ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609270024
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LEXINGTON
SERIES: THE VMI CLASS OF 2000
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
As the final all-male rat line makes it through cadre week, its experience is already different from that of its predecessors.
What was he thinking?
Two days earlier, life for Robert Mason of Fredericksburg was pretty good. With his parents, he had cruised the Virginia Military Institute grounds in knee-length shorts, a T-shirt, and a haircut of his own choosing.
Now his nose is flattened against a concrete wall, sweat streaming from his temples.
Mason seems to be trying to disappear into the concrete - anything to avoid being singled out by the bellowing cadre, the upperclassmen with the furrowed brows charged with whipping him into something the institute can be proud of.
No luck.
Whatever incantations Mason recites to himself don't work. A cadet named Pat Roberts is in his face, their cheeks separated only by a thin layer of perspiration.
"I thought you was dead, Elvis!" Roberts screams. Mason flinches. He mumbles something into the concrete to the effect that he is not Elvis.
"Then how come your tag says you're from Graceland, Tennessee?"
On Roberts' command, Mason peels his nose off the wall and drops for some push-ups.
What was he thinking?
The white card sticking to Mason's sweaty back does in fact say he is from Graceland, but he didn't fill it out. His company cadre did.
The cards of the rats - as freshmen or fourth classmen at VMI have been called for 157 years - next to him say they are from Gotham City; Tripoli, Libya; Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica.
The absurdity of the place names emphasizes an important facet of the rat line, the demanding and demeaning regimen of freshman life at VMI. Once you enter it, it doesn't matter where you came from.
Looking at Mason, sporting the same stubbly head and white T-shirt, translucent from perspiration, as his brother rats, it's impossible to tell whether he's silver-spoon rich or powdered-milk poor.
The rat experience, in theory, takes all that away, reducing the rats to nothing and building them back up the same, as citizen-soldiers.
Hell Week
It starts with Cadre Week - some call it Hell Week - which is only an hour old for Mason as he does his push-ups. It is one long series of defining moments for the 390 rats at VMI this year.
From 1 p.m. on Aug. 21 until six days later when classes start, the 10 companies, organized by height so they look orderly in parades, move through an elaborate matrix of training and equipment issue. They run two miles every morning and lose count of how many push-ups they've done. They learn to march and recite the honor code so many times that its 12 words - "A cadet will neither lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who do" - spew forth in a single breath.
Emergency Medical Technicians stay handy for those who can't make it. Water stations are set up, and breaks are built in, such as the trip to the military store for uniform issue, where the air is cool and the cadets are friendlier.
"Where you from?" Tim Hough asks one rat as he finds a camouflage cap to fit the rat's bald head. But in only an hour on the rat line, the rat has come to distrust all questions.
"Gotham City," the rat answers.
"You're from Gotham City?"
"Richmond."
"Then why did you say you were from Gotham City?"
For rats, there don't seem to be any right answers.
Sweat parties
"Everyone's been sort of preoccupied around here," says David Zirkle, a first classman, or senior, from Richmond, as he strolls along the fourth-floor barracks stoop. "Maybe because of women."
That's not women in the general sense. It's women as in coming to VMI, as in women in the barracks, the showers, the rat line.
According to VMI Superintendent Josiah Bunting III, the rat line will not change a bit to accommodate women. Few cadets believe it should.
First classman Jim Wrenn, of Oxford, N.C., says he was never more aware of himself than when he was a rat.
"It made you realize who you were," he says. "I went into sort of a deep introspection."
"I just remember how long the days seemed," Zirkle recalls.
As miserable an existence as it is, cadets call it necessary. They wouldn't want to go through it again, but they say they wouldn't trade the experience, either.
Sitting at attention on the front three inches of your seat while you eat your lunch one bite at a time won't, in itself, make you a bank president, they say. But it will teach you the discipline it takes to become one.
Before the Board of Visitors made its decision last weekend to admit women, many cadets had admitted to themselves that women would probably be in 1997's Rat Mass. They figured the rat line would change, soften.
And they believe they see the first signs of it in this year's rat line.
"They've only had a few sweat parties" in the month since they arrived, second classman, or junior, Juan Delosreyes says. When he was a rat two years ago, he was put through a few of the intense, 15-minute physical training sessions every week.
Cadets also point to official changes in the rat line. The rats suffered a less traumatic first day of Cadre Week because their heads were shaved two days ahead of time. And instead of getting worked over by the Rat Disciplinary Committee to earn their Rat Bibles, the class of 2000 picked theirs up off a table.
Col. Mike Strickler, public relations director for VMI, says those changes were practical considerations to move the rats through the plodding administrative parts of the rat line more quickly.
