ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9609030078
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
UNLIKE VMI, IT WELCOMES WOMEN, and it relies on positive reinforcement to get its message across. But for one week in August, the cadet program makes it clear that this is the military.
Fans whir in the stuffy August heat, and garbage boxes overflow with the debris from freshman moving day. If this were any other dormitory, this would be the hallway.
But this is Rasche Hall, located in the heart of the campus' Upper Quad, ancestral home of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets. That means this is the company room.
And this is "cadre" week. Here come the freshmen of the band company, back from a seminar on the Virginia Tech counseling center. The men and women have been up and on the move since 5:30 a.m., exercising, drilling and following every upperclassman's order. It is now midafternoon.
"Good afternoon, Bud Jer. Good afternoon, Bud Stacy." The names of the company classmates, or "buds," drone through the hall as the new cadets troop inside to begin their strange parade along the periphery of the company room. New cadets square every corner, pivoting even around the fans and the garbage boxes.
A member of the cadre - the upperclassmen in charge of this week of freshmen cadet training - strides up and down the hall. "Move, move, move," he calls, clapping his hands in the hope that will move the freshmen along. Once they have circled the hallway, they halt, stare straight ahead and wait for the next command.
Outside in the sunshine a few minutes later, Rheagan McWilliams, raised outside Navy-crazed Annapolis, confesses: "I wanted to go to the [U.S. Naval Academy], but now that I'm here, I'm not sure I would have fit in as well. Plebe summer goes on and on."
At Virginia Tech, the hardest of the hard-core drill for freshmen cadets is cadre week.
After that, corners still are squared around the Upper Quad - "dragging," as it's called - and new cadets may not call upperclassmen by their first names until permission is granted later in the year. But posters hang on bare cinderblock dorm walls within a matter of weeks, and if a freshman goes down for push-ups, so does the officer who ordered them.
Grades will come first. Fortitude is bearing four hours of freshman study hall on school nights -minimum. Not a four-mile run.
'It's a coed world'
Like the "Hokie stone" buildings of hewn limestone that ring the Drillfield, Tech's Corps of Cadets is a vestige of old VPI - Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
This is a modern-day corps, however, that first admitted women in 1973, before the national service academies followed suit.
With a membership that is 21 percent female, Tech's corps has the highest percentage of women among the country's 10 college military corps and academies.
"It's a coed world," says Lowrie Tucker, a freshman who broke with his family's three-generation Virginia Military Institute tradition to attend Tech. "You might as well go to a coed school."
The Tech corps is in stark contrast to its one-time rival down the road, 1,200-student VMI. The state military school's leadership is still studying its options nearly two months after the U.S. Supreme Court's decisive ruling against its all-male admissions policy.
Students like Tucker say they'd rather go to a big university with more academic choices. Plus, the Tech corps gets its training across without the harsh, "adversative" boot-camp style for which VMI is renowned.
"I've never been yelled at," Tucker says. "I really thinks it sets a good model. Nobody's going to berate an employee.
"It's not more relaxed," he says of Tech. "But more civil."
While the state has been preoccupied with VMI this year, Tech's corps has quietly undergone a revival.
Not only has a positive-reinforcement style of training taken root now that those trained under a harsher method have graduated, but a $5 million alumni fund-raising drive has pumped 200 scholarships into the program.
A new leadership training center launched last spring will bring speakers and training sessions to campus. Leadership has become an academic minor for cadets.
"In my mind, it's a more rounded education," says Stanton Musser, the retired Air Force brigadier general who's been commandant since 1989. "Primarily, because of the fact we're in a large civilian university, and secondarily, you're working with women day in and day out. It's the real world."
Corps membership has risen and fallen with the popularity of the military. It plummeted after the Vietnam War and rose during the Reagan administration. Then it dropped again.
This year, the corps has grown by one-third over a year ago. About 600 of Tech's 24,000 students wear the white and gray uniform, though eight men and three women dropped out after the first week.
Since ROTC students must join the corps, nearly 80 percent of the cadets are military-bound for four to eight years after college. Between the ROTC scholarships and the corps' Emerging Leaders scholarships, a free ride through a $40,000-plus college education is not unheard of.
Discipline's appeal
McWilliams, an engineering student, is among those who've brought their ROTC scholarships to Tech, which reaps $1 million a year in federal funds from them.
"My major brought me to the school," she said.
The disciplined lifestyle likely will keep her here.
The university's board of visitors sees the full-time corps as a way to "produce a graduate and an officer, or a person in civilian life, who has gone through the discipline of a 24-hour military operation," says Henry Dekker, the board rector.
Senior Carrie Bell did not realize Tech's was a full-time corps until shortly before she came to campus. Now she is one of the top four ranked cadets, a brigade commander.
