ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 15, 1996 TAG: 9612130035
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LEXINGTON
SERIES: the vmi class of 2000
Part 2 of an occasional series about the freshman year of the Virginia Military Institute's final all-male class - It was a warm Monday afternoon in September and Charlie Townes was standing in the middle of the Virginia Military Institute barracks courtyard in his underwear, slathered in shaving cream.
Just nine days before the VMI Board of Visitors had decided to let women attend VMI and live in this very barracks, and there was Townes, grinning and naked to his bleach-white briefs.
From his right arm dangled his torn gray wool coat.
His rifle, propped formally on his right shoulder, had a flower sticking out of the barrel.
"Things are getting back to normal around here," senior Mike Belenky had remarked a few minutes before Townes came to be in his current state.
All around Townes, the concrete and grass were sprayed with the wreckage of a VMI tradition that goes back as far as anyone at VMI can remember, at least 60 years: the initiation of the first rat sentinel of the year.
Like most rituals at VMI, it was part social occasion, too.
In the moments before the first time a rat, as freshmen at VMI are called, went on guard duty, 40 or 50 seniors began to gather like a crowd around a gallows. They carried cups of water, toothpaste, baby powder, peanut butter - the best makeshift tools of harassment life in a Spartan barracks can afford.
Townes, a rat from Colonial Heights, smiled stupidly as he was led into the courtyard by the officer of the day.
The rat might be chosen for being a troublemaker in need of punishment, but more often he is chosen because he is a favorite. Being the first rat sentinel is, after all, an honor, a bragging right for the next four years.
When Townes started to walk his post, in full guard dress from his hat and rifle to his white belts and spit-shined shoes, the muck began to fly.
He was hit with blasts of water and baby powder first. Shaving cream streamed recklessly through the air.
Townes could barely walk for all the cadets surrounding him, tearing at his clothes, wringing out tubes of toothpaste on him.
"Get his dykes!" someone yelled.
A minute later, Joel Harding emerged from the melee with one of Townes' cross-dykes, the white belts he wore across his chest.
"A war trophy," Harding proclaimed, setting it aside for safe-keeping.
Townes' pants were stripped away, then his coat and T-shirt. By the end, he was wet and smiling in his skivvies.
The crowd quickly thinned and faded into regular barracks life, the cadets grinning with a satisfaction that comes only from a ritual like the one they've just witnessed.
They have a new story to tell. So does Townes.
But more than that, they've gotten a taste of an ingredient that flavors all life at VMI, but which no one seemed able to name - much less articulate - during the six-year fight to keep VMI all-male. It was an intangible that got lost among all the talk of haircuts and where to put women's showers.
It is this: There is something precious and worth preserving about doing something with a bunch of guys, about sharing an experience - no matter how mundane, pointless or even childish - that could only happen among men.
VMI is not just an all-male school, after all. It is a miniature culture defined in part by the absence of women.
Even if the rat line - the vicious, adversarial training regimen that all cadets must endure and which distinguishes VMI - is preserved, cadets say, the culture of VMI will never be the same.
'Rats don't have
time to date'
"Even talking to girls is weird now," said Ronald White, a rat from Jacksonville, Fla. That includes his girlfriend, a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Things with her are "pretty rotten" since White came to VMI.
In the limited social life of a rat, women have very little place. Most girlfriends fall by the wayside before Christmas, often by their own choosing.
As VMI Superintendent Josiah Bunting III said when asked if male and female rats would be allowed to date each other, "Rats don't have time to date anybody."
Oh, there are dances, or hops, as they are called at VMI, and there are girls at them, too. Word of the hops is sent to the social committees of nearby schools. Occasionally, according to one cadet, a carload of college women will pull up in front of the barracks and the women will ask if anybody needs a date for the hop.
A rat can get a date if he needs one.
"All it takes is one rat saying, 'I've got a friend at JMU,''' and suddenly everybody's got a date, said First Classman John Jenkins.
Getting a date is one thing. Actually entertaining her is another.
"All you know how to do is sit around telling rat stories," said Chad Brady, a rat from Chesapeake.
A few rats, like Kelly Underwood of Radford, keep their girlfriends.
"She's three hours away in that direction," he said, pointing north toward George Mason University. But he e-mails her daily.
Beyond that, however, the rats are stuck with themselves.
"When you get 350 guys, all together on the exact same place, there's a bond that [develops] between all your brother rats that you're going to have the rest of your life," Underwood said.
That bond is the result of pulling together against a common enemy - the rat line.
"You sort of seek out the group," said Stephen Fern, a rat from Terre Haute, Ind.
