Food for thought
Speaking of anniversary dates...
Today marks the 230th anniversary of the day the 2nd Continental Congress “officially” declared independence from Great Britain. Independence Day.
I always found it interesting that July 4th was considered our “nation’s birthday.” Like a country can have a birthday in the same way a person can.
Independence Day, I sort of get. I mean the Revolutionary War went on for seven more long, bloody years. The American colonists didn’t really GET their independence until the war ended. And they won. If they had lost, all of the Founding Fathers would have been executed for treason. But we did DECLARE it. Independence from Britain. Officially. On July 4th, 1776.
The whole process of writing, approving, and then signing the Declaration of Independence was a very drawn out process. The initial proposal to the Continental Congress was made in June of 1776, the final signature not obtained until 1781! Yes, the final version of the Declaration of Independence, the one we know, was officially adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, but no one signed it on that date.
It was a year later, July 4, 1777, that the residents of Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress had met, celebrated “Independence Day” by ringing bells, shooting guns, and lighting candles and firecrackers. The custom of marking this anniversary date as Independence Day gradually spread to other towns and cities. The tradition slowly evolved to include picnics; parades; flag waving; red, white, and blue everywhere; and, of course, fireworks. It was not until 1941, however, that Congress declared the 4th of July a Federal holiday. I don’t know how often Americans today reflect on what this holiday actually means; if asked, they do usually know it as our “nation’s birthday” and that it has something to do with the Declaration of Independence.
July 4, 1981 marked my fourth day at West Point. Only it seemed like I had been there for weeks, if not months. And I was starving!
On R-Day, one of our stations had been to eat lunch in the Mess Hall – sandwich makings, punch, and cookies. Normally, cadets eat “family style” (a dysfunctional family, maybe) at tables of ten, but on this day we just came in and sat down and ate and left. We were even allowed to talk. There was one other new cadet candidate at the table to which I’d been directed. He said he was a soccer player, he was very chatty. While I was so nervous I could barely eat anything, he scarfed down his food, made a second sandwich, and then asked me if I was going to eat my cookies, because he would hate for them to go to waste. I shook my head no. I was a little shaken: how could a person eat at a time like this? Instead, I should have been asking, how could a person not eat at a time like this? In retrospect, I should have eaten everything in sight. Little did I know, that lunch would be my last chance to eat like a normal human being for months to come.
Not letting plebes eat during Beast was a time-honored tradition. Not all of it was hazing; some of it was simply because there were eight or nine nimrod plebes at a table and they all had to learn the proper way of sitting, announcing, pouring beverages, cutting desserts, passing dishes, and... eating. But, as I said, there was not a lot of eating going on.
My first night in the Mess Hall, I had ended up, purely by chance, as the dessert cutter. I listened attentively to our upperclass table commandant as he told us the rules and regulations of cadet dining as well as the table duties each of us would eventually have to perform. He said we all had to work together: “Cooperate and graduate.” The worst possible thing we could be as new cadets was a “dick.” He said a dick was someone who somehow took advantage of, or “dicked over,” his classmates. I wasn’t quite sure what a “dick” actually was, but I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I never, ever, ever wanted to be one. I then had to proceed to cut the apple pie at our table into ten equal slices. You try to cut a pie – and I had never cut a pie into slices before, period – into TEN equal slices with a butter knife as quickly as you can, under pressure. When I was finished, the table commandant asked for the pie to be passed down to him for inspection. I knew I hadn’t done a very good job, but I had given it my best shot. The table com took one look at the pie and sighed. “This is TERRIBLE! New Cadet, do you know what you are?” “No, sir,” I replied. “You, New Cadet, are a DICK!” Oh, my god, it was only my first night there and already I was the worst possible thing you could be.
