ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 9, 1997 TAG: 9703100010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LEXINGTON
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM/THE ROANOKE TIMES
The end of the rat line was near.
You could smell it.
"Breakout," the final rite of passage for freshmen at Virginia Military Institute, signaled its coming with a pungent stink.
It was a nauseating swirl of sweat and muscle ointment that oozed from the rats' rooms on the fourth floor of the barracks - the residue from a week of wicked workouts that preceded the afternoon when they would claw their way up an impossibly muddy hill to freedom.
Six months it had been since the last all-male rat mass at VMI met its cadre, or training corps, and entered the rat line - the regimen designed to strip them of their individuality, force them to bond together and rebuild them as VMI men.
For that six months, they had been the lowest life form at the institute. Now, they were at last on the verge of becoming full-fledged cadets.
Soon, they would be hauled from their cots and exercised nearly to the point of collapse. They would confront the nearly vertical 20-foot wall of red-clay mud they must climb to the end of the rat line.
In a place so steeped in tradition and ceremony as VMI, the red-clay mud of breakout hill is charged with symbolism. It covers the rats from stubbly skull to smelly boots, obliterates their individual identities and ties them together into one brown mass. It hides their scars, their quirks, their skin color, their history.
Like the rat line, it is at once their adversary and the agent that bonds them.
"I, Rat Mundiger," the note in the Rat Disciplinary Committee mailbox began, "have not felt challenged by the RDC or any cadre. You will never break me and I will prevail. You will lose."
"See, this is what I'm talking about," said senior Jeff Staub, president of the RDC. He smiled at the defiant attitude.
It was a sign the rats were ready, he said.
When rats begin to buck the authority of the upperclassmen, especially the RDC, it's taken as a sure sign they are just about to become VMI men. They are ready for breakout.
This particular rat class, which had carried a mark of pride for being the last all-male rat mass at the institute, was at one point the shame of the corps. They had not pulled together as a class. Their training was lackluster.
"They were lousy for a long, long time," Staub said.
Finally, they were coming around.
A week earlier, for example, the rats had been hauled out of their rooms for a "sweat party," an intense 15-minute workout that is an almost daily staple of the rat-line experience.
But the rats spontaneously locked arms with each other and refused.
Staub liked that, too.
It wasn't just defiance, he said, it showed unity.
But such defiance, while a good sign, isn't exactly tolerated. And the rats later paid the price, as certain rules were forsaken as the countdown to breakout began.
No longer were there safe hours set aside for class and study time when rats couldn't be worked out. And no longer were seniors the only upperclassmen with push-up authority.
Now, anyone could drop a rat for 20.
The final countdown
Three days before breakout, at the time when the rats were usually getting settled for lights out, the barracks courtyard was filled with rats huffing and grunting.
Though it was about 25 degrees, many wore only shorts and T-shirts. With their dykes - their upperclassmen big brothers - looming over them, the rats lay on their backs and kicked their legs in the air. They picked up their fellow rats in a fireman's carry and raced laps around the courtyard.
It seemed rough, but by VMI standards, this workout was just fun.
But it didn't stay fun for long.
A 30-minute sweat party followed. And there was no defiance this time - at least not from a rat named Scott Hillyer, who was singled out by upperclassmen Tim Renzi and Gary Goldsmith.
"Push, push!" they screamed at him as he labored to lift his body off the cement floor for a few more push-ups.
Then Hillyer was on his back for leg-lifts and flutter-kicks.
"Pray," they yelled, and Hillyer pressed his hands together above his chest while he flopped his legs in the air.
He ran in place. He shouted "breakout" as loud as he could. He sang VMI fight songs in a wheezy voice. His hooded sweatshirt became dark with perspiration. Hillyer seemed almost crippled with fatigue, even more so than the rats around him.
One of the four emergency medical technicians overseeing the workout stopped to check him out. He was fine.
Even after another 15 minutes of push-ups, flutter kicks and screaming, Hillyer smiled.
