Copyright John T. Reed

Like all West Point graduates, I am often asked by young people if they should go there. Sometimes, current cadets ask whether they should stay there.

I am only one graduate. I advise anyone reading this to get other opinions and perspectives from other graduates. Talk to former cadets (people who left West Point before graduation), graduates who got out of the Army as soon as their commitment was up, and graduates who stayed in the Army for at least a 20-year career. That’s the whole spectrum of West Pointers. See which of them seems most like you. Listen to the specifics of how they describe the experience and their decisions to stay or leave.

West-Point.org forum

On 10/10/07, the CEO of a Web site called west-point.org told me,

Articles on your Web site are being discussed on the West Point Forum. If you’d like to join the Forum and the discussion, go here: http://www.west-point.org/wp/wp-forum/ and click on “Subscribe Now.”

I never visited that Forum, but based on the above comments, there are apparently some other perspectives on the West Point experience available there. I pointed out to the CEO that my name, address, phone number, and email address are at the bottom of each of my Web pages in case anyone there had found any errors or omissions in my facts or logic. As far as I know, no one else from the West Point Forum has ever contacted me. I tentatively conclude that means they have found no errors or omissions in my facts or logic. If that is the case, then any adverse comments there about my articles about the military would have to employ intellectually-dishonest debate tactics, like questioning motives or name calling. There are comprehensive lists of intellectually-dishonest debate tactics at my article on the subject at www.johntreed.com/debate.html.

Anything I posted at west-point.org would duplicate what I posted here. If anyone there has found any errors or omissions in my facts or logic, and brings them to my attention, I will correct them here. That covers all reasons for communications between me and the Forum.

Short answer to the question

The short answer to the question “Should I go to, or stay at, West Point?” is “Probably not.”

No doubt some will be shocked that a West Point graduate would say such a thing. “It’s disloyal to the school. It discourages some wide-eyed eager young man or woman who was excited about going there.” Etc. Etc.

Actually, it’s a very complicated issue, much more so than deciding which civilian college to go to.

Regarding disloyalty

Loyalty is not necessarily a good thing per se. To evaluate one’s loyalty, you must ascertain his loyalty priorities because to be loyal to one thing means to be disloyal to all other things when the loyalties conflict. The key question is not whether someone is loyal, but to what are they loyal. When your loyalties conflict, in favor of which do you resolve the conflict?

The title of this article implicitly says that my loyalty is to the reader. Accordingly, I cannot be loyal to my college alma mater at the same time if there ever comes a point in the discussion where my loyalty to the reader and my loyalty to the Academy conflict. The title question of this article is, for many, a matter of life and death.

It is ultimately in the best interest of not only the prospective cadet or cadet, but also of West Point and the nation, to encourage only those who should go there to apply or remain. The security of the nation, and the welfare of the prospective West Point cadets and graduates, trump sucking up to the algorithm writers at U.S. News & World Report’s college-guide.

Like yacht prices

To a large extent, the question “Should I go to, or stay at, West Point” is like the old issue of if you need to ask how much a yacht costs, you can’t afford it. If you are uncertain about whether you should graduate from West Point, you shouldn’t. It requires a powerful, long-term commitment.

You could get killed

West Point is not just a college choice. To start with one of the starkest issues, when you pick West Point, you may be greatly advancing the date of your death and choosing a violent death to boot. You could be captured and imprisoned indefinitely by an enemy. You may also be making a decision that will not kill you, but will gravely injure you and change every day of the rest of your life as a result. I’m talking about severe burns, paralysis, loss of limbs, and so forth. War is extreme violence.

To young people, war and serious injury are abstractions. If that is the case with you, visit a cemetery, attend a funeral, and visit the serious injury wards at military or VA hospitals. See a West Point grad or other military person who got badly hurt. Get the abstraction out of your head and replace it with a concrete, real person with a name and personality who is not much older than you. Talk to him or her about the risk you are taking when you choose to enter the military including by attending West Point.

The Vietnam memorial in DC has the names of 20 of my classmates on it. They are abstractions to you, but I can picture their faces. They still stare forever young from the pages of our yearbook. West Point is not a war movie. The Corps of Cadets is an active-duty Army unit and after graduation, when you trade cadet gray for Army cammies, that will become belatedly clear to you if it had not before. I’m trying to make sure it is clear to you before you choose to go there.

Investment writer “Adam Smith” (nom de plume of George J.W. Goodman) says in his classic book The Money Game, “If you don’t know who you are, Wall Street is an expensive place to learn.”

Thayer Road, the main street of West Point, can be an even more expensive place to learn who you are because of the 8-year commitment to remain in the Army and inactive reserves after graduation and the potential dangers of combat. Even if you are not harmed by combat, being in the Army for five years of active duty after graduation will greatly harm your ability to pursue any career other than Army officer. The four years at West Point, while making you better in some ways, also have some negative effects. The five years in the Army are probably a net loss for almost all West Point graduates.

Not for everyone

West Point is not for everyone. In that sense, my answer “Probably not” cannot be argued with. Most people should not go to West Point. Even the Academy and its graduates would agree with that.

We West Pointers owe it to the prospective cadets to make sure they understand that West Point’s eagerness to enroll the “cream of the crop” does not mean the place is the best one for everyone who is “cream of the crop” to go. Go there if the whole 12-year package matches your unique strengths and weaknesses and likes and dislikes better than any other next-12-years-of-your-life opportunity available to you.

But it’s very hard to make such a claim. It’s a big world. Because the young lack self-knowledge, they need perhaps more than anything exactly what West Point and the other service academies offer the least of: flexibility about which direction you go with your life as you gain self-knowledge and knowledge about the vast opportunities available to young, non-service-academy college grads.

West Point may be “free” in terms of cash outlay to go there, but it is about as far from free as you can get when it comes to potential loss of life and near certain loss of most of the vast options available to young civilian college grads during their first five years after graduation.

The government could fix much of this by lettting Academy graduates have more choices including taking unpaid leaves of absence from the Army to do whatever. They do things like that when they want to, as the 2008 drafting of an Army football player by the NFL revealed. He will try out for and maybe play in the NFL while his classmates trudge off to war. See my article on Army football for more on that.

My acceptance letter

My acceptance letter from the Army admitting me to West Point changed my life. It is framed and on a shelf in my office 44 years after I received it.

The second and third sentences in the second paragraph essentially say in different words what I mean when I say “probably not.”

It presents a challenge that will demand your best effort. Therefore, it is suggested that you give serious thought to your desire for a military career as, without proper motivation, you may find it difficult to conform to what may be a new way of life.

Amen.

That part of my acceptance letter is trying to tell you that West Point ain’t UCLA. If you pick West Point for your college, you are getting into some serious shit that extends for at least eight years after you enter the place: four at West Point, five on active duty, and three in the inactive reserves.

Narrow focus

West Point has an extremely narrow focus. It is to prepare you to be a career (at least 20 years) Army officer. Should you be a career Army officer? How the hell would you know? You’re just a teenager.

For me, going to West Point was a big mistake.

Why? At age 17 (when I entered) I did not know who I was and I did not know what the Army was. I had no business at that age signing a document that committed me to nine years of West Point and the Army. And West Point had no business asking me or any other teenager to do such a thing.

Indeed, if you really think you want this, the best advice I could probably give would be to go to a civilian college for a year or two, then enlist in the Army, then apply to the USMA Prep School which is part of the Army, then enter West Point at age 22, the oldest you can be. That probably still is not old enough to make such a decision, but at least you will be as mature and experienced about yourself and the Army and the alternatives to West Point as possible while still meeting their age limit.

I would also be OK with Army brats (children of career Army officers) going there. They know or ought to know what they are getting into. For a 17-year-old civilian son of a World War II, draftee, non-career sergeant like I was, lack of self-knowledge and lack of understanding about what it meant to be in the military makes the soliciting of my signature on the 12-year commitment almost a criminal act by the military.

When I realized I had made a mistake

I realized I had made a mistake almost precisely halfway through my time at West Point. Like all cadets, I was sent on a one-month internship called Army Orientation Training (AOT—some general with no authority to do anything meaningful has since made himself feel important by changing it to CTLT or some such). My internship was with an artillery battalion in the 101st Airborne Division. I was appalled by the “real Army” and changed from committed career officer to committed let-me-out-of-here civilian in about ten days of that internship.

During that internship, I learned in ten days crucial facts that would have, if I had learned them earlier, saved me from a nine-year mistake that almost got me killed twice in Vietnam. I strongly recommend in my Succeeding book that anyone considering a career or just a stint in any organization find a way to spend time watching people in that career or organization doing what they really do on a day-to-day basis. In my case, I should have gone to my local Army base, Fort Dix, and tried to get a West Point graduate lieutenant or captain let me follow him around for a day. That might not have saved me at age 17. But it would have started to correct the false Hollywood version of the military that was unfortunately in my head when I decided to go to West Point.

My Succeeding book strongly recommends internships, shadowing, interviewing people who were in the field or organization in question and got out of it. It recommends talking to those who like the career or organization about why as well as talking to those who left about why—then comparing the thought processes of those who liked and disliked the thing in question with your own way of looking at things.

My book Residential Property Acquisition Handbook makes a big deal about interviewing tenants, managers, neighbors, and previous owners of a building you are considering buying. They can tell you more in five minutes than you could find out in a year with a platoon of engineers and building inspectors. An ounce of observing with your own eyes or talking to objective, forthright people in the know is worth a ton of recruiting brochures, view books, recruiting films, campus tours, and pep talks from true believers in the career or organization in question.

Personal-service contract

There is a concept in law known as a personal-service contract. You can sue someone for “specific performance” to force them to sell you something or to buy something from you if a contract required it. But you cannot force someone to work for you. Back when you could, it was called indentured servitude. Most people think indentured servitude is the same as slavery. Nope. Indentured servitude was voluntary at the outset. But once you signed on the dotted line, you had to stay for the duration of the contract, sort of like marriage back when divorce was illegal. Also, indentured servitude was limited to a set number of years like three to seven. Extremely similar to military contracts today. Slavery was forever.

You can get monetary damages for breach of a personal-service contract, but no specific performance—except in the military. As far as I know, enlistment contracts, ROTC, and West Point contracts with the military are the only remaining enforceable personal-service contracts. I agree with the need for a draft, but I oppose personal-service contracts for the same reasons they have been made illegal in every area of American life except the military. Entering West Point and staying there beyond the first two years literally puts you into seven years of indentured servitude—possible ten depending upon the fine print of inactive reserves and events.

‘Write your own ticket’

A whole bunch of people have told me that anyone who got into West Point would be crazy not to go because if you graduate from there, you can, “write your own ticket.”

