Duty, Honor, Country

March 15th, 2024

Yesterday I read some mindless article about an apparent scandal at West Point, my alma mater. I shouldn’t have done that. The whole story was simply annoying. The article featured quotes from Elon Musk, the bazillionaire, and from Jeff Kuhner, some conservative radio show host, and neither of those people had any idea of what they were talking about, which really isn’t that surprising. I doubt that either of them has ever set foot at the United States Military Academy or can even find it on a map.

The whole point of the article was that the folks running the academy removed the phrase “duty, honor, country” from the institution’s mission statement. This outraged a number of commentators who insisted that West Point had gone “woke”. That is ludicrous on the face of it. If there is any organization on the face of the planet that is not woke, it’s USMA. The academy has not jettisoned the phrase “duty, honor, country”. That motto is literally engraved in stone on the campus. More to the point, the motto is engraved on the hearts of its graduates.

When I was a cadet, there was an alternative motto for West Point that was used as a joke. I heard this said about West Point,

“175 years of tradition unhampered by progress.”

Indeed.

I haven’t been back to the school since 1980, so I don’t know what the place is like now, but I can’t even imagine USMA being woke. The institution has this deeply ingrained conservativism that makes The Roman Catholic Church look like a hotbed of radical change. Seriously, just look at the cadet uniforms. Those hark back to the War of 1812, for God’s sake. Nothing there changes unless it has to change.

I was a plebe (freshman) at West Point in 1976, the first year that women were allowed to be cadets. Prior to that, USMA was kind of a monastic community with excessive amounts of testosterone. Then it was all different. For many people the acceptance of female cadets was akin to the Apocalypse. A lot of old grads were convinced that their Hudson Highland Home was going to hell in a handbasket. Yet, somehow, the institution survived and managed to churn out another generation of Army officers. We got over it.

“Duty, Honor, Country” will never not be a part of the culture of West Point. It doesn’t matter of it is in the mission statement. Those words are in the DNA of USMA. Even now, after 44 years, the phrase affects my life. “Duty” is part of who I am, maybe not with regards to the military, but certainly in other ways. I have a sense of duty toward my family, especially now that I am raising our toddler grandson. Even though the notion of “honor” is countercultural and seemingly anachronistic nowadays, it’s important to me. Love of “country” is what moved me to teach a citizenship class for years. I want immigrants to feel at home here.

I am not woke. Neither is West Point.