Sunday, August 30, 1998 ANNAPOLIS PLEBES FIND THE SAILING SMOOTHER VMI OUT OF STEP WITH ACADEMIES Virginia Military Institute believes its grueling ratline is crucial to the school's mission -- turning out "citizen-soldiers." But at the nation's service academies, charged with producing officers for all-volunteer service, the foucus is on the "dignity" of freshmen. By MATT CHITTUM THE ROANOKE TIMES Virginia Military Institute conceded to the will of the U.S. Supreme Court and admitted women with a promise from Superintendent Josiah Bunting III that they would be treated the same as the men who had endured the ratline before them - "badly." The screaming, the push-ups, the "sweat parties," the merciless quizzes on arcane institutional knowledge - none of it would change. To dilute the ratline to accommodate women would be to make VMI less than what it had been for nearly 160 years, school officials said. It operates, VMI Dean Alan Farrell told parents and this year's freshmen "rats" two weeks ago, "on the good side of a narrow but distinguishable line separating needless cruelty and silliness from a sustained and systematic application of stress designed to exact from these cadets the best inside them and to inoculate them against fear, fatigue, frustration and indecision in time to come." But in so preserving its storied training regimen, VMI held fast to a system well out of step with other military schools, especially the service academies. While the time-honored yelling and punitive calisthenics continue at VMI, they are becoming tools of last resort at the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Military Academy. The difference in training models points out how, in these days of a smaller, all-volunteer military, the missions of the service academies and VMI are becoming more divergent. *** Four weeks into his training at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., freshman "plebe" Matt Gimbusso still wasn't doing his push-ups right. So he was getting a lesson from an upperclass trainer - a "detailer" - in how to do every calisthenic approved by the academy. Junior Jason Hernandez put Gimbusso on his chest and got down on the brown, sun-scorched grass of a training field near the Severn River. Gimbusso did push-ups in the midday July heat, and Hernandez did them, too. Gimbusso did "star jumps," and so did Hernandez. They ran around the field, did more push-ups and more star jumps, until Gimbusso was dragging. The detailer never yelled at the plebe. "All I'm asking you to do is 15 reps, that's all," Hernandez pleaded with Gimbusso. "We're not asking them to do a lot, so at least they ought to do it right," he later said. Capt. Len Hering heads the six-week Plebe Summer training period at the academy, during which plebes rise at 5 a.m. each day for physical training and spend all day in seamanship classes, on the firing range and hearing lectures on character, honor and "interpersonal relations." Hering said Hernandez was practicing the kind of leadership the academy has come to demand. Gone are the constant yelling, the countless push-ups. They've been all but replaced by a concern for the dignity of those being trained, Hering said. Not at VMI. "At VMI, there is a tradition of physical consequences for careless acts," Bunting said. "I believe it's fine to raise your voice. People expect it at VMI." Though you might see a member of the training cadre at VMI doing push-ups with a rat to illustrate how to do them properly, you will more frequently see a rat doing push-ups alone. Just minutes after the ratline began two weeks ago, Kason Junn of Flushing, N.Y., was on his face grunting out push-ups. On both sides of him, shouting, saliva-spraying members of the cadre harangued him. "We never look at it as a double standard," said Brian Jones, a VMI senior from Fairfax. In the class system at VMI, cadets earn the right to be dishing out the push-ups, not doing them. The ratline is as much an initiation as a training period. At Annapolis, they don't call Plebe Summer an initiation anymore. These days, it's a "leadership laboratory" - a chance for upperclassmen to learn mature leadership techniques. It's less about the plebes than the detailers. The plebes are learning how to survive in a military environment. The detailers are learning how to be officers in the Navy. And in the Navy, and the other branches of the military, according to Hering, who is not an academy graduate, screaming and push-ups are passe. "If you yell at a dog all the time, good or bad, they never know the difference," Hering said. "When they tune you out, the instruction is turned off." The same philosophy is in place at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where for 10 years they've been trying to teach cadets to lead in a more civilized manner. Even VMI's colleague in the fight to stay all-male, The Citadel, is taking the kinder and gentler approach. "We still raise our voices," promised Citadel Commandant Emory Mace. After a year without them, freshman "knobs" are back to doing push-ups as punishment at The Citadel. But now the upperclassman who requires the push-ups has to do every one with the knob. Though the trend toward respecting the dignity of lowly freshmen is new at The Citadel, it's been a long time coming at the U.S. service academies. *** Training time constraints and the changing military are responsible for the new leadership styles, according to Capt. Glenn Gottschalk, a 1968 Navy grad and director of institutional research at the academy. In his days at the academy, the attitude toward plebes was, "A third of you aren't going to make it, and we don't give a damn." Back then, they could afford to "treat everybody like dirt," Gottschalk said. Plebe Summer was longer then, for one thing. With high school graduations now coming later in the year, Plebe Summer had to start later. So the academy had to begin to distinguish between "what is truly beneficial, and what is tradition that was nice to have when you had the time." But the greater influence on Plebe Summer and training at the other service academies is the advent of the all-volunteer military. With no draft, every willing participant in military life becomes a precious commodity. It's not cheap to train midshipmen, so the government can't afford to throw away money training people in a way that makes them quit. "We can't have people quitting because they weren't treated with dignity," Gottschalk said. Hence, less yelling and fewer push-ups. At the same time, Gottschalk said, the academy didn't want to lower standards. Rather, it changed leadership styles to find a way to get borderline plebes to make the grade and stick around. That led to more positive, teaching-oriented leadership practices. The process of indoctrinating detailers to the new techniques takes time. It's a matter of breaking a