That’s total bull!

Here are some quotes from a 3/30/08 Los Angeles Times story about military veterans having a hard time finding jobs.

Daniel Ortiz, department service director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S., says the military misleads young recruits into believing that a stint in the armed forces turns them into attractive job candidates.

“I don’t put it past our military to spin stories that soldiers will get the best training and, when they get out, they’ll have the world at their feet,” said Ortiz, a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “It is a false promise.”

The problems according to the Times story are that military experience is too specialized and does not translate well to any civilian jobs other than entry-level police, security, and physical-fitness training. Also, the veterans were used to just showing up and being assigned in the military and seemed bewildered by the need to sell themselves to get a job. 81% said they felt unprepared for job hunting.

Some are physically or psychologically maimed. I would add that because of thousands of slackers loudly complaining that the military turned them into drug addicts, wife beaters, and post traumatic stress syndrome basket cases, and left-wing activists and Democrats echoing those myths to advance their agendas, the military has acquired a public image that veterans are damaged goods. Similarly, accurate media stories about 8,000 criminals a year getting “moral waivers” so they can enlist in the Army and about street gang members joining the Army damage the reputation of everyone who serves the way affirmative action casts suspicion over the diplomas of every minority including those who had the grades and test scores to earn the diploma. My Succeeding book has a chapter on the importance of checking out the reputation of the companies you apply to because working for a company with a bad reputation gives you a bad reputation. The Army has a bad reputation in many ways.

You can’t even write your own ticket as an Army officer as a result of being a West Point graduate. Colin Powell did not go to West Point. Nor Tommy Franks. Air Force General Richard Meyers who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the beginning of the Iraq war graduated from Kansas State, not a service academy.

Being a West Pointer HURT me in the Army

My “career” as a military officer was very short and unusual, but nevertheless, my being a West Point graduate actually hurt me a great deal when I was an officer. How?

I never had an immediate superior who was a West Point graduate. Once, for four months, my battalion commander was a West Point graduate. He was one level above my immediate superiors who were the company XO and CO. On all other occasions, the closest West Pointer above me was at least two levels up and I had little or no contact with them.

In my experience, many, maybe a majority of, non-West Point Army officers hold great resentment for West Point grads. They believe we have some huge advantage. Talking with my classmates who stayed in the Army, my impression is that they had a variation of the same experience as I did, that is, they were hurt by non-West Point resentment of West Pointers.

When I went through Army Ranger School with my classmates, the Ranger Cadre hated us West Pointers and told us so on a number of occasions. The Ranger School flunked so many of my West Point classmates out of Ranger School that the Pentagon ordered them to award the Ranger tab retroactively to X additional number of my West Point classmates so that our percentage of my class graduating from Ranger School was the same as the historical average.

2/3 of West Point graduates do not stay in the Army

It is my understanding that about 2/3 of the West Point graduates during and since Vietnam did not stay in the Army for a full career. Being discriminated against by the majority of non-West Pointers is almost certainly part of the reason for most of the West Pointers who got out early.

I exacerbated the situation by making no secret of the fact that I was getting out of the Army as soon as I was allowed. (As far as I know, all of my West Point classmates who were planning to get out ASAP denied that intention so that things would go better for them while they were in. I can confirm they were correct that such a revelation would have made life harder on them.)

My giving years of notice of my resignation enraged the non-West Pointers. They often said we should have to stay in twenty years to pay the taxpayers back for our “free” education. One was outraged at me because his Army officer son, a non-West Pointer, was in the process of being RIFfed (laid off during the reduction in force after the Vietnam war). He was a reserve officer and trying to get a regular Army officer commission which I, as a West Pointer, always had. “Lieutenant Reed [me] had the RA commission my son would give his right arm for and couldn’t wait to throw it away.” At that time, West Pointers were “Regular Army” officers and most non-West Pointers were “reserve officers” even thought they had always been on active duty. At that time, only reserve officers could be RIFfed. Shortly thereafter, they extended RIFs to West Pointers and other Regular Army officers.

In any bureaucracy, one needs to blend in. Being one of the relatively few West Point graduates among a sea of ROTC and OCS officers absolutely prevents you from being “one of the boys.” Paradoxical though it may sound, to a large extent, the U.S. Army officer corps hates West Pointers.

So tell me again how going to West Point lets you write your own ticket.

Getting a Regular Army commission straight out of West Point was one of the big advantages of going there. Now it has been eliminated. The Army seem to be saying that West Pointers are no better than ROTC or OCS officers. Really? Well, then why are the taxpayers spending so much more money to create West Pointers? Seems to me that the equal treatment policy implicitly says West Point is not worth the huge amount of additional money it costs to operate compared to ROTC and OCS. They can’t have it both ways.

West Pointers are overqualified for the Army

Ever since I was a cadet, I have thought that West Pointers are overqualified for the Army. To put it another way, the high school class presidents, athletic team captains, “A” students, and so forth that West Point attracts would not consider becoming Army officers if there were no West Point. They go to West Point to be West Point cadets and West Point graduates, and only accept the Army as a sort of unattractive, but also unavoidable, part of the package. Furthermore, the Army part of the package is far worse than they think.

You may say, “OK, so the Military Academy tricks higher quality people into joining and committing for a long term to a low-quality organization that otherwise would not get such people. That’s still good for America and the Army, isn’t it?”

No. As any experienced employer can tell you, you do not want either under- or overqualified employees. Neither fits in with the group. Overqualified people tend to quit once they realize what they’ve done. Thus the high resignation rate among West Point graduate officers.

In my Succeeding book, I warn readers of the need to be similar in pertinent ability and like-minded if you want to succeed in any group whether it’s a company or non-profit organization or an athletic team. If you are better than the group, you will find them frustrating. If they are better, they will be frustrated by your inability to keep up.

Need the same worldview

Also, differing worldviews make for bad relations. I am, it turned out, an ambitious entrepreneur. Career Army officers are generally at the opposite end of the spectrum from entrepreneurs—security-seeking future pensioners who go along to get along. Or they are Machiavellian careerist politicians. When I got “counseled” in the Army, the colonel and I would talk completely past each other. They could not understand why I did not think being a West Point graduate Army officer was the greatest thing in the world. I could not understand why anyone would want to spend their life in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. You can see the script of the Army’s standard “counseling” session in my article “Is military integrity a contradiction in terms?”

My wife is a Harvard MBA and worked many years for the FDIC. I had a discussion with one of her old bosses at a party in our backyard once. He said it was rare for a graduate of an elite university like Harvard to work out in the FDIC. “Why?” “They tend to have a superior attitude. The others sense it and shut them out. Because no one cooperates with them or helps them learn the job, they fail.”

You may think, “That’s easy to fix. Just don’t have a superior attitude.” The graduates in question are superior, at least when it comes to their high school and college academic performance and test scores. They probably also got a superior education. West Point certainly “claims” both selective admissions and a great education. When I was a cadet, some famous person was telling us about once a month that we were the “cream of the crop” from the poop deck in the mess hall. If you are superior, pretending you are not is both dishonest and difficult to pull off. Plus, you will be miserable the whole time you are doing it. My wife has a unique personality that enabled her to enjoy and be accepted by her FDIC colleagues in spite of her Harvard MBA background. Most people cannot do it.

West Point graduates also have many, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto” moments after they leave West Point and go into the regular Army. Actually, “I don’t think we’re in Oz anymore, Toto” would be more accurate.

Our superiors at West Point were impeccable. My ordinary Army superiors sometimes wore their uniform brass on the wrong side or at the wrong angle. At West Point, the officers would wait until everyone they outranked got fed before they would get into the chow line. In the Army, the officers would go first and sit at tables with linen table cloths, china, and silverware in the woods while their troops got fed later, received smaller portions, and sat on the ground eating out of their mess kits.

Soldiers spend money like drunken sailors to a comical degree. The mess hall is empty at the beginning of the month (pay day is on the 1st) and packed at the end of the month (they ran out of money to go elsewhere). There are lots of pawn shops around military bases other than West Point because the troops blow their pay at the beginning of the month on stuff they can’t afford, then hock it before the end of the month to get some spending money. The typical non-West Point Army officer reminds me of the fuddy duddy PC guy in the Apple Mac commercials—except that Army officers are usually less intelligent and have less of a sense of humor and timing than the PC guy.

After a couple of months of associateing with people like that, most West Point graduates feel like they are definitely in the wrong organization and start working secretly on their escape plan—like P.O.W.s at Stalag Luft 13.

The best and the worst leave

The public thinks the young people who go to West Point, but do not graduate are the weakest among the cadets. Actually, most who did not graduate fit that description to an extent, but surprisingly many were at the opposite end of the spectrum. Here are some guys who quit or flunked out of West Point that I knew.

• the first class president of my Class of 1968
• my company-mate/classmate who ranked highest among those in our company in “aptitude for the service” (leadership ability as ranked by his classmates and upperclassmen and officers)
• the classmate who ranked highest in our whole class in aptitude for the service
• a guy in the Class of 71—plebes when I was a senior—was a captain who had won the Silver Star and other medals in Vietnam before he arrived at West Point Had he stayed at West Point, he would have resumed the rank of captain upon graduation. His classmates would have been commissioned as second lieutenants upon graduation and would not make captain until years later. They would have had to salute him on graduation day and most likely forever after.
• a high school football quarterback and team captain in the class of 2008

Why did some of the top guys in my class quit? I suspect they already had a ton of self-esteem and did not need the additional self-esteem provided by graduating from West Point. Others at the medium ranks of the class simply decided it was not for them and left. They probably had no self-esteem issues, just independence of mind, that is, they were not going to make such an decision based on what other people might think. Good for them.

I do not mean to suggest that half the guys who quit West Point were top guys. It was more like 5% to 10%. And there were probably another 10% or so who would have had no trouble graduating who quit. The rest quit or flunked out because they lacked academic discipline, intelligence, time-management skills, integrity, a willingness to submit to the restrictions of West Point, or the limited athletic ability required of all cadets.

Oddly, a few “quit” by deliberately committing an honor code violation then turning themselves in. This enabled them to go home and look like heroes in spite of quitting West Point.

My main point here is that it is incorrect to assume that all those who quit West Point did so out of weakness. Some did so out of strength. Similarly, to the extent that those of us who graduated did so to avoid the “disgrace” of quitting or because we needed the self-esteem boost of being West Point graduates, it could be argued that graduating was a manifestation of weakness in part. I hasten to add that the place was a very tough four years, so any weakness manifest by graduating rather than quitting was only a small and temporary part of the overall make-up of the graduates.