When upperclassmen can flame you, or stop you just about any time and demand push-ups, or ask you where the hell the George Washington statue is, and scream at you until your face is windburned if you don't know, you tend to put less emphasis on individuality.
You tend to help keep each other in line.
You seek out the group because when you're a rat, the group is all you have.
"Sometimes," Brady said, "I think about what it would be like to be absolutely free.''
'Kill the mascot!'
"Sir," the rat said to a man standing in the aisle near him at VMI's Alumni Memorial Field, "If we score, you might want to move a little bit."
It was a very decent gesture, considering it came from a guy who, along with his brother rats, had just finished shouting "Inbred Marshall!" over and over at VMI's football opponent.
VMI had the ball on the seven-yard line and was poised to score its first points against West Virginia's Marshall University in more than two and a half games.
A minute later, the Keydets scored on a running play, and the rats roared out of the bleachers and down to the side of the field. It happens every time VMI scores in a home football game.
There was a cannon blast, and the rats hit the dirt and did one push-up for every point on the VMI side of the scoreboard. Regimental Commander Brian Bagwan, the ranking cadet at VMI, joined them. Even the cheerleaders, a group of volunteers from Mary Baldwin College, grunted out the push-ups.
VMI football is a strange religion. Its devotees are driven by a weird mixture of pride and masochism.
With about 1,250 students, VMI is a small school competing in Division I Group AA of the NCAA. They are constant underdogs, yet the Board of Visitors insists on remaining in the tough Southern Conference.
Cadets are required to attend the games and stand the entire game, except at half-time.
But the games are most intense for the rats, the official cheering section.
While the upperclassmen sneak in beers and empty their flasks into $1 Cokes in the highest section of bleachers, the rats sit down front and whoop and holler for a team that, of late, is more than likely going to lose anyway.
But for the rats, even a required social outing is better than straining.
They bobbed their stubbled heads and sang with the pep band. They whirled their gym shorts over their heads. They screamed epithets at the Marshall team.
"The enemy is so undisciplined! You're so unmotivated!"
"You're really not good football players."
"You're below average!"
"Be nice to them! Read poetry with them!"
"Tear his head off, rip it off!"
"We're gonna kill the mascot!"
According to campus lore, that nearly happened a few years ago, when the rats stormed across the field and nearly choked to death James Madison University's "Duke Dog" by trying to rip off the costume head.
Against Marshall, however, the rats restricted themselves to push-ups. VMI put 20 points on its side of the scoreboard, but still lost by 25.
`Brother rat, please pass the sausage'
Kelly Underwood zipped his cropped black jacket to the neck and stepped out into the mid-November cold, the kind of cold that finds every exposed cell of flesh on a human body and penetrates it.
It was 6:30 a.m. From the fourth floor, or stoop, of the barracks, where the rats reside, the pink first light of day was barely visible over the barracks parapet.
As Underwood's foot hit the stoop, he contorted his body into the strain position - chin in, chest out, arms stiff at the sides - which rats must always assume in the barracks. Even if no upperclassmen are awake to see them.
Underwood and his brother rats marched a prescribed path - the rat line - down to the first-floor rooms of their dykes, their cadet big brothers, to begin the chores that await all rats in the morning.
Sometimes, a rat is little more than an indentured valet.
Underwood stepped quietly into his dyke's room - no barracks doors have locks - and waited in the darkness until 6:40 a.m.
"Brian, Brian," he said to Bagwan, the cadet who did push-ups with the rats at the Marshall game, and Underwood's dyke.
Without a word, Bagwan rolled mechanically out of his cot, stepped right into a pair of flip-flops and headed for a sink in the corner.
While Bagwan brushed his teeth, Underwood folded his blanket, rolled up his mattress, and propped the wooden cot against a wall. Later in the day, he would spend an hour between classes shining Bagwan's shoes.
First bugle call came at 6:50, and within minutes cadets clogged to the main archway of the barracks to get to formation by 6:55. Once the flag was raised, most first classmen wandered back to their rooms. It's one privilege of being a first classman.
The other upperclassmen did the same after marching down the hill to the mess hall.
A rat has only one privilege: to strain.
"Whose statue is in the Preston library?" Delta Company Executive Officer John Jenkins demanded of a skinny rat as he waited to march down to breakfast. Jenkins is big on Rat Bible knowledge. The Rat Bible is, after all, VMI's "source of all wisdom."
"Preston, sir," the rat responded uneasily, and incorrectly.
"Who the f--- told you that was the Preston statue?" Jenkins bellowed. "Do you even know what Preston looks like? Do you have a picture of him in your wallet?"
The rat foolishly tried to be logical. The statue in the Preston Library is of Matthew Fontaine Maury, a former VMI professor known for charting the world's ocean currents. There is no Preston statue.