But that doesn't account for another rules change for upperclassmen, made by the new commandant, Col. Keith D. Dickson. First classmen traditionally have been permitted to walk to the showers wearing robes. This year, they have to wear pants, too.
No cadet would say so if his name were associated with the statement, but a few called this last change a sure sign that the administration - even before the board decided to take the school coed - was preparing the corps for the presence of women in the barracks.
Cadets say it's a sign of how, even if the rat line doesn't change, the VMI culture will.
The culture
The VMI system draws a firm line between how cadets behave among cadets and how they should behave among women.
"Cadets should never forget themselves when in the presence of a lady," the Rat Bible says.
Throughout the self-described "source of all wisdom," women are referred to as "ladies." Cadets should always tip their hats to passing ladies and say "ma'am."
But next year, not all women will be ladies. If even a few women are accepted into the corps, barracks life will no longer be a matter of men among men.
And it's not just a matter of wearing pants under their robes.
"The language, the terms used with rats are going to have to change," third classman Shane Still says.
The Rat Bible provides one obvious example: going 28 days without a demerit is called "running a period," a not-so-subtle allusion to a woman's menstrual cycle.
Other terms not in the Rat Bible but commonly used by cadets are not suitable for a family newspaper. But the cadets themselves worry about even the most defensible terms, like the name for a rat's first classman mentor: a dyke.
Cadets are quick to point out that the term comes from the crossing white belts worn for parades, called cross-dykes. The name for a rat's big brother evolved from the fact that it takes two cadets to put on the cross-dykes.
But since the word is also a slang term for a lesbian, it won't be easy to say around female rats.
The dykes
It's Monday night, Aug. 26, the last night of Cadre Week. It is a merciful one compared to the one just passed.
At 3 a.m., the rats were hauled from their cots for Hell Night: an all-night round of sweat parties, drilling and yelling.
The eight rats who gather in First Classman Mike Belenky's room look beaten down. One rat from Texas named Jeb Cox fills the room with the pungent scent of sweat. He promises to shower soon.
The rats met their dykes earlier, and repaired to older cadet's rooms with them.
While they gobble carry-out pizza and gulp Fresca, Belenky and his three roommates fire directions at them:
"Come down any time, come in here any time. It's pretty much your room, too."
"If you just got your hair cut, don't put your head on our pillows."
"For parades, you get to shine everything."
"Your priorities are grades, not shining my shoes."
"Not shining my shoes is not going to get you kicked out of here; bad grades will."
"Any time you guys get in trouble, tell us first or you'll just get in more trouble."
"If you get hauled up before the Rat Disciplinary Committee, we can't help you."
"Stay away from the third classmen."
"The thirds are bloodthirsty."
"We're just talking from experience here."
The relationship between a rat and his dyke is more symbiotic than adversarial.
Each morning, each rat gets up about an hour before his dyke, gets his dyke's uniforms loaded on the laundry trucks, wakes him in time for formation and rolls up his mattress - his hay, as it's called in VMI-speak.
In return, the rat gets advice, sanctuary, friendship. The first classmen also pick up the rats' mail for them; if a rat gets a perfumed letter or a package from home, he might have to do push-ups for it.
Belenky and his roommates don't plan on giving their rats too hard a time. But they don't plan on being "Rat Daddies," either. That's a name given to any cadet who babies the rats.
Rats and their dykes generally remain friendly, though.
First classman Zirkle recalls one time his dyke made him do push-ups. Zirkle couldn't remember to stop calling him "sir."
The strain
A rat's life is never very comfortable. His mind is never at ease, and unless he wants trouble, his body is always at a strain.
The strain is the position rats must assume at all times in the barracks and mess hall: chest out, chin coiled into the neck, forehead out, arms stiff at the sides.
In the barracks, the rats are permitted to walk only a prescribed path - the rat line. They square their turns, and if an upperclassmen is in the way, they stop and ask: "Permission to go around, sir?"
During academic hours, 8 a.m. to 3:50 p.m., and study hours, 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., the rats are off-limits for harassment. But in the early morning and late afternoon, they walk the rat line to and from the fourth stoop, where all rats live, in fear of upperclassmen, who can "flame" them at any turn. Upperclassmen can demand push-ups on the spot, or recitations of the most obscure facts in the Rat Bible.
But most dreaded are the third classmen.
The rats detest them because they are the most vicious at flaming. As sophomores having just been through the rat line themselves, they are thirsty for revenge.
The upperclassmen, who seem less interested in flaming rats, give the thirds little respect. The most zealous thirds are called "Sallyport Geeks," after their penchant for loitering on the stairwell named Sallyport to harangue the rats.