‘I’m no quitter’

A cadet I knew recently said, before he went there, “I’m no quitter” about the possibility of leaving West Point before graduation. (He left in September of his plebe year.) Many a West Point graduate probably became a grad rather than a former cadet solely because of the power of that slogan. It’s a bullshit slogan.

A quitter is someone who habitually reacts to difficulty by quitting. By definition, quiting West Point, alone, does not prove you are a quitter because a single instance of any behavior does not constitute a habit.

Also, the statement “I’m no quitter” implies that you never make a mistake. If you make the mistake of joining an organization that you should not have joined, you need to quit. Only those who never make such a mistake can claim, rationally, “I’m no quitter.”

The statement “I’m no quitter” also suggests that mistakes of the joining-something variety should never be corrected because that would require quitting and quitting is a worse behavior than prolonging a mistake.

Correct decision making

In fact, quitting is a decision. So is not quitting. I studied decision theory at Harvard Business School. Since then, I have studied it at every subsequent opportunity. I have also taught correct decision-making in seminars, coaching clinics, and in writing 80 how-to books and over 5,000 how-to articles. You might think that studying decision making would make you smarter about it, but not teaching or writing about it. Actually, all those activities make you smarter about it. Teaching and writing about something make you think about it more, research it, and learn more about it from your students and readers.

Am I an expert on decision making? Close to it.

Match self to goals

The correct way to make a decision is to know yourself, then choose goals appropriate to who you are and what you want to accomplish in the future. All decisions answer the question, “What is the optimum way for me to get from where I am to where I want to be?” To the extent that outcomes values and probablities of various possible outcomes can be quantified, you should choose the decision with the best expected value.

Should you ever stop pursuing a particular course just because it’s hard? Generally that is not a good reason to quit, but it can be if the price to be paid for the object in question is higher than anticipated and the object in question is not worth that higher price. For example, I urged each of my three sons to go to Stanford, our local top quality college. Each went there with me. Each agreed with my admonition, and each decided against it when I told them what they would have to to get admitted. They wanted to go to Stanford, but they did not want to pay the high price necessary to do so. It was a legitimate choice on their part. (They went to Columbia, UC Santa Barbara, and Arizona instead.)

People quit for reasons other than it being hard

Can it be said that everyone who quits West Point did so because they were not up to the challenges it presents? No. Some fit that description. But others, as listed above, were quite up to the challenges. They simply did not want to continue down that road for other, good reasons.

West Point is hard so anyone who quits is suspect of not being strong enough. But West Point is a lot of other things besides hard. It is narrow. It requires five years service on active duty and three in the inactive reserves after graduation. It has weaknesses as a college. And it has both other negatives or positives that do not appeal to everyone as I mentioned above.

New information

One legitimate reasons to change a decision, like the decision to go to West Point, is new information. Incoming cadets are mostly teenagers. They lack self-knowledge. But self-knowledge is sine qua non to making a decision about the next twelve years of your life (four at West Point, five on active duty, and three in the inactive reserves). Furthermore, as I say at length in my book Succeeding, which is mainly about picking the right career and spouse, those decisions are all about the match between you and the career and you and the spouse. By definition, to make a good career match, you must have both self-knowledge and detailed, comprehensive, objective knowledge about the career alternatives being considered.

When I entered West Point at age 17, I knew neither who I was nor what the Army really was. Halfway through West Point, I had much better information on both and realized I was at the wrong place. (I stayed to graduate because it was during the Vietnam war and my choice was to go to Vietnam as a West Point graduate or as a draftee or low-ranking enlisted transfer out of West Point.) It is highly likely that the vast majority of West Point cadets are in the same position—laking in self-knowledge and non-Hollywood knowledge of the military when they enter—and possesed of significantly more of both after a couple of years at West Point. It is not at all surprising that the majority of cadets and graduates quit either West Point or the Army after West Point—once they get that new information.

When you get significant new, different information about either who you are or which is the most appropriate goal for you or which is the optimum way to get from where you are to where you want to be, changing course—including quitting—is indicated. You made assumptions about who you were and what the Army was when you chose to come to West Point. Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups. If you find that one or more of your important assumptions were wrong, you need to remake the decision. Failure to make the appropriate course correction because of some crude slogan like “I’m no quitter” is a childlike mistake.

This applies both to the cadet’s self-image as well as to what other people will think. Other people aren’t you. To the extent that they are not West Pointers, they don’t know what they are talking about with regard to West Point. To the extent that they are West Pointers, they still are not you and are profoundly ignorant of the alternatives you are considering over West Point. A Coast Guard Academy guy told me all his classmates said he would be crazy to quit and go to a civilian college and career. What the hell would they know about it? They had never taken that route. (A similar thing could be said about my discussing quitting West Point. I did not quit. I stayed and graduated. So I have no experience dealing with either the internal and from-other-people reactions to quitting West Point.)

Deciding to stay at West Point is the same as deciding to go to West Point. The notion that deciding not to go and deciding to leave are different because the latter constitutes “being a quitter” is bogus. Do not fall for that bullshit slogan whether it comes out of the mouths of people at West Point or your friends or relatives. Make the decision based on the best information and logic as described above. If you are considering quitting simply because it’s hard and not because you no longer believe it is the best way to achieve your goals, then I would agree that quitting is a sign of weakness that you should resist.

We each get one life to live. Live yours the way you think is best. The people urging you not to quit West Point are trying to live both their lives and yours. Tell them to live their lives and leave you alone to live yours.

Predictability of the course of an officer career

If you are a cadet now and you have been doing well academically and in aptitude for the service, you may be inclined to lean more toward an Army career on the grounds that you seem to be good at it.

Think again.

When we were cadets, we knew who the sharp guys were. We assumed they would do well in the Army. At West Point, they did: good grades, athletic success, and lots of stripes on their sleeves senior year.

The Ghost of Christmas Future

HOWEVER, had the Ghost of Christmas Future visited us and told us who would get promoted early to major and higher ranks and who would achieve multi-star rank in our class, our reaction would have been about 10% “that makes sense” and 90% “Are you shittin’ me!?” The class in general would have been extremely angry and many who stayed in for a career after we graduated would have gotten out as soon as they could instead if they knew then what we later found out.

What happened in the event is that the Pentagon’s anointing of some of our class as its favorites and others as also rans was very close to random from our perspective. Unfortunately for the very sharp guys who turned out to be Army also rans, the realization that the Army was doing this was very slow in coming—too late in coming for them to make a timely switch to the civilian world where there abilities and performance would almost certainly be more appreciated and rewarded.

We assumed that the sharp cadets in our class would get the early promotions and general’s stars in the Army. Not even close. My roommate Dan Kaufman becoming the dean of West Point (and a brigadier general) was about the only high ranking classmate that made sense to me. He was a sharp guy as a cadet. The other early promotions and generals were such that we would have reacted as I stated above when we were cadets.

From the outhouse to the penthouse

There was another story from the opposite end of the spectrum in my cadet company. In the 1960s, juniors or cows were either corporals or privates. Freshmen and sophomores were all privates. Seniors were all sergeants, lieutenants, or captains unless they lost their stripes as a result of a punishment. During our cow year, half my class in my company were corporals for first detail (fall) and the other half, including yours truly, were corporals second detail (winter). There was one exception. One classmate in our company was never a corporal cow year. (Spring or third detail corporals were the guys who ranked in the top half of the company in aptitude.) I had never heard of a cow never being a corporal before. I guess there are only so many jobs and the number of jobs times two details added up to one less than the number of cows in our company. My class may have had a higher-than-normal-retention rate in that company. He was odd man out. Why? He probably had the lowest aptitude-for-the-service ranking in the company.

Fast forward to the second half of their careers for my classmates who stayed in the Army. The cadet who never made corporal in my company was on the tiny list of classmates who were promoted early to major and lieutenant colonel! In other words, he ranked in the bottom two or three dozen cadets in my whole class of 706 graduates in the opinion of other cadets as to how well he would do in the Army as an officer. Then, as an officer, he ranked in the top dozen or so in the class!

Some may figure that maybe he improved greatly. I doubt it. Cadets lived with each other, including having many different roommates during our cadet years. We spent 24-7 together in class, on the athletic fields, at three mandatory meals a day, on the parade field, on double dates, and in summer combat field training. You get to know a guy very well. In contrast, those in the Pentagon who were promoting him early like some sort of class crown prince, could barely pick the guy out of a line-up and even his immediate Army officer superiors only saw him during business hours in a narrower range of situations than we experienced at West Point. Furthermore, I never heard from classmates that he had changed in any way. I did hear that about other classmates.

So if you are a cadet now, look at the cadet in your company who ranks lowest in aptitude for the service. If they changed the terminology—which they love to do—I’m talking about the guy who is likely to get the fewest cadet officer stripes senior year. There is a decent chance that he may outrank you in the second half of your Army career and become the class star as far as officer careers go. You may end up saluting him and calling him “Sir.” I kid you not.

‘Can you believe who’s on that new promotion list?’

In David Hackworth’s book About Face, he tells of a West Point career officer who went nuts every time a promotion list came out calling up his West Point classmates and venting over the phone about, “Can you believe who’s on that new promotion list!?” That is probably the rule rather than the exception among West Point grads.

Compare the yearbook to the Register of Graduates

Do you doubt me? Then I have a simple homework assignment for you. Go to the West Point library and get a recent Register of Graduates and a yearbook from the 1960s—my era. Write down on a notepad who from the Register of Graduates who in that class made general and how many stars they ended up with. Then go back to the yearbook and figure out who the studs were senior year from the cadet rank listed next to their picture in the yearbook and from the brigade, regimental, and battalion staff group photos. For the 1960s, you can also see the General Order of Merit in the order in which grads are named in the Register. Later classes are alphabetical in the Register (Corps has). You probably figure that the guys who were high in General Order of Merit—which combines academic grades, conduct, and aptitude for the service ratings—and who were cadet captains senior year, were the ones who made general. Ha! See how many of the generals in that class were studs in the yearbook. I predict you will find almost no correlation between cadet success and career officer success.

Here’s an actual case history for you. The most successful West Point graduate of the mid-1960s was Eric Ken Shinseki who became Army Chief of Staff—the highest job there is. How big of a stud was he as a cadet? The 1965 yearbook—my plebe year—lists him as a soccer player his first two years. No other corps squad (varsity NCAA) athletics. He was a member of five cadet clubs off and on. The only one he did all four years was Sunday School Teacher. He was not a star man (top 5% academically). His cadet rank was lieutenant indicating he was a platoon leader or training officer or some such as a senior. He was not on battalion, regimental, or brigade staff. In the group photo of his company’s seniors, he is one of several cadets who are very slight of build.

