speaking-outside-of-Barracks rule. When we passed a group of the high school students, we would tell them exactly what we thought about the place.
"Run away."
"This place sucks- don’t come here."
"Get the hell out of here- go to Tech!"
We were herded into the small Physics lecture room after SRC. The whole Rat Mass was going to get a "briefing" by the RDC. We wore our gray blouses, and the "briefing" started off with the RDC packing all of the Rats into the small confined seating rows, and straining them while standing at attention. Someone had turned the heater in the room up all the way, and after a few minutes, the 300-some population in the lecture hall began to leak sweat through their wool uniforms. We were screamed at to be silent, and the only noise in the auditorium-style lecture room was the sound of the low-quarters of RDC members pounding up and down the stairs to yell at different victims who looked around or did not strain hard enough.
Then, a film projector was flipped on, and we began to view the silent film "Nosferatu." At this point, all logical means of thinking and reasoning my way through the situation evaporated. It was now just me against the creeping insanity of VMI. The Ratline had seemed outlandish in August when they yelled at us loudly. Now we were sweating in a heated lecture room, getting flamed for not straining while watching a vampire movie made in the 20's. The cheesy, over-dramatic music played over the speakers as it was projected up on a screen in front of us.
Suddenly, someone started coughing, then others quickly began to join in. Soon everyone was coughing. The RDC went ballistic and began pushing themselves into us, bowling over rats, screaming "stop coughing STOP FUCKING COUGHING, WE MEAN IT!!"
"You can’t break us!" Somebody yelled. Then they totally lost it. They cut the film off, and told us we weren’t ready to break out yet. They said Breakout would be cancelled unless we got our collective shit together by the next day. The RDC President told us to be back on the stoop at 2200 for a PCI (Pre Combat Inspection) and then they stormed out, defeated by the very thing they had created. The Rats were ready, now. In that room, the last psy-op by the RDC failed.
Then something bad happened, that was forbearing of worse things to come. The politicians emerged. Various members of our class pushed their way to the front of the lecture hall, and demanded our attention. We all knew that we would have to elect class officers, our GC, after Breakout. These guys were trying to get their campaigns started a little too early for my liking.
"Look guys, we’ve got to act like a class if we want to be one." said Mark Lucas. Lucas was a short, stocky black kid from Band company. He was well liked, but also well-known as an over-enthusiastic Bible-thumper. He garnered boos from the crowd over this comment.
"Fuck the RDC, Man! They just had us watch a goddamn silent film! Why should respect-or even put up with that!" Matt Delauro sounded back at him from the front of the room. Matt played up the crowd, Lucas grimaced.
"We want to break out tomorrow- right?" He got cheers and whoops in response, "Then we’ve gotta stick together plain and simple. We’re the only ones who’re gonna be here..."
He got cut off as more shouts rang out. Someone that no one liked jumped up on the table trying to get attention, and shouted "Rats! Ears!" He was booed down by the entire crowd.
I was disturbed at the turn of events in that room that night, but only briefly. From what I saw, our class might have been unified as far as having shared the same experiences, but political discourse was a resounding failure. After several more minutes of non-debate, we resolved collectively to return to our rooms quietly. This first attempt at class unity did not bode well for the future of the class of 2001+3.
We awoke at 0400 on Saturday, and formed for a force march. Our dykes were out there with us, sleepy-eyed much as we were. We silently filed down Hospital Hill and over Route 11 toward McKethan Park. We marched down the winding river trail in the dark. It was raining lightly, but the march was at a quick enough pace not to notice it much. We passed McKethan park and continued on for 2 miles or so, then returned to Barracks. Already tired from the march, we were herded down to the mess hall after returning our canteens and rifles to our rooms. We ate chow briefly, and were given stern lectures by our cadre on what it meant to be a VMI cadet. We would have responsibility now, we had to use everything we had learned during the Ratline. Jones, our OPS SGT, gave us one of the best talks.
"Look Rats, just because you break out, it doesn’t mean you slack off. Things are gonna be better and easier for you for now, but life gets hard here after a while. Don’t be shitbags. Don’t slack off. Study, shine your shit, be good cadets. You got traditions and pride at this school. That’s something you don’t get anywhere else. You’ve come a long way, Rats. Don’t let yourselves down by letting the BR spirit wash off with the mud."
We returned to the stoop, and had a long, long stoop run on the second stoop, getting worked out for at least an hour. We were then sent back to our rooms to get water. After 15 minutes, the RDC shuffled us back down to the New Barracks Courtyard for a Sweat Party with the Third class. It was raining now, and after doing up-downs on the wet deck of Barracks, we were soaked through and through. Then we had Breakout preparation time with our dykes. This "Dyke time" was an un-supervised hour long "unofficial" workout. We low crawled across the freezing, damp courtyard. We got worked out in the dyke’s rooms, and then we were back pushing in the courtyard, sprinting from one end to the other and often slipping on the wet floor.