The rats are an easy target because there are few places they can go to get away, and they can leave the barracks only through the main gateway, the Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson Arch. They salute the statue of Jackson, the famed Civil War general and VMI professor, and their shoulders suddenly slacken. They uncoil their chins from their necks, like turtles emerging cautiously from their shells.
And then it starts all over again in the Mess Hall.
"Permission to be seated, sir," the rats of Foxtrot Company, or F Troop, shout at breakfast. They can't sit down until they say it in perfect unison.
But then sitting isn't much of a treat, either.
The rats sit at steely-eyed attention on only the front three inches of their seats.
They can look only at their plates and the bowls of eggs, grits and bacon they pass around.
"Would anyone else like a banana, sir?" shouts Josh Wagner, his deadpan a counterpoint to the ridiculous yellow fruit he holds in the air.
The rats take one bite at a time, setting down their forks and sitting at attention while they chew.
If they finish early, they read their Rat Bibles, holding them so close to their eyes the print must nearly be a blur.
When it's time to go, they must earn the right to rise and strain.
"If we ain't strainin', we ain't trainin'!'' the rats shout together. ``F Troop fall out! VMI beat...'' The last words are mumbled and inaudible. They are supposed to know the name of VMI's next football opponent. Clearly, they don't.
The daze
"What is Mycenae?" Justin Dodge asks in Maj. Mary Ann Fay's world history class. Dodge and the other rats slump in their chairs, tap their feet, chew on pens.
"Don't you remember the first chapter?" Fay asks. "I think you were all in too much of a daze at that point."
Fay is just starting her second year at VMI, but she's already used to that daze, even sympathetic to it.
"They nod off in class all the time," she says. She doesn't make a big deal of it. She just walks over and nudges them, if their brother rats don't do it first.
"This time of year," Fay says of mid-September, "they really begin to wear out."
The guarantee
B.J. Grinage remembers a time or two during his rat year when he thought about leaving VMI.
"Actually, I can't remember a day when I didn't think about quitting," he said.
Grinage came to VMI on a basketball scholarship. In high school in Greensboro, N.C., he said, he was the big man on campus, captain of the basketball team, popular.
"All of a sudden, I'm a rat. Nobody can talk to me. Nobody wants to talk to me."
Leaving begins to look attractive pretty quickly.
Grinage said the physical stress of being a rat was not the hard part.
"You can take a nap or whatever and it's gone. The mental part, it's all the time."
Whenever he called home, his father, who did not attend VMI, reminded him of the network of VMI alumni that would "guarantee" him a job and told him to stay.
The only way he survived, he said, was by learning to laugh at the rat line. "If you take it too seriously, you'll go crazy."
If your roommate walks in, and he's just been called out by some third and flamed for a good 30 minutes, you laugh about it, Grinage said. He'll do the same to you when you get flamed.
Still, every year, nearly a quarter of the rats decide to go home. The attrition rate for the class of 2000, however, has been comparatively low. Though the year is just getting started, as of Sept. 25 only 33 rats had packed up and gone home, wearing civilian clothes but unable to hide the VMI brand: that stubbly skull.
Ironically, that haircut - a powerful symbol of commitment to the VMI way and of the abandonment of everything else - may be part of the reason why fewer rats are leaving VMI this year.
First classman Zirkle thinks giving the rats their haircuts earlier than usual made it easier for some of them to stay. "They already had their hair gone" when Cadre Week started, Zirkle says, "so they had less to lose by staying."
When rats do want to leave, they are taken aside by an upper classmen rat counselor, second classman Tom Warburton says.
"You can't think clearly when you're `on the stoop,''' when you're in the heat of the rat line, Warburton says. So counselors take the rats out of the rat line and get them to explain why they came to VMI and why they want to leave.
"Sometimes when a rat says he wants to leave, he doesn't really want to leave," Warburton says. "They see their reasons for leaving really aren't reasons for leaving."
The change
"I used to be able to pick him out on a football field, anywhere," Shirley Herrin says as her son Johnny's company marches past at the New Market battlefield. She knew his gait, the way he would stand. But on this Sunday before Labor Day, just 13 days after she and her husband said good-bye to him outside the VMI barracks, she can't pick him out.
Shirley Herrin is caught in a place many VMI parents find themselves: between pride for their sons' commitment to VMI and trepidation because of what they know their boys are enduring.
"It's been hard. I cried the first week," Shirley Herrin says. "The first time [Johnny] called home, he said it `sucked.'''