What happened Army-career-wise to some top cadets

Would you like to know what happened to the top three cadet officers in the Class of 1965—the guys whom we cadets back then assumed would become Chief of Staff if anyone would?

First Captain Bob Arvin: Killed in action on 10/8/67 in Vietnam, awarded two silver stars and a purple heart
First Regimental Commander Mark Walsh: Retired as a colonel
Second Regimental Commander (star man) Buddy Bucha: Resigned in 1972 as a captain after winning the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam

In my own Class of 1968, where we had four rather than two regimental commanders because of an increase in the size of the student body, the career results were:

Cadet first captain: Retired as a lieutenant colonel
1st regimental cadet commander: Retired as a lieutenant colonel
2nd regimental cadet commander: Resigned as a captain after five-year graduation commitment
3rd regimental cadet commander: Killed in action in Vietnam on 7/21/70
4th regimental cadet commander: Killed in action in Vietnam on 7/15/69

In case you’re wondering why the disproportionate number of KIA in the 1965 and 1968 highest-ranking-cadets group. It probably relates to their branch choice—infantry. The cadets who get the most stripes senior year tend to be, or claim they are, gung ho, which is part of why they got the stripes. The most gung ho branch choice is considered to be infantry.

For a while, I had a theory that the West Point grads who stayed in for a career were the bottom-of-the-class types. One day, I decided to check out my theory. I was wrong. What I found instead was that the guys who thought—erroneously in most cases as it turned out—that they were doing really well with the Army and destined for higher rank, were the ones who stayed in. By the time they realized the promotions were essentially random with regard to ability and performance, it was too late for them to get out because the present value of the retirement benefits was too high and/or because they had incurred additional service obligations from attending grad school or Army schools.

Games to trick you into staying in the Army a little longer, and a little longer, and a little longer

A higher percentage of West Point graduates would get out of the Army before 20 years if the Army did not play a series of effective games to trick people into staying in a little longer, then a little longer, then all of a sudden, it’s too late to get out. The most common game is paying for you to go to graduate school or an advanced Army course that results in your incurring an additional one- to-four-year commitment. Nowadays, I heard that they start these games while you are still a cadet!

When I was a cadet, it was common to ask each other, “Are you gonna make a career of the Army?” The two answers you got were either “No” or “Yeah, I want to to go to grad school.”

I always thought the latter answer was humorous on two counts:

• They imply no one would stay in unless they were going to get a bribe like grad school for doing so.
• They imply that it is not possible to go to grad school unless the Army sends you.

Most graduate school students are actually not in the military. It is actually possible to go as a civilian—really. My wife and I went to Harvard Business School after I got out of the Army. I got about $300 a month during the school year from the GI Bill. I paid the rest out of my pocket. My wife borrowed a little from Harvard and paid the rest out of her own pocket. At the time I went to Harvard—1975-1977—I believe military officers could not go there because Congress banned officers from attending any university that did not have ROTC.

Even bigger news flash, as a civilian, you can go to whatever grad school you can get admitted to and study whatever subject you want. If the Army sends you, you can only go where they say and you can only study what they say.

‘Out there’

This “Yeah, I want to go to grad school” mind-set is typical of the “tenure” too good to leave and womb-to-tomb take-care-of-me-Daddy mentality of career military people. They fear the cold, cruel outside world. I have actually heard them use that phrase—even West Point grads who were much higher in the class than I was. At a West Point reunion, one guy still on active duty asked me wide-eyed, “What’s like out there?” Those were his exact words.

They wonder what we do when we get sick or injured? (HMO or Blue Cross or whatever plan you sign up for) How will we survive without the military pension? [home equity, 401(k), business equity, IRAs, SEPs, continue to work, etc.] What do we do if we get fired? (Get another job or become self-employed) The question to me is not how do we survive after we get out but how can you and your family stand it if you stay in.

At the 15- to 20-year reunions, we who got out had a tendency to group together separate from the lifers. We occasionally would marvel at the stunted development of the lifers. We felt like college graduates who were back at school several years after graduation visiting younger underclassmen whom we knew who were still there. They would chatter excitedly about some rumored change in PX privileges or retirement medical care rules or about where they and their families might be shipped next. We civilians would talk about business ventures or the best places to live.

A classmate with whom I discussed this said his theory was that the poop schoolers—guys who were in the Army before they came to West Point—seemed to do the best in Army careers. I wonder if that is because of the extra Army experience or their more advanced age upon entering West Point. Probably both.

In my Succeeding book, I noted that my West Point classmates who were older seemed to do much better not only at West Point, but for a decade or more afterward, because of their greater age when we entered West Point and when they graduated. That was true both of guys who were previously in the Army and guys who went to civilian colleges before they came to West Point. You can be 17 to 22 when you enter West Point. I was 17. When I went to Harvard Business School, I was 29—a little older than most students there. At Harvard, I was president of two clubs and the main columnist in the school newspaper—positions I attribute to my being older than most of my classmates.

A recent West Point grad told me current poop schoolers were significantly dumber than the civilian new cadets and flunked out at a higher rate. When I was there, I saw no such distinction. They just seemed a bit blue collar and cliquish to me. Since it was apparently harder to get in as a civilian than as a soldier, I always thought their superior attitude toward the rest of us was puzzling.

What is an Army officer career anyway?
Deciding to go to or stay at West Point means you are implicitly making the following statement:

I am certain that a career as a U.S. Army officer fits my unique combination of strengths and weaknesses and likes and dislikes better than any of the infinite number of worldwide civilian careers could.

When you state it like that, the unlikelihood of it being true kind of jumps right out of the wording.

In my career as an author, I know where I will be ten years from now—in my home office—and what I will be doing—typing on my computer keyboard. I could change if I wanted and I have from time to time throughout my life. But if I ask a West Point cadet similar questions, the dialog would go like this.

Reed: So where will you be geographically ten years from now?

Cadet: Probably at a U.S. military base somewhere in the world.

Reed: Probably?

Cadet: Well, I could be at a civilian college or on some officer exchange assignment or something else I would not think of now.

Reed: And you can’t even pin it down to a partiular continent?

Cadet: Nope.

Reed: But you say a career as an Army officer is the best thing for you?

Cadet: Yes, sir.

Reed: Pardon me but how can you say it’s the best alternative for you when you don’t even know where in the world you will be? How can an unknown be better than a known?

Cadet: Well, I know generally the sort of things I would be doing.

Reed: OK. So what, pray tell, will you be doing ten years from now—somewhere on planet earth?

Cadet: I might be a troop commander. I might be a staff officer. I might be in a school as a student or instructor. I might work in the Pentagon.

Reed: You’re sure that’s a complete list?

Cadet: Actually, no. I could be doing other things like working on some project or being a prisoner of war.

Reed: Or dead from wounds?

Cadet: That could happen, too.

Reed: And you’re certain that each and every one of those possibilities beats the hell out of the best custom-fit-to-you civilian career you could have? Doesn’t that imply an absurdly low opinion of the entire world outside the post gate?

In fact, this is yet another area of consideration where the prospective cadet or graduate should read the Register of Graduates. There you will find that those who graduated 20 or 30 years ago have had an eclectic series of brief jobs and probably have changed which continent they lived on about every three years. Who in civilian life do they most resemble? Temps, like substitute teachers, except that temps typically stay in the same metropolitan area their whole lives.

Reed: So you think being an intercontinental temp is a better fit to your unique abilities than any civilian career could possibly be? Like coaching a college football team? Or being a much beloved and respected professor at some ivy-covered university? Or starting your own company and taking it public? Or writing a series of well-received books? And you’re sure that your spouse and kids share your affection for pig-in-a-poke, surprise-package temping around the world? How could such an eclectic career path match you so well? How could it match anyone? Do you have multiple-personality disorder? Aren’t you afraid that you might get a military job you like and are extremely good at—then be transferred out of it after three years never to get such a job again? Indeed, isn’t that almost certainly the best thing you can expect to happen to you during an Army career? (The worse alternative being that you never get that job during your whole Army career.) Why wouldn’t you be better off in a civilian job where, if you are good at it and like it, you can stay there forever?

Career officer spin
If nothing else, career military personnel are geniuses at spinning how great their lives are. The above mix would be praised as letting them see the world, meet all sorts of new people, make new friends, experience different cultures, different challenges.

Spare me. When my classmates who stayed in the Army for a career start spouting that stuff, I ask them to name anyone on earth who lives like that when he or she does not have to. Civilians, if they wanted, could try to structure a life where they take very different jobs every one to three years and move to a different continent each time. Virtually none do.

My classmates, like all other military career people, get out of the Army when they are young enough to continue working—and usually have to in order to pay the bills. When they start telling me how great the Army was, I ask, “So why do you not still live like that? Why are you staying in the same house and job for decades? Why not move every couple of years like you did in the Army? See the world, meet all sorts of people, make new friends, experience different cultures and challenges. Essentially, after you got out, you started living like I have been living—like the vast majority of civilians live. For someone who proclaimed to love and prefer the Army life style, you sure glommed onto the civilian life style in a hurry—and without the slightest indication you miss your old Army life style.”

The ‘Real Army’
When a cadet would complain about some stupid thing at West Point, one of the committed career cadets in the bull session would always say, “Well, this isn’t ‘The Real Army’. This is West Point. In a couple of years we’ll graduate and join ‘The Real Army’.”

My first assignment after West Point was Ranger School. Complaints there among Ranger students were met with, “This isn’t ‘The Real Army’. This is Ranger School. In a couple of months we’ll be back in ‘The Real Army’.”

Next was Signal Officers Basic—a “gentlemen’s course” as they say in the Army officer corps. Long lunches. Leaving early in the afternoons. No parades. No inspections. No paperwork. If you flunk the test, they give you the answers and let you take it again. Still, it generated occasional complaints. As before, a member of Future Lifers of America would always chime in with, “But this isn’t ‘The Real Army’. This is Fort Gordon. We’ll get to “The Real Army” after this.”

Then Airborne School. Not “The Real Army”—but just another tolerable delay on the way to “The Real Army.”

Then Radio Officers School at Fort Monmouth. Another “gentlemen’s course.” Occasional bureaucratic annoyances. Not “The Real Army.”

Then Satellite Communications Officers School. Ditto.

Finally, more than a year after graduating from West Point, I got to my first “real” assignment: platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division. Chickenshit a foot deep and none of the intelligence we had among the administrators of West Point. Then I heard a lifer respond to someone’s complaint. “But this isn’t “The Real Army’. This is the Airborne.”