Plebes had to sit at attention, their feet flat on the floor, their chests a fist’s distance from the table, their backs a fist’s distance from the chair back, their hands in their laps. They could not talk or look around. They must either be sitting at attention, their eyes glued to their empty plates, or else be performing their assigned table duties: dessert cutter, cold beverage corporal, hot beverage corporal. The food, when it was brought to the table by waiters pushing heavy metal carts, was passed around family style, starting with the upperclassmen at one end of the table and ending up with the plebes at the other end of the table. During Beast, of course, there were eight or nine plebes to every table and only one or two upperclassmen. Plebes were not allowed to begin eating until everyone had served himself. More importantly, plebes could not begin to eat until the Firstie at the head of the table, the table commandant, said they could eat. And he could tell any one, or all, of them to stop eating at any given time, in order to make a correction, ask a question, or just plain fuck with them. You weren’t really supposed to go out of your way to haze plebes at the table, but depending on an upperclassman’s mood or whether or not he was an asshole, plenty of hazing and very little eating could be going on at any given time.
When allowed to eat, plebes had to eat “square meals.” That meant they had to lift their forks straight up from their plates and then directly to their mouths at a right angle. They must then take their tiny bite of food into their mouths (and it had better be tiny -- “Big bite, mister!” was a reproach you didn’t want to hear. Because it meant you wouldn’t be taking any more bites for quite some time, if at all, as you contemplated your egregiously bad table manners) and then extend the fork back out away from them and straight back down onto their plates. Hands in lap, chew the food for the appropriate number of times before swallowing, before even thinking about taking another bite. And it was not as if eating were the only thing plebes had to worry about while at the table.
Upperclassmen had many demands – like more ice in their glasses or more drinks, which meant glasses had to be passed from one end of the table to the other and then back again. Or seconds. Or dessert. Upperclassmen also stopped plebes from eating whenever any plebe made an error in cadet table etiquette or protocol, which was frequent at first as there were just so many possible errors to make. Upperclassmen could also stop a plebe from eating to ask him or her a question. To which the plebe had better have the right response.
To say that meal time at West Point was not a pleasant experience for plebes, especially during Beast Barracks, would be a gross understatement. Most new cadets lost weight, some a lot of weight.
Nowadays upperclassmen are not allowed to significantly interfere with plebes at meal time. They are not allowed to haze them pointlessly to keep them from eating. They must ensure that new cadets get a reasonable amount of food to eat, or at least have the opportunity to eat a reasonable amount of food. They are not allowed to haze new cadets by not letting them eat.
Personally, even as a new cadet, I thought not letting people eat was stupid and juvenile. In the “real Army,” would you ever not let your soldiers eat? No, of course not. Not letting people eat was sadistic, cruel, and just plain wrong. Besides, there were plenty of other ways to haze a plebe....
By my fourth day at West Point I had barely gotten to eat anything. And they had been running us ragged from early morning reveille until taps and lights out. My life was pretty much a big, giant blur. Now all of a sudden here we were standing in formation along the Apron, facing the Plain, as the West Point Band played patriotic music and there was a fifty gun salute – one boom for each of the fifty states. We had to stand there perfectly still, saluting for the entire fifty gun salute, which included announcing the name of each state after each blast. It was interminable. It was hot, and I was starting to feel light-headed from not having eaten anything. Plus, it is hard to keep your hand in a rigid salute for a long period of time, especially when you are not used to doing so, which none of us were.
The last thing I wanted to do was faint in formation during the Fourth of July fifty-gun salute. Cadets did periodically faint in formation, even in parades out on the Plain. The cadre were forever telling us not to lock our knees when we were in formation, that doing so would make you faint. If you felt like you were going to pass out, for god’s sake, take a knee! That’s what they always said, but as a plebe you didn’t really want to be doing anything to make yourself stick out. You just wanted to gut it out. Just the other morning, a huge, hulking football player behind me had gone down with a sickening thud onto the concrete. It was not something I, or any of my other classmates, wanted to repeat in the middle of a patriotic ceremony.
I dug down deep inside myself and produced my Scarlett O’Hara moment: “As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again!” I vowed that somehow, I wasn’t sure how -- but that was a minor detail at this point in time -- somehow, by God, I was going to eat something at my next meal.
After the ceremony, we marched into the Mess Hall for lunch. As luck would have it, since this was a holiday, our nation’s birthday no less, the upperclassmen relaxed a little bit and pretty much let us eat. I think the fact that they were hungry, too, after all of their incessant lecturing and hazing and correcting was also a factor. This was our Fourth of July picnic, they said, and we’d better take advantage of it. I ate a hamburger and a hot dog and even some ice cream for dessert. I was in heaven. Happy Birthday, America!
