Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
member of that Protestant chapel squad that he was marked absent from because he was
really on the Catholic chapel squad.
Well, when you got right down to it, it was found that he missed chapel, and so he was
written up for punishment. There was an ongoing legal action by five midshipmen at
Annapolis who had sued the federal government to get out of mandatory chapel. Anderson
joined that suit and was the only cadet as part of that suit.
At this time, Colonel Haldane, the regimental commander, was at Harvard at an advanced
management program, so I was the acting regimental commander. It befell on me to handle
this situation over the coming weeks.
There was a strong reaction from Anderson's classmates, and there was a great deal of
discussion and talk, a buzz of activity and dialogue about this at West Point. It was
manifested a little bit later in an incident in which Anderson, in a classroom, had used some
profanity in a social studies class in answer to a question. The cadet section marcher reported
Anderson for conduct unbecoming a cadet, using profanity in a classroom. The instructor
took issue with this because of his feeling that in the classroom he was in charge, and he
wanted to have freedom of expression.
This, then, became a bit of an issue between the academic department involved, social
sciences, and the tactical department. Now, you must understand that often there's some
differences in opinion between the tactical department and the academic departments. The
tactical department feels that they do important things; the academic side needs to understand
how important those things are. The academic departments think the cadets are up here for an
education; if the tactical department would quit taking up all their time, they'd be able to
study better and be more prepared.
That puts it very simplistically, but that's the rudiments of this divide. There were always
efforts to bring the two together for the common cause.
Well, in this case, Colonel Amos Jordan, who had been the head of the department of social
sciences for some years, quite a well-known figure in United States national security circles,
called me, the acting commander. He said basically that what happened was well within
norms and met the standards of the department of social sciences and certainly we shouldn't
do anything to punish Cadet Anderson.
Now I had a dilemma. As I looked at the situation, it seemed to me that I should let it play
out its course and see how it was going to work. I didn't want to stop anything at any one
particular time because if I stopped it, then it was going to be a situation in which no one was
going to be happy.
Our normal protocol in the tactical department was that if a cadet reported an offense we sent
it to a cadet board. I'm talking here about an offense that reached a certain threshold, we
would send it to a cadet board and let them pass judgment on their fellow cadet and assess
the punishment. If it was reported by a tactical officer, we would send it to a tactical officer
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