Isn’t the Airborne the epitome of the gung ho Army? Apparently not. Apparently the Airborne is a bullshit subsidiary of “The Real Army.” If you want “The Real Army,” you need to stay out of the Airborne. “The Real Army” is a leg unit.

Next stop: Vietnam. A war zone, but very little difference from stateside garrison duty at Fort Bragg—other than far worse living conditions and weather and the occasional enemy rocket attack. Chickenshit in Vietnam was about a foot and a half deep. Then I heard it. “Yeah, but this isn’t ‘The Real Army’. This is war time.”

Wartime is not “The Real Army”?! Jesus H. Christ! If wars are not “The Real Army,” what the hell is all the training about? The career people were put out about the war. It upset their comfortable routines. Apparently, “The Real Army” is leg garrison duty in the U.S. or Germany in peacetime.

Career military people sedate themselves in one lousy assignment after another by telling themselves and each other than they are actually members of a wonderful organization called “The Real Army.” There is another Army which is a bureaucratic, Kafkaesque nightmare. Members of “The Real Army” do have to spend some time in that purgatory called “not the real Army.” They get through it by simply reminding themselves that they will soon be back in “The Real Army.”

Never in my years as an Army officer did I hear a fellow officer describe his or my current assignment as “The Real Army.” I ultimately came to the conclusion that there is no actual “Real Army.” It apparently is a figment of the imaginations of prospective Army officers and those who make a career of being Army officers—a motivational carrot on a stick dangled endlessly in front of career officers by the officers themselves out of a need to cope with a series of unhappy assignments. “The real Army” has no bureaucracy or chickenshit. Any Army officer who engages in, or unit or base that has, such things is promptly declared “not the real Army.”

As near as I can tell, the closest Army officers ever get to “The Real Army” are those “gentlemen’s courses” they attend every so often. These are various basic and advanced courses that are conducted almost entirely in classrooms at various Army schools the Armor School, the Advanced Course (for captains), Command and General Staff College, and so forth. Generally, those courses are short in duration—TDY—and therefore your spouse and kids are not with you.

In other words, if you are at West Point now, you are about as close to “The Real Army” as you’re ever gonna get. After graduation, you occasionally visit various West Point Lites around the U.S. like the National War College, but mostly you spend your career trudging through one Kafkaesque nightmare after another surviving each by reminding yourself that your next assignment will be “The Real Army.”

The tenure trap

There is a pertinent chapter in my book Succeeding. It is called “Tenure and other deals ‘too good to leave’.” It is about people who get into a situation where they have what many others regard as a super deal. Examples include tenured college professors, rent control tenants, union members, and career military people who have not yet reached retirement age.

My main message in the book is that you must always keep your eye on your current goals and the best way to get from here to there. Staying in a situation that prevents you and/or your family from being happy or from reaching your goals in the most expeditious way possible—just because many consider your situation to be too good to leave—is a serious mistake. You only live once and you are only young once. Putting up with a situation you dislike or hate to get overly generous retirement benefits is suicidal to your soul—especially when you consider that the cemeteries contain lots of people who died before they received any, or many, of their retirement benefits.

Oh, also, some successful cadets think their cadet success is known by and cared about by the Pentagon for career officer promotions and assignments. If you did really well academically at West Point, good chance they will bring you back there to teach. Otherwise, unless you got the Heisman Trophy or a Rhodes Scholarship—maybe First Captain, forget about it. As far as I know, a cadet regimental commander, star man who was All-East in football is just another second lieutenant in the Army to the Pentagon.

‘We’ll give you what you want, for a couple more years commitment’

The games the Army plays to keep West Pointers in a little longer—until you pass the point of no resignation—mostly revolve around figuring out what young West Point graduates want, and trading it to them for a few more years of commitment. Young West Pointers want special forces, graduate school, teaching at West Point, choice assignments like Hawaii, choice branches like engineers, and various other Army goodies. So the Army uses those things as carrots to get the young officers to stay a little longer. And they do it repeatedly to try to get you to the 8- to 10-year or so point which they know from the past is the point of no resignation for the vast majority of young officers.

If they can suck you into that game two or three times, you will probably stay in for the rest of the 20 years because you are too close to extremely generous retirement benefits to “throw it away.” The tenure trap.

‘Your doing great’ careerwise

The other game they play is to keep you in the dark as to how your career is going compared to your peers. That way, they can get hundreds of grads from each West Point class thinking they are doing great as Army officers. In fact, that’s mathematically impossible.

There are only a handful of officers in each class who will make general. So only a handful are doing great as junior and middle officers. The Pentagon knows who the handful are, but they damned well will not reveal that to the officers because they need the uncompetitive officers to stay in to fill the ranks of majors and lieutenant colonels so the generals have someone to boss around and so they can fill the various positions that the size of the Army requires.

If the Pentagon gave you a tight-lipped “No comment” when you asked, keeping you in the dark would be less troublesome. But that’s not the way it’s done. Rather, they encourage all junior officers to believe they are doing great and on track to become generals. For my class, the first list of the tiny minority who were really doing well—as opposed to the many who thought they were doing well—came out around our tenth reunion. In othher words, around the point of no resignation.

What they ought to do out of fairness and honesty is what they did when we were cadets at West Point. That is, publish a general order of merit weekly, monthly, quarterly or semi-annually. They should list all the officers in date-of-rank groups according to how well they are doing in their officer careers so that the early promotion to major list is not a surprise. True, there will be some movement over time as officers who were doing well do less well and vice versa, but the early list should not be a tremendous shock as it was when I was in and probably still is.

But the Army will not do that because they know that many officers who were planning on an Army career will figure, “I guess being a general is not my fate. I’ll try civilian life.”

In other words, the percentage of West Point grads who should stay in the Army is actually worse than the stats suggest because not only were they tricked into going to West Point, they were subsequently tricked into staying in the Army for a career with various goodies-for-additional-commitment trades and with misinformation or lack of information about how they were doing compared to their peers.

Can you predict your success as a career officer?

So is there any way for a cadet to forecast how well he or she will do as an Army officer? Nope. Will working really hard and doing a great job as an officer guarantee you high rank? Ha! Jeez, you guys are naive!

The Pentagon will swear the promotion decisions are anything but random, but ask some retired grads who did not make multi-star general how it seemed to them. Also, what’s in and what’s out changes over time in the Army. When I was in, special operations was the kiss of death for your career. Now it’s hot. You may choose a focus that is hot now with the Pentagon only to find it’s not fifteen years from now. I have just one word for you about how well you and your cadet buddies will do during your Army officer careers.

Random.

Reject or be rejected

Cadets, the Pentagon, and the career Army are one big happy family. Ironically, that seemingly loving relationship between the Army and West Pointers who did not die while on active duty almost always ends in “divorce.”

How so?

As I already told you, approximately 2/3 of West Point grads leave the Army prior to the 20-year point that constitutes “making a career of the Army.” If you talked to them, most would probably soft pedal their reasons. But actions speak louder than words. They came. They saw. They concluded, “This is not for me.” They voted with their feet against an Army career in spite of seemingly being set for life by having graduated from West Point into West Point’s parent organization.

What about the other 1/3 who did make a career of the Army? Sooner or later, they were all forced out by the Army’s “up or out” policy. My West Point class of 1968 only had one guy still on active duty—a chaplain—which may give new meaning to the phrase “up or out.” He retired in 2007. None of my other classmates made it to the top of the Army: Chief of Staff. The last West Pointer to do so was Eric Shinseki, Class of 1965, who was still forced out of that job because he honestly answered the Congressional question about how many soldiers would be required to occupy Iraq. He said, “Several hundred thousand.” The Bush Administration was aghast. They fired Shinseki or something akin to firing him.

As far as I know, everyone else in Shinseki’s class reached a point where they were not moving up so they had to move out. Same seems to be true of the classes of 1966, 1967, and my class. It reminds me of making the playoffs in my football coaching career. You are elated that you make the playoffs, then you realize that the season of everyone who makes the playoffs ends in the downer of a loss—except for the one team that goes undefeated in the playoffs and wins the championship. I wrote an article titled the “30-year, marathon, single-elimination suck-up tournament or How America selects its generals.”

So there is about a 99.9% chance that if you graduate from West Point and do not die while on active duty, that your military career will end either with your resigning short of retirement age or with your seeing a new promotion list that you are not on and that you had to be on to remain in the Army. No doubt many read the handwriting on the wall before that list actually comes out and retire in anticipation of being forced out.

Civilian employers

What about civilian employers? Are they enamored of West Point?

I went to two so-called elite higher education schools: West Point and Harvard Business School where I got an MBA. My wife also has a Harvard MBA. And my oldest son graduated from Ivy League Columbia University in 2003.

Here’s the way it really works. There are a handful of corporate employers who really like West Pointers. AT&T was one for a while. You can see which companies they are by perusing the annual USMA Association of Graduates Register of Graduates which has little bios of the vast majority of grads.

Harvard Business School also has such a list—a longer list. HBS MBAs are hired in great numbers by Wall Street investment banking firms and management consulting firms like Mitt Romney’s only employer: Bain. Some other employers like Procter & Gamble and others also have liked Harvard MBAs at times.

Similarly Columbia grads get hired by Goldman Sachs (Wall Street investment banking firm) and ConEd (NYC electric company) and so forth. The Columbia list is more regional thhan the HBS list.

In most cases, I suspect that the fondness of a particular company for West Pointers or Harvard MBAs stems from the CEO or various other executives being one of them. For example, EDS was big on hiring service academy grads. Their founder and owner at the time was Ross Perot, an Annapolis grad. I had supper with him once in my capacity as co-president of the New Enterprise Club at Harvard Business School. At that time, he was the nation’s only billionaire.

Once you go outside of the list of companies who seem to love graduates of the school in question, having West Point on your resume gets you a combination of “That’s nice” or resentment from other civilian employers. I am a Baby Boomer. The vast majority of college-educated Baby Boomers were draft dodgers. So explain to me how a draft dodger, who feels somewhat guilty about that, is going to love seeing West Point and Vietnam on my resume.

I have never wanted to work for any of the companies that love West Point or Harvard. My son has never wanted to work for a company that loved Columbia grads. They’re mostly in New York City. He wanted to come back to California.

Companies that hire West Pointers disproportionately may do so for the wrong reasons. They may see the place as a reliable source of Babbittesque, organization men in gray flannel suits—well-behaved yes men who will make a good appearance and impression, but not rock the boat. Fortune once said in 2006 or 2007 that corporate recruiters were not all that fond of the top MBA school students. Screw corporate recruiters! We did not go to Harvard Business School to impress corporate recruiters. We went there to found our own companies. West Point supposedly produces leaders. Corporate recruiters are looking for followers.