cycle. Each class of midshipmen trains the way it was trained. "They quickly resort to what was done to them, good or bad," Hering said. Mace said The Citadel is just at the beginning of what he believes will be a three- to five-year process of installing more positive leadership methods. But at The Citadel, where most graduates don't join the military, the motives for making the change are different. The school in Charleston, S.C., was confronted with a degeneration of its system that became painfully public with the hazing of two of the first four women to attend the school two years ago. Mace said the sanctioned harassment of knobs had "gotten out of hand" and "began to border on hazing." "What we're refocusing on is, it's a tough military school, but it's tough for the right reasons. And that's because we have high standards." *** A "rat," states the VMI "rat bible" received by all freshmen at the institute, is the "dumbest and lowliest of all God's creatures." The rat bible doesn't say much about the dignity of rats. In Annapolis, though, dignity is a big concern. "You don't ever want to do anything to make them [the plebes] feel like they aren't a human being," said Joe O'Brien, a detailer from Norfolk. "We want people who are going to respect their superiors." Shouting at plebes, making them do push-ups, trashing their rooms because they fail inspection won't instill that respect, the academy believes. That kind of behavior only proves to the plebe that the detailer is "an immature individual," Hering said. "I should never do anything in my leadership style that someone says, `When I get there, I'm never going to do that.' " The Naval Academy does not allow reporters into its barracks, where plebes are frequently quizzed on Navy knowledge and walk prescribed pathways, but in the massive mess hall, there wasn't much yelling going on. Jamie Brassfield, a detailer from Cincinnati, was inches from plebe Terrence Doyle's face, demanding he recite the dinner menu. Doyle complied, but Brassfield stayed on him. "Louder, Doyle. Louder. Louder. They better hear you all the way over there," he said, never raising his voice. "There's a place" for screaming at plebes, Brassfield said, but if something else works, he doesn't bother. Officially, physical corrections - exercises - are a last resort. And they are strictly regulated. They last seven minutes at the longest, with a break, and are never to be used as punishment for conduct violations. Abuses constitute hazing. VMI's sweat parties last 15 minutes, with a break every five minutes. The Rat Disciplinary Committee routinely uses the workouts to punish poor conduct. "I feel if I have to use a spot correction, then my leadership is failing," said detailer Trevor Grant, a junior from Fluvanna County. They try to use other means of correction for when a plebe doesn't know his "rates" - facts about Naval life and history contained in the academy's version of the rat bible, called "Reef Points." Matt Berger, a plebe from Roanoke, said when he didn't know his rates, "not much" happened most of the time. "They get mad and say, 'You better find out.' " Once he couldn't recite the qualifications of a naval officer, so a detailer made him write out the answer 20 times. The punishment depended on the personality and "leadership style" of the detailer. Some entire companies could be found almost every night doing push-ups on the quarterdeck, he said. But when detailers carried their power too far, the detailers themselves got a talking to. "They wouldn't show us even a common courtesy, and other detailers got on them," Berger said. Berger got a taste of both worlds. A kinder detailer in his company he would "follow anywhere." Another detailer, more fond of shouting, he called "a jerk." Berger, a wrestler from Cave Spring High School, lost 18 pounds during Plebe Summer and was "shell shocked" when the ordeal began. He never considered quitting, he said. Others did. Some 87 of the 1,231 plebes left over the summer. If history tells anything, about 45 more will quit before June. *** "What may work at the Naval Academy," VMI Superintendent Bunting said, "has no particular interest to VMI. We have to evolve in our own way." VMI is military by name and nature, but its mission is vastly different from a service academy's. VMI isn't bound by concerns for training people for the military. Mandatory commissioning of cadets for military service ended in 1989 at VMI, when the U.S. military began to reduce its number of active duty troops, spokesman Mike Strickler said. But the number of career military has held steady at 18 percent for years. VMI's focus has remained turning out what it calls the "citizen-soldier": a person characterized by integrity, patriotism and "an unthinking, unhesitating willingness to say what you believe is right, bluntly," as Bunting puts it. The details of the ratline may have changed in 159 years, but the spirit of it has not. "We think the things we did in 1890 and 1930 are still valid today," Bunting said. Grant, the midshipman from Fluvanna County, said VMI's system seems degrading. "The only purpose is to make them feel like scum." Brad Wineman, VMI's cadet regimental executive officer, won't deny that it's degrading. "But it's degradation on a group level," he said. The first purpose of the ratline is to strip away the trappings of life outside the institute: wealth, status, upbringing, race. All that is left, the theory goes, is the bare character of the individual. It's equal opportunity harassment, none of it intended personally. Smart rats don't take it personally, either, cadets say. Those who do typically leave. The freshman attrition rate is more than 20 percent, or twice that of the U.S. Naval Academy. That "impersonality" is the key to the VMI system, and the element people outside VMI understand and trust the least, Bunting said. Cadets learn when to turn the harassment on and off, VMI officials say. No learning gets done when rats are doing push-ups. "As a rat, you appreciate true leadership all the more when it is so easy to contrast it with 'adversative' behavior," said VMI spokesman Chuck Steenburgh, a 1986 graduate. In that atmosphere, leaders emerge naturally, Bunting contends. Academy midshipmen and West Point cadets are taught the finer points of good leadership. At VMI, where cadets and not the administration are in charge of most elements of daily life, leaders rise to the top by virtue of their innate ability to lead. "We give upperclassmen a broad range of responsibility and autonomy and see what they do with it," Bunting said. In his 1978 history of the institute, VMI alumnus Henry A. Wise called the process "drawing out the man." "If you are able to survive with grace and efficiency in a system which is very tough," Bunting said, "you are brimming with confidence to undertake anything else in life."