She also has dated the corps's other new brigade commander, Travis Howell, for three years. Some jokingly call the couple "Bell & Howell."
"I have no heartburn with it," says Musser. "It happens in the real world, I guess. They're totally professional about it."
Bell and Howell say their relationship has spurred them on during their cadet careers. "It's helped out a lot, having somebody to rely on and talk to about problems going on, sort of a best friend. She is my best friend," Howell says.
Still, dating inside a company is almost universally frowned upon by cadets. Given the lean-on-me relationship of the "buds," that would be like dating a sibling, they say. And dating up the chain of command is forbidden.
Since 1991, the sexes have lived matter-of-factly, side-by-side, in the dormitories of the Upper Quad. The major concession is single-gender bathrooms. The flipping of the "frat lock," known in the civilian world as a deadbolt, locks dorm rooms open rather than shut to avoid any risk of fraternization or hazing behind closed doors.
"The biggest thing I've noticed since we integrated totally, there's a lot more respect between the two sexes," Musser said. "Prior to that, the language was not what I wanted."
Calisthenics and calluses
That doesn't mean it's easy being a female cadet during cadre week, where a 17-hour day starts with calisthenics at 5:30 a.m.
Roommates Jobey Bernstein and Veronica Harvey measure the passing days by the meals, heaped with fruit and water to ward off dehydration and constipation.
"It is a little intimidating because there are so many more men that women," concedes Bernstein, who walked in and signed up for the corps at freshman orientation in July.
Mandatory early-morning physical training lasts daily only during cadre week. Led by an upperclassman, the companies do calisthenics such as "diamond" push-ups, where they hold their hands so index finger meets index finger and thumb meets thumb. The first day, their run was only around the Drillfield. It got longer each day after that.
Students who are sick or injured are allowed to drop out in sick bay.
After this week, cadets do physical training with their ROTC units, and once or twice a week with the corps as a whole. But they still have to meet military fitness requirements for push-ups, sit-ups and running. Those tests will be administered later this month.
"I'm harder on myself. I actually feel the cadre is nicer to the girls than the boys. They don't want to scare us," Bernstein says.
The women of the cadre aren't going easy on anyone, says Harvey. "The cadre women, to me they seem really tough, like they can take anything," she says.
Because they are freshmen, Bernstein says, corps membership is a good thing.
"One of the reasons I joined the corps, I didn't want the 'freshman 15 [pounds]' and to drink at parties," says Bernstein. "I know the corps would secure me from that."
Harvey laughs.
Like other new cadets, she's impressed with how much she can accomplish in a single day. "They don't ease up on us because we're girls," Harvey says.
Sense of belonging
Five days later, when the cadets join the other students for the first day of class, the cadet freshmen see the beauty of cadre week. The discipline brings a measure of pride.
McWilliams steps confidently off the curb leaving the Upper Quad and into the sea of Birkenstock-shod Tech students shooting sidelong glances at uniformed cadets.
"Sometimes, I think the Upper Quad is the safe zone," she says. "Sometimes, I think it's the danger zone."
Today, it's the safe zone. "All your buds are there," she says.
"Had I been just a regular student, I would have been alone forever until I got up the gumption to introduce myself."
Bernstein, settling in to the counter at a campus coffee shop, sums up her new life-style like this:
"During cadre week, you realized how much you were messing up. During the weekend, you realized how much you'd learned."
So what advice does Tech have for VMI?
"You know," says Dekker, an ardent corps supporter, "the only thing I'd say about VMI [is], every individual that's had a mother or that had sisters or had wives or daughters, should realize women are just as competent as men. There's nothing to be feared from them. They cannot destroy traditions. They just add to them."
LENGTH: Long : 200 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: LORA GORDON/Staff. 1. Cadet First Sgt. Pete Gray givesby CNBthe new cadets in Hotel Company the word that they have five minutes
to get their uniforms on properly. The company's sin: Failing to
wear their belts and canteens all in the same position. 2. Crystal
Kominar and the other new cadets were ordered
into the showers to soak their boats so they'd get a better fit. 3.
Jobey Bernstein (left) helps fellow Hotel Company cadet Bradley Hill
with his name tag as they get ready for a lineup before breakfast.
All new freshmen in a company are "Buds" to each other and
responsible for helping each other prepare for inspections. 4. New
cadets January Slyh (right), Crystal Kominar and Thomas Deegan read
their Guidons in the prescribed fashion as they wait in line for
breakfast. The Guidon is considered the new-cadet book of
knowledge. They must learn it from cover to cover by the end of
cadre week. The arm position helps them learn the proper way to
salute. color.