My Share of the Task(243)
the Rutgers football game: U.S. Military Academy, “West Point 1972–1973 Catalog,” 142.
“surrounded by attacking Indians”: Rick Atkinson, The Long Gray Line (Holt, 2009), 396.
“prima donnas and spoiled brats”: Ibid.
dramatically upset Air Force: Gordon S. White, Jr., “Long Run Decides: Hines Races 49 Yards for Cadet Score with 5:53 Remaining,” New York Times, November 5, 1972.
rooms were to be kept: During the 1976 honor code hearings, Lieutenant General Sidney Berry explained, “Now, regulations require cadets to keep their rifles cleaned and without rust. If a cadet has a dirty rifle bore and rust on the trigger housing guard, he has violated regulations and will get a minor number of demerits but we do not believe that that is indicative of a lack of integrity” (House Armed Services Committee, Hearings on the United States Military Academy Honor Code [U.S Goverment Printing Office, 1977], 24).
usually in a formal fistfight: A report completed as part of the congressional investigation states that such an issue of honor “was then settled in some sort of duel, the most popular type in the Corps being fisticuffs,” (House Armed Services Committee, Hearings on the United States Military Academy Honor Code, 152).
scope of the code narrowed: The report indicates that this emphasis on cadet honesty was the only “tenent [sic] which had been consistently in existence since the early 1800’s [sic]” (ibid.).
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down”: Atkinson, Long Gray Line, 319. While the charges against Koster were ultimately dropped, he was censured and demoted and left the Army in disgrace.
an electrical engineering exam: By April 4, 1976, 117 cadets had been implicated (ibid., 398), but by graduation Time magazine was reporting it might be a larger scandal: “There is talk . . . that hundreds of others may be in deep trouble” (“What Price Honor?” Time, June 7, 1976). Atkinson notes that one West Point lawyer and graduate of the academy, Arthur Lincoln, suspected as many as 600 cadets were “involved”; eventually, 149 cadets left the academy because of the scandal (Long Gray Line, 405 and 416). In August 1976, Secretary of the Army Martin Hoffmann granted amnesty, and 93 of these cadets were allowed to rejoin the academy after a “year of reflection” (ibid., 414–15).
commandant almost always expelled: “Report of Superintendent’s Special Study Group on Honor at West Point,” House Armed Services Committee, Hearings on the United States Military Academy Honor Code, 154.
near the Cambodian border: United Press International, “Viet Cong Regiment Is Cut to Ribbons,” Williamson Daily News, June 30, 1966.
fewer than seventy thousand: Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (Simon & Schuster, 2010), 181–82.
only three years earlier: Ibid., 171.
broke apart in mid-December: Kissinger writes that talks “finally exploded” on December 13, 1972. Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (Simon & Schuster, 2003), 407.
an intense bombing campaign: The bombings took place from December 18 to 29. It is worth noting that Kissinger quotes the Economist when writing in his book that the civilian death toll in Hanoi from the Christmas bombings was “smaller than the number of civilians killed by the North Vietnamese in their artillery bombardment of An Loc in April” (ibid., 415).
quit their academy posts: James Kitfield, Prodigal Soldiers (Simon & Schuster, 1995), 142. Kitfield writes that thirty young officers quit their posts in one eighteen-month period around 1973.