Today marks the 230th anniversary of the day the 2nd Continental Congress “officially” declared independence from Great Britain. Independence Day.
I always found it interesting that July 4th was considered our “nation’s birthday.” Like a country can have a birthday in the same way a person can.
Independence Day, I sort of get. I mean the Revolutionary War went on for seven more long, bloody years. The American colonists didn’t really GET their independence until the war ended. And they won. If they had lost, all of the Founding Fathers would have been executed for treason. But we did DECLARE it. Independence from Britain. Officially. On July 4th, 1776.
The whole process of writing, approving, and then signing the Declaration of Independence was a very drawn out process. The initial proposal to the Continental Congress was made in June of 1776, the final signature not obtained until 1781! Yes, the final version of the Declaration of Independence, the one we know, was officially adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, but no one signed it on that date.
It was a year later, July 4, 1777, that the residents of Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress had met, celebrated “Independence Day” by ringing bells, shooting guns, and lighting candles and firecrackers. The custom of marking this anniversary date as Independence Day gradually spread to other towns and cities. The tradition slowly evolved to include picnics; parades; flag waving; red, white, and blue everywhere; and, of course, fireworks. It was not until 1941, however, that Congress declared the 4th of July a Federal holiday. I don’t know how often Americans today reflect on what this holiday actually means; if asked, they do usually know it as our “nation’s birthday” and that it has something to do with the Declaration of Independence.
July 4, 1981 marked my fourth day at West Point. Only it seemed like I had been there for weeks, if not months. And I was starving!
On R-Day, one of our stations had been to eat lunch in the Mess Hall – sandwich makings, punch, and cookies. Normally, cadets eat “family style” (a dysfunctional family, maybe) at tables of ten, but on this day we just came in and sat down and ate and left. We were even allowed to talk. There was one other new cadet candidate at the table to which I’d been directed. He said he was a soccer player, he was very chatty. While I was so nervous I could barely eat anything, he scarfed down his food, made a second sandwich, and then asked me if I was going to eat my cookies, because he would hate for them to go to waste. I shook my head no. I was a little shaken: how could a person eat at a time like this? Instead, I should have been asking, how could a person not eat at a time like this? In retrospect, I should have eaten everything in sight. Little did I know, that lunch would be my last chance to eat like a normal human being for months to come.
Not letting plebes eat during Beast was a time-honored tradition. Not all of it was hazing; some of it was simply because there were eight or nine nimrod plebes at a table and they all had to learn the proper way of sitting, announcing, pouring beverages, cutting desserts, passing dishes, and... eating. But, as I said, there was not a lot of eating going on.
My first night in the Mess Hall, I had ended up, purely by chance, as the dessert cutter. I listened attentively to our upperclass table commandant as he told us the rules and regulations of cadet dining as well as the table duties each of us would eventually have to perform. He said we all had to work together: “Cooperate and graduate.” The worst possible thing we could be as new cadets was a “dick.” He said a dick was someone who somehow took advantage of, or “dicked over,” his classmates. I wasn’t quite sure what a “dick” actually was, but I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I never, ever, ever wanted to be one. I then had to proceed to cut the apple pie at our table into ten equal slices. You try to cut a pie – and I had never cut a pie into slices before, period – into TEN equal slices with a butter knife as quickly as you can, under pressure. When I was finished, the table commandant asked for the pie to be passed down to him for inspection. I knew I hadn’t done a very good job, but I had given it my best shot. The table com took one look at the pie and sighed. “This is TERRIBLE! New Cadet, do you know what you are?” “No, sir,” I replied. “You, New Cadet, are a DICK!” Oh, my god, it was only my first night there and already I was the worst possible thing you could be.
Plebes had to sit at attention, their feet flat on the floor, their chests a fist’s distance from the table, their backs a fist’s distance from the chair back, their hands in their laps. They could not talk or look around. They must either be sitting at attention, their eyes glued to their empty plates, or else be performing their assigned table duties: dessert cutter, cold beverage corporal, hot beverage corporal. The food, when it was brought to the table by waiters pushing heavy metal carts, was passed around family style, starting with the upperclassmen at one end of the table and ending up with the plebes at the other end of the table. During Beast, of course, there were eight or nine plebes to every table and only one or two upperclassmen. Plebes were not allowed to begin eating until everyone had served himself. More importantly, plebes could not begin to eat until the Firstie at the head of the table, the table commandant, said they could eat. And he could tell any one, or all, of them to stop eating at any given time, in order to make a correction, ask a question, or just plain fuck with them. You weren’t really supposed to go out of your way to haze plebes at the table, but depending on an upperclassman’s mood or whether or not he was an asshole, plenty of hazing and very little eating could be going on at any given time.
