Engineer Memoirs
As the committee pondered this problem, a cadet from the parade arrived to put the parade flags
in the storage case in the conference room. As he began to leave I said, "Young man, if you were
going to put a stripe on your new bathrobe, would you put black, gray, or gold?"
He said, "I'd put gold on."
That's how we got the gold stripe on the bathrobes.
We had a lot of interesting events. I don't think they relate to the interview, but the last June week
I was there, one of our officers had some of the cadets' girlfriends stay at his quarters. The night
before graduation, the ladies had gone to a party of some kind, and one was very upset with her
cadet escort. She came home and she made some comment about her "husband." It's against the
rules for cadets to get married. So when reported to me, I called the young cadet in, and he
admitted he was married.
I explained to him, his parents, and his girlfriend that when he signed in the previous night he also
signed that he was not married. He had lied. The matter was turned over to the Honor Committee,
which met quickly. He was found guilty of an honor violation and given a chance to resign as a
cadet, which he did. Since he had successfully finished his academics, he still got his diploma,
but not a commission.
West Point provides a special human as well as academic experience. My aim was to deal with
every cadet as an individual, so we had a policy in my regiment to build on strength-find out
what a young man was good at and build on that. There's so much negative up there anyhow, you
know, demerits and the plebe system and all. The policy worked.
As a senior colonel I was not going to give any demerits myself. I felt that if I brought a young
man in and talked to him, that would be enough unless it was something very serious. That turned
out to be a pretty good idea, too, because it gave me a chance to talk to a lot of cadets I otherwise
would have just written up on a piece of paper.
My earlier assignment in the career development field was beneficial to this assignment, and also
I learned a lot about how an officer is made. As a cadet going through West Point, you see things
mostly as they affect you personally, but when you're in an oversight position, you see the whole
picture-a broader perspective. It certainly did increase my love and devotion to the Military
Academy and bring a better understanding of what it does and does very well.
Historically, 25 to 35 percent of an entering class did not graduate. In the early
a lot of
effort was going into keeping the ones who were leaving. I made a little study and I found out that
the losses generally distributed themselves in the lower half, one way or another. I took the
position that we shouldn't change the system to keep the lower group when we were going to lose
up to 30 percent historically anyhow. A better idea was to get the entrance criteria more precise
so that when the young man came in, he was more apt to stay. Certainly in the United States there
were 1,100 young men who would stay at West Point if we could find them.
Q .. You were in a position to see what cadets chose the Corps of Engineers.
A .. Yes. Well, branch drawing was always important. As deputy commandant, I didn't want to be
overly pushy about the engineers. Besides, I had learned that whoever came in the Corps would
be qualified. It wasn't a matter of getting a winner or a loser, they were all winners, so it's just
a question of helping those who were not sure to make up their minds. There were cadet
counselors established for each branch.
Q .. I wanted to get you to talk a little bit more about the advanced management course. I'm not too
familiar with it.
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