Cadets learn to face Y they're at VMI An average of 3.7% drop out the first week By MADELYN ROSENBERG THE ROANOKE TIMES Rats don't have time to think - during the day. But when the lights turn off, the doubts turn on. The adage is engraved in block lettering on wooden desks across the Virginia Military Institute post: Y M I at VMI? "You think about it every day," said Gardner Mundy, a first classman, or senior, from Dumfries. By Wednesday at 1 p.m., four rats had decided they had no good answer to that question; they went home before even meeting their training cadre. None of VMI's 30 new female cadets was among them. "I don't think anyone has gone through VMI and not thought at one time or another about leaving," said Vern Beitzel, admissions director and a 1972 VMI graduate. "I could show you a letter I wrote to myself in the fall of '68 telling myself why I had to get out of this place." The attrition rate at VMI changes slightly from year to year. An average of 4.7 percent of the cadets drop out the first week, 15 percent by the end of the first semester. But people leave the first day, the first month, the first year. By Wednesday evening, there were still 456 cadets on the ratline - the grueling, screaming, exhausting seven-month period where freshmen must prove their mettle and honor, where they are broken down and built back up. Most officials expected a few more to drop out Wednesday night after their first full day on the line. During the day, rats don't have time to think, explained Al Conner, a member of the VMI class of 1966 who was here to watch the proceedings. "But wait until the lights go off. If you're not second-guessing yourself at that point, you'd better get out your mirror and check your breath." The reason many cadets give when they leave VMI is "this is not the place for me," said Mundy, an S-5 lieutenant this year. But the real thing that's usually bothering them is more specific - trouble at home or feeling singled out somehow, he said. As an S-5, or peer counselor, Mundy's job is to help the rats think through things rationally when they get panicky and want out. Some may choose to leave anyway, and that's OK. "We've been through it before and know how it feels," Mundy said. Others go right back onto the line. The institute's official counselors are the other main step in the formal "outprocessing" procedure that ends in the commandant's office. Often, cadets change their minds before it goes that far, though the idea isn't to talk them in or out of staying, said Mike Monsour, a counselor at VMI for 25 years. The idea is to help them think. Clearly. And you can't do that on the ratline. "We try to get them to relax first," said Chris Floom, a senior S-5 lieutenant from Richmond. "When they're being run by the cadre, they're shaken up." The counselors offer the rats water, or let them use the bathroom. Tom Warburton, the regimental S-5 captain, says he usually tells the rats his first name and asks for theirs. The rest of the time they are known only by their last names, or by something demeaning. "I take them in the shade, if it's hot, to talk," said Warburton, who is from Pulaski. "I get them in a state of mind that's not as hectic, and at that point they can think things out." He asks them to think about the positives and negatives of staying at VMI. The positives, he said, include a strong alumni network, lifelong friends, trust, leadership opportunities. The negatives? "Some people don't want the adversarial training," Warburton said. "For other people, it's their first time away from home. They can't handle being away so long." Rats aren't allowed off post until Thanksgiving. Every night during these first few months, Monsour and B.J. Teichman, the female counselor who started work this summer, will walk through the barracks, studying the body language and facial expressions of the institute's newest students. The first few nights, Monsour said, he didn't see anything out of the ordinary: just a group of exhausted cadets. But that was before Wednesday's intense training. The walks continue, and the counselors remain on call 24 hours a day. In the beginning, the stress on the new cadets is because of cadre, the counselors said. After that, the issues are mostly those found at other universities. "Homesickness," Teichman explained, "or they'll miss their girlfriends or boyfriends. There will be problems with families back home." Sometimes the counselors have the cadets talk to their parents, or superiors, or the chaplain. They do not expect the addition of women to the corps to alter their counseling techniques. Whatever gender differences there are, Teichman said, the individual differences are more apparent. And counselors look at the cadets as individuals, though the issues are often the same. "Some will feel they're trying their best and they're still inadequate, that they can't meet expectations," Teichman said. "But they may be meeting them." And, in the end, an average of 76 percent of the cadets will make it through the year - a year that in retrospect will consist largely of blurred images. On the whole, though, "VMI never leaves you," said John Brown, who graduated from the institute in 1984. "It's a powerful place."