A minute later, they marched off to breakfast to a head-rattling drum cadence played by a half-dozen drowsy drummers. But life doesn't get any easier at breakfast.
"You're hungry all the time," Chad Brady said. But going to the mess hall is such a trying experience, rats learn to dread it. They must sit-strain on the front three inches of their chairs the entire time, looking only at their food or straight ahead, while their company officers harangue them.
"Brother Rat, please pass the sausage," they sing. "Brother Rat, please pass the syrup."
"Underwood, did you empty that pitcher?" Jenkins shouted that mid-November morning.
"No sir," Underwood replied weakly.
"Did you pour every last drop out of that pitcher of juice?" Jenkins demanded.
"Yes sir."
"Then what do you do?" Jenkins said, patronizing him now, like Sgt. Carter with Gomer Pyle.
"Go fill it up, sir."
"Then go do it."
Underwood had no problem recalling the rule he violated: "You kill it, you fill it."
Rat missions
One evening, when the rats of Hotel company were out on a training march, one of the company officers pointed at the orange sun, dipping behind a mountain and said, "See that? That's you all."
The members of the VMI class of 2000 consider themselves the last of a breed. As the last all-male class to pass through VMI, they are a group of marked men.
"It gives you an extra mark of pride," Underwood said. "We're culminating what the rat tradition has been about."
So they try to march a little better, strain a little harder, keep their rooms a little cleaner.
After only two and a half months, these guys are veterans of the rat line.
They've figured out ways to obtain the most precious commodity among rats: sleep.
A rat might get eight hours sleep on a Sunday, but most nights it's closer to six.
Rats can't have their cots down during the day. A lucky rat gets to sleep in his dyke's room if he wants. Not all dykes are so kind, but some rats get to use their big brother's room as a safe haven in return for keeping it clean.
The average rat can fall asleep sitting up in the most uncomfortable chair.
Rats sleep sitting up in class. They sleep splayed out on chairs in the science library. They sleep curled up in the aisles between the rows of books.
But if the rats lack sleep, some nights it's their own fault.
Night is when rats sneak out on "rat missions." Night is when the rats exact an affectionate revenge on the cadets who make their lives miserable during the day. The administration frowns on the missions, but among the cadets, they are tacitly encouraged.
The rats of Bravo company burned a mattress in front of their company sergeant's room.
"A little 'Lord of the Flies' action," Chad Brady called it. The company officers "ate it up. They loved it," he said.
Another time, they found their company corporal's private study desk in one of the academic buildings, stole it and set it up intact in front of his door. He was so pleased and amused by the attention from the rats, he came out and took pictures of it.
"Your definition of fun definitely changes," said Thomas Rhodes, a rat from Dallas.
Fun for rats serves the double purpose of binding them together and, in the case of rat missions, showing their leaders what a bond they have.
But even before they could get home for Thanksgiving furlough, that bond would be questioned.
Getting out of line
Something was amiss in the barracks on the Thursday before Thanksgiving.
The rats were not straining. They ignored the paths they were supposed to walk in the barracks. They did not salute the statue of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson when they left the barracks.
"Right now, they're just freshmen," First Classman John Jenkins said matter-of-factly.
The rats had been kicked out of the rat line.
"Basically, the rats suck," Jenkins said. "They're not unifying the way they're supposed to."
It started the previous Saturday, after VMI's football team nipped a rival team from the Citadel in South Carolina in double-overtime. In celebration of the 34-27 victory, the first class, which is in charge of the rat line, excused the rats from it.
No straining, no strict adherence to the prescribed pathways in the barracks, no early morning sweat parties.
Every so often at VMI, the rats are given a break like this. But the smart ones realize it is a test. A test the class of 2000 failed miserably.
Ideally, the rats would have showed their unity and commitment by putting themselves back in the rat line. But by Tuesday morning, they were still sauntering around the barracks like any upperclassman with a pocket full of privileges.
That afternoon, the first class met with the rats, told them what scum they were, and then walked out of Jackson Memorial Hall. The rats were left sitting there wondering what to do.
That night, the rats reportedly stormed out of the barracks, broke the chain holding the school's howitzer in place, wheeled it past the parade ground to the commandant's house, and jumped up and down on it, screaming, until the axle broke.
Then they raided the mess hall and smashed plates until they felt they had showed the first class how devoted they were.
The first class was not impressed. Neither was the administration, which told the first class it would have to pay for the damages because the rats are their responsibility.
Still, no one told the rats what they should do to appease the first class. By Friday, they still had not figured it out, and they left for a week's break having been out of the rat line for a week.