Now she sees a change in him. Most of the parents who have come to see their sons during the rats' annual trip to the Civil War battlefield where 10 VMI cadets died in combat see a change, too.
"I was `ma'am' instead of `Mom' at first,'' Cindy Hilewitz says.
Her son Josh has lost 14 pounds in 13 days. "He had it to lose," Josh's father, Greg Hilewitz, says as Josh marches off with his company to see another part of the battlefield.
"This is your family we're talking about, not just some abstract page out of history," Lt. Col. Keith Gibson tells the rats. The battle of New Market is the only time in history a college has been engaged in a pitched battle, he tells them.
On May 16, 1864, the VMI Corps of Cadets joined Confederate forces in a charge across the Bushong family farm, taking a battery of cannons and giving the Confederacy one of its last victories of the Civil War.
It was in the moments after the battle, former Secretary of the Army and Congressman John O. Marsh tells the rats, when cadets helped their bloody classmates off the battlefield, that the dyke system at VMI was born.
As the companies of rats march from site to site on the battlefield, their families and girlfriends tag along like birds above seagoing ships. When the opportunity arises, they land, and parents steal a few moments with their sons. The girlfriends hug them uneasily.
The rats take their cadet oath and then make a symbolic charge across the "Field of Lost Shoes," so named because when the cadets made their charge across it in 1864, their shoes were sucked from their feet by the muddy earth.
Then they line up in companies for another symbolic moment. They are presented with their VMI crests, small pins that will at last add some color to their barren, gray shoulder boards. "By wisdom and courage," the crests say in Latin.
"We walked over 86 miles in four days so we could do something special for you," First Classman Francis Busser tells the rats as he passes out the pins. "I expect you to do the same for your dykes when you get the chance."
A few minutes later, they are pinning them on.
"This is just the start, gentlemen," Busser tells them. "You've got the crests; now you've got to live up to them."
It's 6 a.m. on a cold, rainy Monday in September, two weeks after the family reunions and day of uplifting brotherhood at New Market.
The rats roll out of their rooms into the miserable morning. There's not a light shining on the first three floors of the barracks, but every light on the fourth floor is on.
The rats, figuring they are the only ones up, ignore the rat line, or adhere to it only loosely. Many do not strain at all until one, walking along casually, nearly bumps into a first classman who is on the stoop escorting a reporter.
The rat leaps to the rat line and strains hard. But the first classman says nothing to him.
Some rats pull out their hays and strap them to the stoop railing to air out. They don't realize a slight shift in the wind could soak them through.
Just before 7 a.m., a trumpet sounding reveille cuts through the weakening darkness, followed by the announcement that, despite the rain, they should form up outside the barracks in white blouses.
A small, tattered American flag, a "storm" flag, is raised at the edge of the drill field while they salute. They turn on heel and march off to breakfast in the rain.
LENGTH: Long : 391 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. 1. To the ominous beat of aby CNBsnare-drum cadence, uniformed upperclassmen of the cadre march into
the barracks, flanked by the rats. Minutes later, Hell Week begins.
2. On matriculation day, the rats form up in companies after telling
their parents goodbye. From the beginning, cadets are grouped by
height so that they look neat and orderly in parades. 3. This year's
rats were given their haircuts two days earlier than previous
freshman classes. Micah Chandler of Harrisonburg (above) maintains a
stoic attitude during his haircut. 4. Upperclassman Aaron Frazier
(left) gives rat Jason Smith of Danville hell. 5. On the third day
of cadre week, the rats go for their usual two-mile morning run. 6.
Bradley Arnold (above), class of 1998, plays reveille, usually
before 6 a.m. 7. This company of rats found that the variety and
intensity of their tasks increased after they gathered up their new
gear in sacks from the military store. 8. An upperclassman from the
cadre (above) orders a rat to look him in the eye. When rats are
done with their dinner (right), they fill their time by reading the
1997 Bullet (also called the Rat Bible). 9. Shawn Fisher (above)
works hard at sit-ups, while a brother rat holds his feet. 10. Rats
charge the hill during a re-enactment of the battle at New Market,
in which 10 VMI cadets were killed during one of the last
Confederate victories of the Civil War. 11. During a break in a coed
ROTC class (above), a VMI rat demonstrates the strain posture to
students from the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership at Mary
Baldwin College. 12. On the first day of classes (left), the new
cadets work on a writing assignment for ``Rat English.'' 13. Rats
enjoy pizza and conversation (left) with their dykes, or mentors, in
the upperclassmen's barracks room. 13. Josh Hilewitz (above) takes
some time with his sister, Sarah (at left) and mother, Cindy, after
the New Market re-enactment. color.