Walt Brown entered West Point on July 5, 1955. After he had been there for one hour, he thought he had made the biggest mistake of his life! What a shock this was for a seventeen-year-old boy who had never been away from home. Where was the “glory and the honor of the Corps” that he had heard so much about? He wished he could just walk away from this “nightmare.” What am I doing here? he wondered. Whenever the question arose, he reminded himself that he was here in the military to help his neighbors—those who were subjected to bullies.
The first two months were called “Beast Barracks”—a fitting name, he found out, for the two months of drills and grueling physical workouts before academics began. He had so much to learn and couldn’t seem to do anything right. Taking apart a rifle was a mystery. And he had to do it quickly in total darkness.
Even marching was difficult. Sometimes he couldn’t react to the commands fast enough and was left behind. “Mr. Brown, get with it, dumb smack!” the upperclassman barked. “You need more practice, so instead of having free time, I want you to report to my room, and we will work on it.”
There was never enough time to do what he needed to do. His math courses came easily, but he had difficulty with the courses that involved long reading assignments. He had to read the New York Times every day and keep current with the news in case he was asked to recite the news at meals. If he didn’t know the news, he would have to visit each upperclassman who sat at his table and recite the news.
This plebe system was a merciless plan to heap stress on the new cadets, or “plebes” as they were called. (Plebe means “common people” in Latin, and it was used in a derogatory sense at West Point.) The upperclassmen would make a plebe feel inadequate and clumsy. If he did something wrong, then everyone would look at him and would find something else wrong. It was a vicious snowball effect, and inexperienced plebes found themselves sleep deprived and buried in demerits.
Walt racked up demerits right and left—having lint in his rifle, not getting a haircut that week, failing room inspection, having dusty shoes or dirty fingernails, hiding clean laundry instead of taking the time to fold it neatly and stack it in his locker. Later Walt realized this constant nit-picking was good preparation for what was ahead in the Army, because there would be situations in which he would have to function under even greater stress.
Plebes were allowed a certain number of demerits each month, but after that, each demerit meant one hour of walking “punishment tours.” Many times Walt had to walk tours—walking back and forth in a lane, one hour at a time, in his full uniform carrying his rifle. At one point he had thirty hours of tours to walk. Fortunately, a visiting European prince saved his skin by pardoning all cadets’ offenses. (West Point allowed visiting royalty or heads-of-state to “pardon” cadets serving punishments.)
He wanted so badly that first semester to resign or be kicked out. He watched with envy when a classmate failed or resigned and had to leave. One thousand cadets had started in his class, but only six hundred would finish four years later. He was sorely tempted to deliberately fail Russian, his worst subject, so that he would be sent home. He knew he could do well in all other subjects, but if he failed one subject, he was out. As much as he wanted to go home, though, Walt could never bring himself to put down a deliberately wrong answer. When his grades were posted at the end of the first semester, he was very disappointed to see that he had passed Russian. He had passed with the lowest possible grade. One more wrong answer and he might have been sent home.