________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
You now find yourself at a table of ten folks. There used to be eight plebes, two
upperclassmen. Now there are three plebes and seven upperclassmen, all of whom ask
questions. The plebe has duties that used to be for just the two upperclassmen at the end of
the table and now there are only three plebes, so you're the water corporal or you're the
coffee corporal or you're the gunner--taking the stuff from the waiter and passing it down.
You're responding to upperclass questions, and each time you screw up you pay in some
form, either in further recitation of the many thousands of facts you're supposed to know or
something else.
The same goes for your squad leader. My squad leader was very demanding, and when you
didn't know the President's cabinet, you might get the opportunity to write it out 30 times
that evening. Well, then you have a choice: you can study math, you can study French, you
can study English, or you can try to keep off your squad leader's bad list by writing the
cabinet down 30 times. So, you do the latter.
I was very high in my high school class in math, did very well in English, and was high in
relative class standing. So, I would take one look at those subjects and say, "Well, I know
that math, I know that English," and hardly touch the book in either of those subjects. I was
really having difficulty with French. I mean, I just didn't understand because we started out
totally in French at the outset. From the first day, we did not speak English in the classroom.
So, the transition was very abrupt for somebody who'd never had French before.
Consequently, I was floundering in French, floundering with my squad leader, and just
wouldn't touch math and English.
After six weeks, I was deficient in French, deficient in English, and deficient in math. I still
wasn't doing too well with my squad leader. It was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy of
things. For example, the max grade was 3.0; 2.0 was passing. In three straight lessons on the
slide rule I went 1.0, 1.2, and 0.8. That meant that I was three units deficient on a cumulative
scale in just those three lessons. That takes a lot to make up when you can only make it up
with grades between 2.0 and 3.0.
So, things were not going well, and I was discouraged and even had my parents' permission
to resign because of the duress I was getting from the squad leader and all of this. I didn't
want to resign. Then several others left. Out of that there was a table reshuffling. My squad
leader had also been my table commandant, so I mean I was getting from him twice. He
moved off, and I was moved out of that squad to more reasonable leaders who maybe thought
Theory Y was as good as Theory X. I then got the kind of breathing space I needed to get
things going.
We were re-sectioned in our classes too. At West Point at that time, you were sectioned into
classes according to where you stood in the class in that particular subject at that time. So, in
math I was sent to the 20th section of 24--that's how far down I was in math. There I met
Lieutenant Colonel Jessie Fishback, Corps of Engineers, and he was a patient, fatherly,
mentoring kind of person. Later on, his son would be a cadet, assistant S3 for the second
regiment when I was a Tac in the regiment, the exec/S3. The saying goes, what goes around,
comes around.
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