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About these stories
For the 390 young men who marched into the Virginia Military Institute's new barracks Aug. 21, 1996, it was a momentous occasion. Wearing matching white T-shirts and red gym shorts, the rats - as freshmen at VMI are called - clapped in unison and cheered each other.
It was an attempt to steel themselves against the coming onslaught: six days of endless running, marching, push-ups, and lots and lots of screaming.
It's called Cadre Week - or, more colloquially, Hell Week.
It's the kind of experience that can change an 18-year-old boy's life.
But on Sept. 21,1996, exactly one month after Hell Week started, this year's rat rite of passage took on added significance.
The VMI Board of Visitors voted to make the school coed after six years of litigation and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that an all-male admissions policy at a public school was unconstitutional.
Waiting for Hell Week to erupt, the cadets of the class of 2000 didn't know it, but they were to become the last all-male "Rat Mass" in the school's 157-year history.
These stories by Matt Chittum and photos by Cindy Pinkston document the perspiration and perseverance, the demands and the dilemmas of the last class that will graduate from VMI in this millennium - and probably the last to graduate without women.
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