We then helped each other close up our cuffs on out BDU blouses and pants with duct tape, to keep the mud from getting inside them. Buses had bee pulled into a line in front of Barracks to shuttle upperclassmen out to Breakout Hill. Freezing rain was falling all around us as cheering upperclassmen boarded the buses as we jammed into JM Hall for a final speech by Sergeant Major Alvin Hockaday. The burly Marine SGM was a powerful figure as he strutted down the main aisle of JM Hall, among the seated, exhausted rats.
"When I came here as a young Marine NCO many years ago- I heard the same thing then that I hear today: you haven’t had a ratline!" Hockaday’s booming voice reverberated through us all as we listened. "Your ratline wasn’t as hard as mine! Your Ratline was soft! Well- they were wrong then- and they are wrong Now!"
Everyone cheered. "You made it through- you survived- because of the men and women next to you- because of your BRs!"
"BR, BR, BR!" He repeated, each booming louder than the last. "That will be the person you can always count on! Your BR!" Cheers erupted from the rats, as Hockaday blasted out the proclamations from his barreled chest "And today- that will be the person beside you as you climb your final hill- your BR!"
"Go! Go! Go!"
I sprinted full bore up the hill, almost willing forward motion into my dead, sore, and non-responding muscles. The incline rose sharply and fast. We crossed the first berm, and met the second and third classmen, who immediately shouted for us to start low crawling. We wormed our way up the hill through the dry grass. Then we hit the mud.
The whole area of the hill had been dug up by heavy equipment and sprayed down with water from fire trucks. It was as if an entire layer of grass and topsoil had been scraped off the crest of the hill, replaced by cold, gooey, wet , brown mud. Immediately a third shoved my face into it as I crawled forward. I made my way up as much as I could, BRs helped each other along the way. We pulled on each others legs and arms to gain ground, even as some upperclassmen grabbed us by our legs and drug us back down several feet. Eventually we got past the seconds and thirds to our dykes. Fred saw me and shoved a huge rock down my pants. The thing began a slow, painful descent from the top of my ass to the cuff by my boot. Mud was everywhere, in my eyes, in my mouth, in my ears, down my pants and shirt. The dykes put handfuls of the stuff in our pockets and down the backs of our necks as we continued to press forward.
The experience itself was unreal. My mind shut down, and my body just seemed to move forward and upward. Fred pushed and pulled at me, as I rolled myself over the second berm, landing in a huge moat of muddy water. I blinked my eyes open and saw a five foot cliff in front of my that my BRs were struggling up. Those on top were reaching their hands down, and those on the bottom were pulling and groping blindly. I waded through the moat toward the squirming throng, and just as I got half way up, an upperclassman grabbed my belt from behind and tore me off of the mud wall, and I fell back into the moat, splashing in and submerging. I landed hard on a huge rock, directly on my back. For a second I paused below the muddy water. My body was exhausted, wracked with pain and finished. Then I heard the voice.
"GET UP!"
Somebody grabbed my hand and jerked me up. As I burst above the thick water, the winter sun had broken through the clouds. I didn’t pause anymore after that. This time, I attacked that last hill, climbing and trashing and forcing my way up it. Fred grabbed my hand, and pulled me up. I flopped over the berm and slid down about three feet, to the bottom. I exhaled.
My eyes were still clinched shut, caked with mud on the outside. Fred dumped out water from his canteen and splashed it over my face. I looked around, eyes open fully for the first time. People were rushing around with hoses, spraying off muddy figures that may or may not have been actual humans underneath. Heated tents were nearby where our laundry bags sat with a dry set of sweat dyke inside. I was in such a state euphoria of what had just happened, I barely noticed Fred talking to me.
"What class are you?"
"Huh?"
"What class are you?"
I grinned widely, my face plastered with mud. "The class of 2004."
Recovery
We were hosed off, and a group picture snapped of the company after we changed. We were bussed back to the I, where we showered up down in Cocke Hall. I was still picking mud from various nooks and crannies of my body when the last company arrived from Breakout Hill. We had a formation in Cocke Hall, where the RDC president addressed us.
"Look R.. Everyone. You’ve come a long way, but there is one last ceremony to do. Your going to march into Jackson Arch- your gonna strain for one last time. Then- the First Class President is going to give a speech, and officially end the 2001 Ratline. You’ve come a long way, but remember- it’s not over. Attrition at VMI is almost 50%. While there are almost 400 of you here today, only about 200 will graduate in 4 years. Use what you learned, stick together. You came this far by working together- finish the job."
The drums beat and we marched through Jackson Arch with our heads held high, despite the strain. The First Class President posed on top of the sentinel box and delivered a powerful speech.
"You are now members of the corps- with duties and responsibilities. Now you are cadets, not rats. You live in the same system of privileges, demerits, and penalties we all do. Live by the Honor Code, stick by your Brother Rats, keep our traditions alive! VMI is what it is not because of the buildings or the uniforms, but because of you! Now how about we end this Ratline thing?" Cheers rang out among the rats at base of the sentinel box and the multitudes of upperclassmen on the stoops. "We’re gonna do 3 old yells- one for our dyke’s class- the class of 1998, one for our class, and one... for the class of 2004!"
"OLD YELL, OLD YELL FOR THE CLASS OF 1998, ARE YOU READY?"
"LETS GO! RAH VIRGINIA MIL! RAH RAH RAH! RAH RAH VMI 98,98,98!