He wasn't sure why he'd been singled out for such a rough time.
"I don't know," he said, hoarse and barely audible. "Just breakout, I guess."
`Simple male brutality'
Even as the rats careened toward their final ritual, some upperclassmen questioned whether the rite should be continued.
"No matter how we try to justify [it], it is simple male brutality in its purest sense," wrote junior John D. Cocke IV on the opinion page of the student newspaper, The Cadet.
Cocke called for VMI Superintendent Josiah Bunting and the Board of Visitors to "consider terminating the ritual event."
He asked cadets to recall when they took off their muddy clothes and "saw the cuts and bruises that covered your body, not to mention what a struggle it was to raise your arms, much less cough or sigh.
"Now this pain was mild in comparison to those brother rats who found themselves in the hospital with broken bones or hypothermia."
He warned of the toll the same treatment might take on a female rat next year, when women arrive at the institute for the first time in its 157-year history.
But by most accounts, breakout used to be worse.
The most recent form of break-out, which requires the rats to crawl up a steep, muddy hill, is only about 10 years old.
Breakout used to take place in the barracks. Rats would have to battle their way from the courtyard, up the steps to the fourth floor, and through a barricade of furniture, ropes and upperclassmen armed with coat-hangers and wooden paddles.
"It was just stupid," recalled Col. Mike Strickler, public-relations director for the school. He was a rat at VMI in 1967. He said the school was lucky that nobody ever fell off the stairs and suffered a serious injury.
In the 1950s, "they used to do something called `Bloody Sunday,''' Strickler said, when rats had to run through a double-line of upperclassmen whacking them with various blunt objects as they went by.
But, in the minds of most cadets today, the rat-line experience would not be complete without breakout. To graduate without climbing that hill would mean being something less than the VMI men who went before them.
`You gotta want it'
"Don't break any bones!" called one mother as the rats formed up outside the barracks on Feb. 20, a calm, prespring day.
But this was a loose formation at best.
The rats looked ready for battle. Most had strapped duct tape around the tops of their combat boots to keep the mud out. The waists of their camouflage fatigues were bound with rope and more tape.
One rat had bandaged his head to protect an existing wound. Another rat with a shoulder injury taped his arm tightly against his chest.
"Wooooooo!" howled rat M.J. McKeen every time there was a half second of silence. After a week of seemingly endless sweat parties, the rats were running almost solely on adrenaline. They were giddy with the thought that the rat line was at its end.
"Breakout hill," a nearly vertical mud incline in the woods a few hundred yards behind the barracks, had been saturated by a Lexington Fire Department hose by the time the first of three waves of rats came to face it.
The rats got a break on the weather. The sun was shining, and the temperature was well above 50 degrees. Last year, the temperature was in the 40s, and several rats had to be treated for hypothermia. Standard procedure for breakout calls for the ritual to be postponed if the temperature is below 45 degrees.
Peculiar at this year's breakout, though, was the presence of news reporters and cameras, there to chronicle this last all-male breakout. It was a circumstance the cadets clearly did not like.
In the past, the media have been forbidden from witnessing breakout.
"Go home and take your pretty camera with you," a cadet shouted at a reporter and photographer from Richmond. Other cadets fantasized out loud about tossing reporters into the mud.
Several rats' parents and girlfriends also got wind of the ritual and showed up.
"It's not a family affair," senior Oliver Johnson said later. "It's a VMI affair, it's a corps thing."
Some cadets speculated that the media presence was a sign that this would be the last breakout. Superintendent Bunting insisted that it was not.
Once the mud started to fly, however, the corps quickly focused on the task at hand.
It started with the first wave of rats being dragged full speed into the flat stretch of mud and puddles at the bottom of the hill. Within seconds, the muddy pool was alive with writhing, brown bodies.
As the rats squirmed forward, they looked primordial, like tadpoles just finding their legs, or that first amphibian to slither onto dry land eons ago.