Knew what they were getting

I had a mildly interesting and pertinent discussion with one AT&T exec. When he learned I was a West Point grad, he volunteered that his company hired many academy grads but that they noticed and commented on the fact that when they hired a guy from Air Force or Navy, they did not know what he was like until he arrived. But with the West Pointers, they knew what he would be like before he arrived.

He wondered why. I said it was probably because West Point was far more restrictive and its cadets, far more isolated, than those of the other academies.

He seemed to think this uniformity was a virtue. I would say it certainly indicates that West Point has more of an effect on its graduates than the other two major academies. But that is not necessarily good and probably is not good. Everyone who ever entered any service academy was a unique individual. Based on the AT&T exec’s comments, they still are after graduation if they went to Air Force or Navy, but less so if they went to West Point. Note that the exec did not say the West Pointers were better, only more uniform.

I would note that he did not hire me or a number of other guys I knew at West Point who would not have inspired such a comment. There is a certain amount of self-selection in that not all academy grads would want to work for AT&T. Only a certain type would. So he did not see the whole cross section of West Point grads.

No one should want their individuality stripped away, even in part. Military trainers unabashedly say that’s part of what they do. Break you down then build you up. It’s crap. Although as my life and those of other West Point grads illustrate, letting your individuality be stripped away, even in part, is not certain at West Point. But it is a significant danger.

‘The Look’

In that same uniformity vein, I must comment on what I call “The Look.” I first noticed this when I was a cadet at West Point and commented on it to my classmates. They agreed and said that they had noticed the same thing. I found it spooky and wondered if the place was having a little bit too much effect on us.

Our dates often complained that when they went to Grant Hall to meet us at the beginning of a weekend at West Point, they were very disconcerted by the fact that we all looked alike. That was largely due to the uniform which, when the hat was on, covered us entirely except from the top of the neck to just above the eyebrows. But had you dressed a bunch of non-West Pointers in the uniforms, there would have been far less similarity. Basically, at West Point, we were taught not only how to wear the uniforms, but also the approved demeanor of a West Point cadet. Serious. Confident. Alert. I can’t totally describe it.

In New York City

“The Look” simply means that West Point cadets and graduates have a certain similar appearance when they are out of uniform. In New York City, we used to see a guy 50 to 75 yards away, recognize him as a fellow cadet, and exchange nods. Did we know the guy from West Point? No. We could just tell from his appearance and demeanor that he was a fellow cadet.

True, there were several clues like age, haircut, and body shape (physically fit). But that was not enough to make such an identification. After all, as the old TV series Naked City used to say in its sign-off, “There are eight million stories in the naked city.” Everyone in New York City with short hair between the ages of 18 and 26 and in good physical shape is not a West Point cadet. Furthermore, it was not just a suspicion. We would recognize each other as cadets—not cadets we knew—just looking like cadets to the point where we were certain each other was a cadet. We exchanged those nods with no doubt that we were saying hi to a fellow cadet.

After graduation, too

This also applied after graduation. I have seen men wearing shirts with “West Point” or “U.S. Military Academy” on them and laughed at the notion that they thought they could pass as West Pointers. They did not have “The Look.” On other occasions, I have noticed a man who was in civvies and thought, “He’s a West Pointer.” On a number of occasions, I later met the person in question and learned that he was, indeed, a West Pointer.

I have seen military officers interviewed on TV and thought, “He’s from West Point” or “He’s not from West Point.” Then I went and looked them up in the West Point Register of Graduates and I was almost always right. It even happened a time or two withh female Army officers but I am less able to do it with females. There were no females at West Point until eight years after I graduated.

Dallas hotel

Once, I was in a hotel lobby in Dallas. A man walked by in a suit. When I saw him, we exchanged glances. No nods. I thought, “He was a West Point professor.” I did not recognize him as a professor I knew, just as a generic professor. (When I was a cadet, 98% of the professors there were West Point graduates.)

Later, I was on an elevator in that hotel and that guy got on the elevator when it stopped. I said to him with total confidence that I was right, “Sir, do I remember you from West Point?” He extended his hand and said, “Mike Collins, Class of 1952.” “Jack Reed ’68,” I said. “That was after my time,” he said. “Were you a professor when I was a cadet?” I asked. “No,” he said. Then it hit me. “Oh, you’re Mike Collins the astronaut?” “Yes,” he said and got off the elevator as I continued up to my floor.

Now you may think that I recognized him from TV appearances as a result of his being one of the Apollo 11 astronauts. Perhaps. But I did not recognize him as Mike Collins astronaut or as a TV person that day in hotel. Rather, I was just sure he was a West Point grad, which he was.

Jogger

Years ago, I noticed a guy who jogged by my house a couple times as a probable West Pointer. One day, I was out front when he went by and he asked me if I was a West Pointer. In other words, he had the same thought about me. He was a little older than I was and was a cadet when I was for a year or two, but we were not in the same regiment, which graduates will recognize means we had no contact as cadets. We might have laid eyes on each other momentarily while we were cadets, but that was true of about 7,000 guys who were younger or older and there at the same time over four years.

Upperclassmen only

How long do you have to be a cadet at West Point to acquire “The Look?” Eleven months—from around July 1st when you ener West Point until around June 1st when your plebe year ends.

Plebes do not have “the Look.” In fact, they have an even more distinct look called the “Plebe Look.” It is easy to describe: a combination of deer in headlights and paranoid terror. Actually, that was how it was in 1968. I would not be surprised if it’s different now from changes in the Fourth Class System (rules relating to the different way plebes are treated). How long does it take to acquire the Plebe Look? About a half hour.

My son Dan

My son Dan has A look but it’s not “The Look.” When he was in the Fall of his eighth grade year, Stanford gave me two tickets to one of their home games because I was a local high school football coach. I had to pick them up at a recruits will-call window. It was a little confusing so I went over to some coach-looking guys with my son to ask if I was at the right place. They took one look at Dan and asked if he was a prospective recruit. “Jeez! He’s only in eighth grade!” Fall college football recruits are all high school seniors by NCAA rule.

The following year, I took Dan to an Army football game at West Point. On the way, we attended a minor league baseball game in Maryland with some classmates. One of them took one look at Dan and commented on what a good-looking kid he was and that he should go to West Point because he looked like a recruiting poster for the place. At the game itself at West Point, one of my West Point roommates, Dan, and I ran into another of our classmates: Mike Palone. He was our class’s top athlete and has his name engraved in Holleder Center at West Point as a result. He was with his dad—retired, long-time, revered, Army soccer coach Joe Palone. Joe took one look at Dan and said, “You should come to West Point. You’d make a great cadet.”

Dan is 6'2", blue-eyed, broad-shouldered, athletic, and handsome enough to be chosen to be a blazers-and-slacks model for a GQ magazine spread during his Columbia tailback days. He was also recruited off the street in Times Square with some of his Columbia football teammates to appear repeatedly in a speaking part on MTV’s Total Request Live show with Carson Daily. He has been my son his whole life. I work at home so I spent tons of time with him from birth on. He was recently in a bull session debate with friends about whether religion makes people behave better. A friend said “Fear of God” made Dan behave better when he was growing up whether he admitted it or not. Dan responded that it was not “Fear of God,” it was “Fear of Jack” (that’s me), that made him behave.

But he does not have “The Look” of a West Point cadet or graduate in spite of my influence and DNA. He never commanded adult men. Unlike West Pointers, he never learned by instruction and example the proper demeanor and bearing for a cadet marching in a parade or an officer giving commands to troops.

You can see a photo of Dan and me at http://www.johntreed.com/footballauthor.html but it made me realize that you cannot get “The Look” out of a still photo. As with Butch Cassidy demonstrating his shooting skills in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the West Point cadet or graduate has to be moving a little to evidence “The Look.”

Movie stars playing West Pointers

What about the various movie stars who have played West Point graduates in Hollywood? Guys like Ronald Reagan, George C. Scott, John Wayne, Karl Malden, Laurence Olivier, Tom Berenger, Martin Sheen, Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum. Did they have “The Look?”

Not even close. Indeed, no depiction of any military officer in Hollywood, West Point or otherwise, comes close to what a real military officer is like. Real officers are timid and deferential. See my article titled The 30-year, marathon, single-elimination suck-up tournament or How America chooses its generals. General Petraeus showed the world what a real Army officer behaves like in his 2007 public appearances before Congress. Can you imagine John Wayne or George C. Scott replicating that? Some officers are bombastic bullies to their subordinates, but never to their superiors. Al Haig, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Patton come to mind. Hollywood “West Pointers” have far too much personality and individuality. They are far too assertive and self-confident. In a bureaucracy like the Army, anyone who acted like that would be smacked down immediately.

Not just West Pointers

You don’t need to be a West Pointer to recognize “The Look.” My Uncle Jack, a non-West Pointer who worked for several years as the assistant manager of the Hotel Thayer at West Point, was once in a bar in Arizona after his time at West Point. He spotted several young men at a table. He went over and asked, “What service academy do you guys go to?” They were Air Force Academy cadets. Again, they were young, had short hair, and were fit, but that could describe anyone in the military or, back in the 1960s, any athletes. The Air Force Academy is in Colorado, not Arizona, so there was no geographic reason to believe that several guys in a bar in Arizona were cadets at any service academy.

The Zoomies were surprised he could tell and asked how. My uncle said, “I worked at West Point for years. I can spot you academy guys a mile away.”

Below, I list the ten guys whom I figure are the most well-known living West Pointers. Do they have “The Look?” Absolutely, with the possible exception of second-man-on-the-moon Buzz Aldrin, who always looks a bit bewildered to me. Is there any reason why he would have lost “The Look?” Yes. He is an admitted long-term alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. Alcohol sweeps all personality, training, and experience before it. If you are an alcoholic, nothing else you ever were matters much.

Can I describe “The Look?” Not really. It has to do with confidence, perhaps the demeanor of one who has been in command of other men, a certain level of intelligence, perhaps a habit of carrying oneself in a certain way as a result of all the posture corrections and image consciousness at West Point. Take the bearing and demeanor of a West Point cadet marching in a parade or standing at attention in ranks before a parade and soften it a bit with a dash of “Hi. Howya doin”?’ and that’s sort of it. Otherwise, I cannot articulate or put my finger on it. But we generally recognize it when we see it.

Theatrical

I have commented in these military pages that the military in general, and West Point in particular, are theatrical. You can often spot a veteran stage performer by the theatrical way they sometimes move or talk. Marching in parades or commanding troops are theater to a large extent. It may be that same mechanism that is at work in creating “The Look” among West Pointers.