The class of 2000, it seemed, was not quite living up to its proud place in history. The last all-male class of rats in the 157-year tradition of the rat line was becoming something of an embarrassment.
'The way you prove yourself'
Twenty years ago, training at VMI consisted largely of strapping on combat boots, picking up a rifle and running around to the point of exhaustion.
These days, it's sophisticated business.
Twice a week, rats go through "Rat Challenge": a series of ropes courses, climbing walls, obstacle courses and mental challenges like taking a cannon apart and putting it back together. The whole affair culminates in the Rat Olympics, in which rats compete as companies on the obstacle courses. It's one more way the rats demonstrate company unity, pride and teamwork. In short, how they've bonded.
It was the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving. The howitzer was still broken, but the rats were back in the rat line.
It happened Monday just before 11 p.m. The first class had called a meeting in Jackson Memorial Hall, and the rats got wind of it.
So they ran down to the football stadium, found the only spot in the bleachers visible from the entrance area to J.M. Hall, and arranged themselves into a 97 in tribute to the first class.
"It was pretty cool," John Jenkins had to admit. But it was too little too late.
The first class subjected the rats to a serious sweat party and then put them back in the rat line. On top of that, they all had to turn themselves in for violating the 11 p.m. curfew.
Tuesday afternoon, though, all seemed forgiven.
"You gotta start yelling like banshees," directed Chris Himel, the cadet in charge of the Rat Olympics. "Especially when they get to the rope. That's when they die out."
The event before him was the Marine Obstacle Course: a mass of utility poles arranged into a series of hurdles, walls, and balance beams culminating in a 25-foot rope climb.
While upperclassmen stood around wondering out loud what it would feel like to slip and wind up straddling a pole, the rats slogged through the mud in waves to the end of the course.
Nearby, rats weary from running a three-mile obstacle course in combat boots plodded heavily by. At the low hurdles, they no longer even bothered to climb. They would simply fall forward with a grunt and somersault back to their feet.
But the premier event of the day is the ``pugil stick'' matches. Rats strap on football helmets and lacrosse gloves and swing wildly at each other with long padded poles.
One match between Alex Hill and James Bartels went on for 10 minutes.
Both rats were mud-brown, with broad smears across their helmets. They had battled to a quick tie, but no one seemed able to break it.
The referee just kept shaking his head and starting them over. Each would get down in a push-up position and, after a whistle blast, leap to his feet and try to bludgeon the other when he wasn't looking.
The more tired they became, the more mad they got, the more they fell in the mud. The rats encircling them closed in tighter, yelled louder, like kids at a playground fight.
Hill, a stocky redhead, finally caught Bartels with his stick a little low. With a roundhouse swing, he rattled Bartels' helmet and ended the thing.
By the time the tug-of-war came around, it was dark, and the rats competed in the blinding beam of car headlights.
F company, or F-Troop, took the last event of the day, but the championship went to Charlie company. They were perhaps the favorites anyway. Charlie company is known for its insane dedication. Last year, the rats in Charlie Company voluntarily branded themselves with hot coat hangers.
"This is the way you prove yourself," Himel told the rats. "Not by destroying stuff, but by coming up here and running like hell and beating the hell out of each other."
LENGTH: Long : 393 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. 1. Charlie Townes is initiated asby CNBthe first rat on guard duty this year by enduring blasts of shaving
cream and the harassment of upperclassmen. 2. Rats drop for push-ups
(right) after VMI scores during its Homecoming game against Furman
University. 3. As the official cheering section at home games
(below), rats never sit down except at half-time. Tradition also
dictates that they wave their gym shorts while shouting insults to
the opposing team. 4. Twice a week, rats go through "Rat Challenge"
(above right), a physical test of ropes courses and obstacle
courses. 5. During the Challenge, three cadets (right) cheer on a
rat through a ropes course. 6. As a rat, Kelly Underwood of Radford
shines his dyke's shoes as part of his early morning routine. 7.
Usually sleep-deprived, rats catch a few winks whenever and wherever
possible. One popular place is called the "rat nursery,'' a cozy
corner of the new science library. 8. Reflecting on their
experiences as members of the rat class of 2000 are (clockwise from
above): Ronald White of Jacksonville, Fla.; 9. Stephen Fern from
Jacksonville, Fla.; 10. Thomas Rhodesi of Dallas; 11. and Chad Brady
from Chesapeake. 13. Rat life is rarely boring. Members of the Hotel
Company (left) work to get five rats over a wall in one of the
events of the Rat Challenge. They made it in 19 seconds. 14. At the
Homecoming Hop dance, rat Anthony Joseph Gagliardi dances with a
friend. color.