"OLD YELL, OLD YELL FOR THE CLASS OF 2001, ARE YOU READY?"
"LETS GO! RAH VIRGINIA MIL! RAH RAH RAH! RAH RAH VMI 01,01,01!
"OLD YELL, OLD YELL FOR THE CLASS OF 2004, ARE YOU READY?"
"LETS GO! RAH VIRGINIA MIL! RAH RAH RAH! RAH RAH VMI 04,04,04!
Cheers and shouts rang out across the courtyard, and the Ratline of the class of 2004 thus ended. We grinned and slapped each others backs as we grouped around the sentinel box. The glorious feeling of a lifting of a burden rippled through our entire class. I walked around after the crowd had dispersed. Most of us returned to our rooms, and pretty much everyone wanted to take another shower. Mud still lingered in various parts of the body, especially the ears. I sat in my room going and went through at least 10 q-tips. Collectively, the corps probably brought back a chunk of Breakout Hill. Mud clung to our boots and clothing. The upperclassmen splayed their gear across the stoop, and mud gathered in clumps around shower drains and at various points on the courtyard.
As the remnants of Breakout began to appear in Barracks, it all amounted to a glorious celebration of the rise from filth. I climbed the stairs to my room for the first time since August not straining. It was almost weird and foreign as I climbed those steps, and I, along with the rest of my tired yet proud Brother Rats walked proudly in the center of the steps, taking our time as we moved upward.
Back in my room, we placed our black nametags on our class dyke shirts, and looped our black belts into our pants. It was a small uniform distinction to anyone who didn’t realize the momentous achievement it took for us to earn it. Our dykes took us out to dinner uptown that night. Parker raised his glass and offered a toast. We sat at a long table and laughed and joked. All of my co-dykes sat at the table, trying to keep ourselves awake. Our dykes slapped our backs, threw back beers, and shouted happily across the warm inside of the restaurant.
“Hey- listen ya jerks!” Parker stood, his grin was wide. We all wore our gray blouses, the dykes were in their sport coats and VMI ties. Parker’s was pulled down, his top button undone. “To the class of 2004! Guys, you’ve just completed a huge part of VMI. But you’ve only finished a sprint. VMI is a marathon, and you’ve got a lot left to run.”
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Comments
I suggest that you find the nearest sink, and drown yourself in it.
Do it for the children.
P******!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Crossed the line on 28 December 1980! You non-hackers at vmi couldn't deal with something like that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
we couldn't do what?
AMH1, good to hear from a fellow Shellback.
You wouldn't happen to also be a fellow Bluenose, would you?
John, he is referring to something you AF types don't have much experience with: "Crossing the Line" is when Pollywogs cross the Equator and become Shellbacks.
Likewise, you become a Bluenose when you cross the Artic Circle.
Of course with both, there is a ceremony...
Nothing like Breakout, but it sucked nonetheless...
Oh..yeah. My dad's USS Enterprise yearbook had a big section on that from WESTPAC 83-84.
It looked kinda...well, gay.
Well, yeah, waddya expect from Aviators.
Now we knew how to do it up right on submarines...:)
Like all things strenuous and tough and uniquely male, except for some military boot camps and training schools, this is going the way of the dodo - Moms of America don't like their sons to be abused by other sons, they don't like their sons to become pseudo-warriors. So they start campaigns and lawsuits to emasculate all things that smack of male superiority. Get used to it, it's the future of this country.
Looks kinda like heartbreak hill at Ft. Knox, 'cept they made us crab walk feet first. My arms and shoulders still hurt 20 years later.....
btw Charlie...
YOUR op-eds? I believe the opinion page was mine, all mine.
Surely you jest.
I saw the latest rat-mass 'brokeout'. Man, have times changed. What a yawner. Let me guess, it was more professional though(they love throwing that word around). Sad.
Gentlemen, gentlemen. It is a widely accepted fact that the Ratline, as a whole, ended in March 1998. There have been some attempts at imitation since then, but none have come close. I mean, none of you clowns even managed to pull off a riot. Has there even been a class since then to get billed for damages to Institute property? Now that was unity.
Charlie, I had no idea that Parker and Fred were your dykes. Good dudes, both.
In 1995 there were rumors that VMI would no longer conduct Breakout on the hill behind Barracks - the one that was so steep that you needed your BRs to help you up half way and the 2nd & 3rds to pull you the rest of the way. Maybe it was getting too hard or maybe there were too many injuries; I don’t know. So, I wrote an op-ed suggesting that the only suitable replacement for the hill would be for the Rats to march to New Market. I guess I did not make it clear that they should start the march from Lexington.
Holy Crap! That's my Dyke's Class in those photos.
Charlie, you wouldn't by chance know Mike McCue or Ryan Shealy would you?
You paid for this? And people say I'm crazy...
I'd also add that we should just let the VMI staff run Gitmo for one month. The normal conditions will look like heaven.
Holy Crap, that brought back memories. Oddly enough, the same day I finished up the winter class notes for 2004.
'04 '04 '04!
-Ryan Shealy
Class Agent for 2004
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Charlie, you had no ratline.