Is “The Look” a good thing? Probably slightly. Does it indicate that West Point has a significant effect on its graduates? Probably slightly, at least in a superficial way. I only disclose it here in the interests of full disclosure. I do not draw any big conclusions about it.

‘A West Point diploma opens doors’

This is another line I often hear.

To an extent, it is true. But coming out of the mouth of a teenager or a cadet or a non-West Point grad, it has two major flaws:

• It does not open as many doors as you think, and it closes some doors.
• “Opening doors” is less important than you think.

Which doors?

I suspect that I have gotten some jobs faster, and maybe gotten some jobs that I would not otherwise have gotten, as a result of being a West Point grad. I sense that prospective employers figure a West Point grad has a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

In July, 1966, after my “internship” with the 101st Airborne Division, the traveling show Up With People, also known as Sing Out ’66, put on a performance at Fort Campbell. They had previously performed at West Point and a classmate and I discussed that we would like to join the cast during summer leave (30 days) if possible. Unexpectedly, the day before my leave was to start, there they were.

I told their boss about the discussion I had at West Point. He said, “You’re welcome to join us right now if you want.” “Don’t I have to fill out an application or something?” He smiled and said indulgently, “No. We figure that if you meet West Point’s standards, you meet ours.” So for the next several weeks I was in the cast of Up With People. (They later performed at West Point again when I was a junior. Since I knew the song and dance routines, I asked them if I could sneak into the cast and perform at West Point. I did not ask permission from the officers at West Point. My friends told me not to do it because they thought I would get into big trouble. Up With People got me one of their blazers, shirt, pants, and make-up, and I slipped into the cast and did the whole performance. One of my professors recognized me and commented to me about it, but no other officer said anything. You can see me in a photo of the performance on page 202 of the ’67 Howitzer yearbook—first male face visible from the left. Compare it to the picture of me as a member of the C-2 second classmen on page 162. Had I sought official permission to do it, I would probably still be waiting for an answer.)

I think a number of those who hired me to coach athletic teams and to work in real estate and banking thought the same thing. They figured I had been thoroughly vetted. Last I heard, the FBI liked to hire former military officers.

But I am sure it closes some doors, too. West Point is not universally loved. Democrats generally do not like the military. Liberals do not like the military. I doubt that being a West Point graduate helped anyone get a job in the Clinton Administration. One Army officer in the Clinton White House complained that a female Clinton executive refused to shake his hand because he was military. As I said earlier, draft dodgers do not like the military. Academia seems hostile to the military so I doubt our diploma would be a big help in getting tenure at a liberal arts college or university.

Importance of doors

More importantly, opening doors is less of a benefit than you think.

As I explain in my book Succeeding, you may be “the West Point guy” the first week you arrive at a new job, but after that you’re Jack or whatever your name is. West Point may have gotten you in the door, but your long-term success will be determined far more by what you do after you get in the door and that is on you as an individual, not related to your resume.

Also, the importance of “doors” is a function of what you do as a career. I write books and a newsletter. Does West Point in my “about the author” help sell books? Probably a little. But readers are far more interested in what I know about the subject of the book than where I went to college.

My best friend from West Point is a professional magician. Does being a West Point graduate help him get gigs? Probably in some cases, but they are far more interested in how good of a magician he is.

The world is full of careers where being from West Point is irrelevant or of little importance like farming, founding your own company, medical research, medicine in general, and so forth. So whether you will need “doors” opened depends on what you are best suited for. Not all careers are door-type careers.

Great education?

Another line I often hear, from grads and wannabes alike, is stated as Gospel truth: “At least you know you’re going to get a great education at West Point.” And even if you are not getting to write your own ticket or open doors because West Point is on your resume, you still have the great education that will help you no matter what you do.

A lot of hours

When I went to West Point, we went to class five and a half days a week from 7:45 AM to 3 PM on weekdays and from 7:30 AM to about 11:30 AM on Saturdays. Furthermore, our schedule was like high school only without study halls. We were in class all morning and all afternoon. A lot of guys who quit West Point were moved ahead a year at the civilian college they transferred to. For example, a cadet who would have been a sophomore had he stayed at West Point would be a junior at the civilian college or a sophomore cadet would transfer into a civilian college as a senior—because he already had so many credit hours.

I heard they no longer go to school on Saturday—except to take some tests. I also heard that they are considering resuming Saturday classes to some extent. A recent grad indicated that started school earlier in the morning now and did not finish until 4 PM rather than 3PM. To see how many hours of class cadets have now, you’ll have to check with West Point. But it used to be an extraordinarily large number of hours. It probably still is, only less so.

Few cadets per classroom

We also almost always had 10 to 15 cadets per classroom. That was excellent although the professors were Army officers so you could not form the sorts of beneficial relationships that civilian college students often do with professors. You couldn’t even linger after class to talk to the professor because we were so over-scheduled that we always had to hustle away to the next class, lunch formation and athletics or parade.

My sons who went to Columbia, U.C. Santa Barbara, and Arizona say they typically had huge class sizes with little interaction between students and teacher. But they could form friendly relationships with some professors.

Teaching was primary focus

The professors at West Point are there to teach. At civilian colleges, they are often more interested in research, publishing, and consulting.

At civilian universities, you are often taught by grad students, not professors. In many cases, the grad student in question cannot speak understandable English! This is an outrage. Never happened at West Point. All our professors except a tiny number of civilians (mostly languages and PE back then) were captains or majors or colonels in the Army and were there to teach, period. It was a three-year tour so they would go to grad school in the subject in question, teach at West Point for three years, then go to the 101st Airborne division as a battalion commander or some next job like that.

Nowhere near as good as Harvard Business

However, I also went to a graduate school with the same focus on teaching: Harvard Business School. There, the teaching was sometimes so good that my section mates and I gave the professor a standing ovation at the end of the class. (Most notably Steve Starr in marketing and John Shank in control, which is what most people would call accounting—a section at HBS is 85 students who sit in the same amphitheater classroom all day every day for the first year)

A great many, maybe most, of my Harvard classes were like the one class you had one day in high school or college where the class was scintillating and thrilling, but was actually about the subject being studied, not some let’s-talk-about-something-else lark.

My wife’s aunt was a high school art teacher. She was distinctly unhappy about my wife going to HBS. Then my wife took her to a day of three classes there. Afterward, she could not stop raving about how “creative” it was. (All instruction at HBS is via the case method, that is, discussions of important, recent decisions that needed to be made by actual companies.) I never heard of any such thing happening at West Point. If it did, it was exceedingly rare.

None of my classes ever applauded a teacher at West Point. I never heard of anyone ever doing it at West Point. The teachers there were focused just on teaching at least for those three years, but they were workmanlike, not great. Many of the teachers at Harvard Business were great. Ovations were commonplace there.

I got a great education at Harvard. At West Point, I got a good education. Roughly speaking, the Harvard Business School professors are full-time, long-term teachers. The West Point instructors are just passing through and they are primarily trying to succeed as Army officer bureaucrats, not teachers. As teachers, they are temps.

A recent West Point grad said that it’s not fair to compare the instruction at West Point, which is an undergraduate college, with Harvard Business School, which is a graduate school. Why not?

Where is it written that grad schools automatically have better instructors than undergraduate schools? If West Point wants to have great instructors, they can scour the nation looking for college professors who are highly rated as instructors and offer them whatever it takes to get them to go to West Point. That is essentially how Harvard Business School does it. The instruction at HBS is better than at West Point because each institution made a decision to have the quality of instruction it has. The main problem at West Point is using it as a temporary three-year tour for regular Army officers rather than employing all or almost all professional career instructors.

Better than Columbia

Based on discussions with my son, the instruction at West Point was apparently better on average than at Columbia, but the best professors at Columbia were better than the best at West Point. Indeed, I recall no discussion of who was best at West Point. The professors were as uniform as their clothes. All workmanlike.

A large percentage of cadets and military officers fall into a union-member mentality—that is, they seek to get as much as possible for the least possible effort. Union members oppose individual excellence. To try to be the best professor at West Point would be considered unseemly rate-busting or Stakhaonvite behavior. At civilian schools, they often publish student ratings of the professors and professors compete to be the best. West Point would never, ever publish ratings of active Army officer professors by subordinate cadets, even though doing so would improve the quality of instruction there.

Test every week in every subject

When I went to West Point, we were tested every week in every subject. That was a very good thing. It forced you to make a continuous, even effort to master the subject. My impression of civilian college students is that loafing and procrastinating are big, followed by cramming or all nighters when they have a test or a paper due. At West Point, we were not allowed to be that stupid about study habits.

During exam weeks, it was hard to get a tennis court. Why? We would all sit down to study the subject of the next exam, realize we already knew the material as a result of having studied it daily all semester, then get a buddy to go play tennis. But it was suddenly hard to find a court, even though West Point had a zillion of them, because everyone else had the same experience.

Nobel Laureates

At UC Berkeley, which is near where I live, they have parking spaces reserved for Nobel Prize winners. They say, “NL only” as I recall. I do not believe there are any such parking spaces at West Point. There the reserved spaces say, “Superintendent,” “Commandant of Cadets,” “Dean of the Academic Board.” Rank, not academic merit, rules at West Point.

I don’t know that undergraduates get to spend much time with Nobel Laureates at Berkeley, but their presence speaks volumes about what U.C. Berkeley is about and their absence at West Point does the same.

Rhodes Scholars

West Point does have more than its share of Rhodes Scholars, although I am suspicious of how hard the Academy works to get such scholarships. That sort of thing is the kind of recognition about which West Point would probably get overly competitive and game the system.

And West Point’s ranking in the production of Rhodes Scholars is suspiciously out of character when you take into account the various other academic honors that graduates of the other Rhodes Scholar-producing colleges win, like median SAT scores, PhDs, articles published in peer-reviewed publications, tenured professorships at civilian colleges, and Nobel Prizes.

It reminds me of the Taiwanese Little League teams winning the Little League World Series every year but sending virtually no players to the Major Leagues. (Turned out that the Taiwanese were systematically cheating by sending a national all-star team rather than a local all-star team as required by the rules and by falsifying birth certificates of over-age players. They no longer participate in the Little League World Series.)

Scholars and scholarship

America’s great universities annually produce tens of thousands of scholars who, in turn, produce great volumes of scholarship. The alumni magazines we get from Harvard and Columbia are full of items about such things. The alumni magazine I get from West Point, on the other hand, is almost devoid of such things. It is more of a military-history and cadet-life publication.