One rat - it was impossible to identify any of them - inched forward only to be dragged back by one leg. Some of the dykes piled mud on his head and shoved handfuls of it down his pants.
"You gotta want it, you gotta want it bad," they screamed.
The smart rats kept their heads down, lest they get mud kicked into their faces.
Another rat was carried to the back of the mud hole and dropped onto his belly with his feet pointed in the direction he was supposed to be heading. Blind with mud, he began to creep forward, unaware he was heading away from the hill.
The first casualty came halfway up the hill when a rat slipped and wrenched his knee. He was carried to a plastic-lined van and carted away to the campus hospital. Thirty minutes later, another rat on the hill suffered the same fate.
But for most of the muddy mass, the hill was more of a salvation.
That's where other upperclassmen waited, ready to help pull the rats along, even laying themselves out like ladders to climb over.
"This is the concentrated essence of the rat line," Bunting said as he watched the fray, "with the exception that they know it's almost over."
The second and third waves came. The temperature dropped and a cool wind kicked up, but the rats slogged forward. An hour and a half after it started, the last of the 320 rats to breakout cleared the hill.
One by one they plopped into a pool of water to wash off and then entered a heated tent. They clasped arms and posed for pictures. Some blew mud and mucus from their noses. In some cases, their clothes had to be cut from their bodies.
"I didn't get that much in my mouth," said Jeb Cox, a freshman from Texas. "It's mostly in my ears. I can't hear. I tried to clean it out with a stick."
Later, they shared a steak dinner with their dykes and then were presented to the superintendent as VMI's freshman class, or "fourth classmen."
They were no longer rats, and they were jubilant.
Breakout "put a period on the sentence, pretty much," said Kelly Underwood of Radford. "To me, that was the greatest achievement of my life, to be able to say I climbed that hill."
`A whole new place'
The first time Kelly Underwood sat down to eat in the mess hall after breakout, he settled uncomfortably onto the front three inches of his chair.
That's the way rats have to eat.
Underwood paused.
"I thought, 'what are you doing?'''
Then he slid back into his chair and had his first comfortable meal at VMI in the six months since he'd been there.
Ever since then, he's been seeing things he never noticed when he was a rat.
For that six months of "straining" - walking at attention, eating at attention, never being allowed to look around - the rats' world seemed even smaller than it was.
"You find stuff you never knew existed," Underwood said. "You realize VMI isn't constrained to about five upperclassmen and your rat mass."
"It's a whole new place," David Epperly of Christiansburg said as he entered the barracks a week after breakout.
Indeed it was.
Disco music thumped out of Epperly's room. Rats cannot have stereos. Fourth classmen can.
And they can go into town three days a week.
They can leave their cots out during the day and nap in their rooms if they want.
Or study late and sleep uninterrupted.
"I could never picture upperclassmen not yelling," said Jason Pierson, a fourth classman from Botetourt County. Now he calls them by their first names instead of addressing them as Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones.
They feel like different men from when they came, they said.
They are more confident. Bold.
"I'm no longer afraid to fail, to step out there," Underwood said.
LENGTH: Long : 249 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/THE ROANOKE TIMES. 1. Three days beforeby CNBbreakout, upperclassmen torment rats during a late-night sweat party
in the barracks. 2. Two days before breakout, rats race around the
barracks courtyard while hauling each other around in a fireman's
carry. 3. Scott Hillyer, a rat from Montclair, Va., is singled out
for a workout from upperclassmen. 4. VMI Superintendent Josiah
Bunting calls breakout ``the concentrated essence of the rat line.''
The mission for the rat mass is to struggle through the mud then
climb the steep, slippery slope called breakout hill. 5. Rats
struggle to keep their heads above the mud, despite the hindrance of
upperclassmen (photos at left). 6. However, once the rats make their
way to breakout hill (above), members of the corps (in yellow and
black) help the rats up the slope. color.