When allowed to eat, plebes had to eat “square meals.” That meant they had to lift their forks straight up from their plates and then directly to their mouths at a right angle. They must then take their tiny bite of food into their mouths (and it had better be tiny -- “Big bite, mister!” was a reproach you didn’t want to hear. Because it meant you wouldn’t be taking any more bites for quite some time, if at all, as you contemplated your egregiously bad table manners) and then extend the fork back out away from them and straight back down onto their plates. Hands in lap, chew the food for the appropriate number of times before swallowing, before even thinking about taking another bite. And it was not as if eating were the only thing plebes had to worry about while at the table.
Upperclassmen had many demands – like more ice in their glasses or more drinks, which meant glasses had to be passed from one end of the table to the other and then back again. Or seconds. Or dessert. Upperclassmen also stopped plebes from eating whenever any plebe made an error in cadet table etiquette or protocol, which was frequent at first as there were just so many possible errors to make. Upperclassmen could also stop a plebe from eating to ask him or her a question. To which the plebe had better have the right response.
To say that meal time at West Point was not a pleasant experience for plebes, especially during Beast Barracks, would be a gross understatement. Most new cadets lost weight, some a lot of weight.
Nowadays upperclassmen are not allowed to significantly interfere with plebes at meal time. They are not allowed to haze them pointlessly to keep them from eating. They must ensure that new cadets get a reasonable amount of food to eat, or at least have the opportunity to eat a reasonable amount of food. They are not allowed to haze new cadets by not letting them eat.
Personally, even as a new cadet, I thought not letting people eat was stupid and juvenile. In the “real Army,” would you ever not let your soldiers eat? No, of course not. Not letting people eat was sadistic, cruel, and just plain wrong. Besides, there were plenty of other ways to haze a plebe....
By my fourth day at West Point I had barely gotten to eat anything. And they had been running us ragged from early morning reveille until taps and lights out. My life was pretty much a big, giant blur. Now all of a sudden here we were standing in formation along the Apron, facing the Plain, as the West Point Band played patriotic music and there was a fifty gun salute – one boom for each of the fifty states. We had to stand there perfectly still, saluting for the entire fifty gun salute, which included announcing the name of each state after each blast. It was interminable. It was hot, and I was starting to feel light-headed from not having eaten anything. Plus, it is hard to keep your hand in a rigid salute for a long period of time, especially when you are not used to doing so, which none of us were.
The last thing I wanted to do was faint in formation during the Fourth of July fifty-gun salute. Cadets did periodically faint in formation, even in parades out on the Plain. The cadre were forever telling us not to lock our knees when we were in formation, that doing so would make you faint. If you felt like you were going to pass out, for god’s sake, take a knee! That’s what they always said, but as a plebe you didn’t really want to be doing anything to make yourself stick out. You just wanted to gut it out. Just the other morning, a huge, hulking football player behind me had gone down with a sickening thud onto the concrete. It was not something I, or any of my other classmates, wanted to repeat in the middle of a patriotic ceremony.
I dug down deep inside myself and produced my Scarlett O’Hara moment: “As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again!” I vowed that somehow, I wasn’t sure how -- but that was a minor detail at this point in time -- somehow, by God, I was going to eat something at my next meal.
After the ceremony, we marched into the Mess Hall for lunch. As luck would have it, since this was a holiday, our nation’s birthday no less, the upperclassmen relaxed a little bit and pretty much let us eat. I think the fact that they were hungry, too, after all of their incessant lecturing and hazing and correcting was also a factor. This was our Fourth of July picnic, they said, and we’d better take advantage of it. I ate a hamburger and a hot dog and even some ice cream for dessert. I was in heaven. Happy Birthday, America!
posted by delta at 2:33 PM
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