SAT scores

Many West Point graduates say that West Point is the equivalent of an Ivy League college.

No, it’s not. Maybe it was in the past when it was smaller and the military was more popular with the public, but not now.

If you peruse any college guidebook in a book store, you will find where West Point stacks up in SAT scores. Here is a comparison of West Point SAT scores with those of colleges with similar scores and with two Ivy League schools. (Source: US News & World Report Ultimate College Guide 2005)

College	SAT 25/75 percentile range	College’s rank
West Point	1170-1350	unranked because service academy
Yeshiva University	1170-1350	46 among national universities
U. of Maryland at College Park	1170-1360	56 among national universities
Skidmore College	1170-1340	45 among liberal arts colleges
St. Mary’s of Maryland	1160-1360	87 among liberal arts colleges
Occidental College	1170-1370	42 among liberal arts colleges
	Now a couple of Ivies
Harvard University	1400-1590	1 among national universities
Columbia University	1310-1510	9 among national universities

So, West Point ain’t bad. But it ain’t Harvard. The school it most closely matches is Yeshiva University which has the same SAT scores. The closest non-religious schools to West Point are Maryland and Skidmore.

A lot of people, including West Pointers, point to its ratio of applicants to admissions to prove how hard it is to get in and how great a school it must therefore be. First, games can be played with those numbers. How do you define an applicant for a place like West Point which has a convoluted, Congressional application process? Also, is the low acceptance rate proving high student standards or the attraction of a free education? In fact, it is the latter as evidenced by the relatively low SAT scores in comparison to the other schools with similarly low acceptance rates like Harvard.

A recent West Point grad said the SAT scores are misleading because West Point admits a lot of soldiers from the Army by law and they tend to have low SAT scores and flunk out of West Point.

Cadets from the Army pulling down the SATs?
I do not know if that’s true. When I was a cadet, we had the same percentage of guys from the Army (called poop schoolers). I do not recall observing that they were dumber than those of us who had never been in the Army before. Nor do I recall anyone else ever making such an observation.

Also, even if it’s true, so what? West Point’s student body is whomever they admit. If those guys are dumb they should stop admitting them. If they admit them, they have to suffer the consequence of a lower average SAT score than the Ivies.

Plus, the difference between the Ivies and West Point SAT scores are so dramatic—300 points for chrissake!—that you would have to have one heck of a lot of super dumb poop schoolers to make them solely responsible for the 300-point difference.

This is an example of an individual West Pointer taking my criticism of West Point as an institution as a personal criticism of him alone. The guy doing the complaining may be smart enough to have gotten into the Ivy League. I would not know. But for whatever reason, he chose to go to a college with SAT scores that are 300 points lower than the top Ivies. You makes your choice and you pays the price.

He also complained that I relied only on SAT scores. I would be glad to use GPAs and other critieria to make the comparison more valid, but West Point refuses to release that information. Other colleges do. You can see it in the college guides. Also, GPAs are notoriously unreliable because they vary so much from high school to high school. The colleges have adjustments they make for each high school’s grades to remove inflation. I have no access to those adjustments.

Also, it is extremely likely that the GPAs correlate with the SAT scores. In other words, the GPAs would probably just provide more proof that West Point students are far below the Ivy stsudents.

Learn from fellow students

One of the main, unheralded ways you get a college education is from associating with your classmates. I got more benefit from my fellow cadets than from the West Point formal program. A similar thing happened to me at Harvard, but not as much.

Generally, the teaching at any college is aimed at the median students. At West Point, the median student is a Maryland/Skidmore equivalent. At Harvard and Columbia, they pitch the classes at a much higher level median student.

Mile wide and an inch deep

What did we study at West Point? Everything. We were jacks of all subjects and masters of none. When West Pointers went to engineering grad schools, they sometimes had to first take a semester or two of undergraduate engineering because we did not get enough to constitute an engineering major at West Point. A classmate who got a masters in civil engineering at Stanford told me he did not have to take any undergraduate courses in engineering after West Point. He may have taken advanced courses at West Point because of his high class rank. Also, civil engineering masters may have fewer undergraduate prerequisites than masters degrees in other subjects like electrical engineering.

When I went to West Point, every cadet took the same subjects. Now, they can major. Perhaps this problem has been corrected. Although a recent graduate told me they now have an extraordinarily high number of required courses outside the major.

I always thought we were over-scheduled at West Point. Indeed, I had the impression that they taught us everything so they could show Congress and the taxpayers how hard we were working and how much they were getting for the money they were spending on us. The length of the list of the subjects we studied was extremely long. But the depth was extremely shallow as a result of the length. We took introduction to everything and 201 of almost nothing. I had three and a half semesters of Russian, but no more than two semesters of anything else.

Is that a great education, or a great PR ploy?

Critical independent thinking

One of the main things colleges do is teach their students how to think critically, creatively, how to think for themselves, independently.

How does West Point do in that department?

Surely, you jest.

Once, at West Point, I participated in an extemporaneous speaking contest. The assigned topic was the anti-war protesters. This was at the height of the Vietnam War. I said that the lack of such people was one of the reasons Germany and Japan went so far wrong in the years leading up to World War II. I got my ass chewed for the content and logic of my speech, not my public-speaking ability which was the only thing the contest was about. An officer judge called my reasoning “incongruous” and threw me out of the competition.

At most college campuses, federal public policy and the wisdom of elected and appointed officials are hotly-debated topics. They should be, although I get annoyed when a college town or a dorm room adopts its own foreign policy.

At West Point, those are more or less taboo topics. When you attend West Point, you are an active-duty member of the U.S. Army and the federal government, as are your instructors and administrators. You may not criticize public policy or officials, period. I think it’s even illegal unless you complain directly to a Congressperson.

The recent West Point grad who complained that the school’s SAT scores are pulled down by poop schoolers said I was “dead wrong” about critical independent thinking. But the only evidence he had to offer was that some professors encouraged cadets to challenge the officers in class. I’m glad to hear it. I saw no such thing in the 1960s nor did I ever hear of it. But even if it’s true, it pales in comparison to evidence of critical independent thinking at other colleges.

As I said, I believe it is literally illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for active-duty military personnel—including cadets, professors, and administartors at West Point—to criticze government policy. Professors at, say, the JFK School of Government at Harvard, frequently criticize current government policy in class, in speeches, and in journal articles. I would be astonished if you could find more than a tiny bit of such public criticism from active duty military cadets or officers stationed at West Point.

‘The grindstone cloister’

In the 5/12/08 Fortune “Best Advice I Ever Got” article, West Point grad General David Petraeus, speaking about getting his Ph.D. in international relations at Princeton said,

I found the truth there about what General Galvin occasionally described as “the grindstone cloister” existence of military officers—we live a somewhat cloistered existence...grad school also gives most folks a healthy dose of intellectual humility. That was certainly the case for me, and that’s not a bad thing either.

The grindstone cloister mind-set is very unhealthy for the students of West Point.

Civilian colleges have recently been rightly criticized for stifling speech that does not please their liberal group norm. But you ain’t seen nothing regarding stifling opposing views until you’ve tried to debate whether there is a God or capitalism versus socialism or U.S. foreign policy at West Point.

You could debate whether there was a God in an informal barracks bull session when I was there, but a professor would have been afraid to touch the subject. Nowadays, I understand assertive evangelical Christians dominate the Army and the service academies and that you would likely suffer from such heresy as a cadet or officer even if you only revealed your feelings in a private bull session. See the discussion on fundamentalist Christians becoming dominant in the U.S. military in my article on the need for a draft. A recent cadet said he thought what I just said about private bull sessions was true in the Army officer corps but not at West Point.

Bastion of socialism

By the way, the socialism versus capitalism debate does not occur at West Point because they know which is best: socialism. The U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. military are both run on strict Marxist principles.

• From each according to his rank. To each according to his family size.
• Free, unlimited medical care for your whole family with no deductible from cradle to grave.
• Free housing, legal advice, clothing always and meals when you travel or are in the field.
• Soviet-style central planning.
• You work in the job they tell you, where they tell you, when they tell you.
• Military service is characterized, like Soviet life, by lots of standing in lines. Hurry up and wait.
• No freedom of speech or press.

U.S. military officers are expected to be political eunuchs.

On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is best, West Point’s rating for teaching critical, creative, independent thinking is about a minus 2. That’s not to say no WestPoint graduates are capable of such thinking, only that it was neither taught nor encouraged at West Point.

‘Reasonable men’

One of my favorite quotes is this one from George Bernard Shaw,

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

Roughly speaking, West Point is about recruiting and/or turning you into a Shawesque “reasonable man.” The military officer corps hates Shawesque “unreasonable men.”

In contrast, you cannot even get admitted to my graduate school alma mater—Harvard Business School—unless you convince them that you are a Shawesque “unreasonable man.” To put it in a phrase that cadets used in the sixties, Harvard Business only admits

rompin’ stompin’, hard-chargin’, movers and shakers

The superior performance of HBS grads, as a group, over USMA grads, as a group, is almost certainly attributable to that difference in recruiting and training. The military occasionally has a rompin’ stompin’, hard-chargin’, mover and shaker, like a blind pig occasionally finds an acorn. They ultimately brag about such people, but typically not until they have fired, court-martialed, or otherwise harassed them. Examples include George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Hyman Rickover, Billy Mitchell.

Ltc Hank Kiersey

David Lipsky wrote a 2003 book called Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point. It is very laudatory about West Point and very popular with the Long Gray Line. Among other things, it tells about a real-life, rompin’ stompin’ hard-charging West Point officer named Lieutenant Colonel Hank Kiersey. West Point seemed to be very proud of him and trotted him out in front of the cadets and visitors on numerous occasions, before they forced him to resign from the Army (pages 112 and 113).

The Army officer type in literature

Another way to describe what West Point and the Army want, and will insist on turning you into, is to use some literary metaphors, namely,

• Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt
• Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
• William Whyte’s The Organization Man

Pecking order

You’ve heard the phrase “Pecking order.” It is a real-world phenomenon among animals including chickens. The head chicken will peck your eyes out of you are not the head chicken and you hold your head up too high—literally—in the barn yard. West Point and the Army are about driving your head down to the level befitting your rank and this applies even to four-star generals because they are outranked by civilian appointees and elected officials.

You might think West Point is about teaching you to become the head chicken. No. No matter how big of a “chicken” you become in the Army, you always have to hold your head lower than the “chickens” who outrank you. Holding your head appropriately low is a sine qua none for advancing in a career as a cadet and a U.S. military officer.

At Harvard Business School, in contrast, everyone is a future head chicken because there is no rank order in civilian business when you are, as many if not most Harvard MBA