The Corps, And The Corps, And The Corps

October 30, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Military, Nixon Library events 

Vietnam War scholar Bob Sorley, third-generation West Point graduate, brought his copy of the 1952-53 Bugle Notes (indispensable handbook for each class of plebes, or freshmen, at the U.S. Military Academy) to the Nixon Library last week. He was in Yorba Linda to talk about his new book, Honor Bright: History And Origins Of the West Point Honor Code And System. Copies of Honor Bright were on sale. The Bugle Notes were not. Sorley would just as soon give you his right arm. The well-worn volume contains this answer to the question of what advantages an Army career has to offer, which he read out to his audience:

The answer is, paradoxically, practically none; [but,] in another sense, everything that is worthwhile in life. It depends entirely on your viewpoint….If you measure success by things accomplished, by a niche well filled, by the gratification of duty well and faithfully done, if your joy in life finds fulfillment in playing the game for the game’s own sake, of winning the love and respect of the men serving under you…, if you do not count the work, the trouble, the cost to yourself and do not stop to think of where the credit will go, but only of the success of the team, then in the Army you will find contentment.

Bolstering this countercultural vision of community and mission-critical interdependence is West Point’s honor code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Cadets violated the code most famously in 1951, when 90 were dismissed (with the personal acquiescence of President Truman) after one revealed the existence of an academic cheating ring designed to help members of the football team, and in 1976, when an instructor read this on a cadet’s computer science paper: “This is not entirely my own work.” Over 150 cadets were involved that time, though many were permitted to return after a redemptive year off. Sorley says the returning cohort did just as well making colonel (an important benchmark in an Army career) as those who weren’t involved in the scandal.

The friendly and phlegmatic scholar choked up just once, and just a little, as he talked about his and Virginia Sorley’s (his wife and a former CIA librarian) friendship with West Point graduate Dawn Halfaker, severely injured while leading troops at Baquba, Iraq in June 2004. Among many other activities, Halfaker is now vice president of the Wounded Warrior Project. Recruited to play basketball at West Point, she had no special calling to military service until she arrived at the academy and got to know her instructors and coaches and her brother and sister cadets. Sorley said she told him later, “I’d found my tribe. These were the people I wanted to be with.”

After Sorley’s talk, the last question was posed by Orange Countian Lee Hobbs, who’d brought his son, Tobin, West Point ‘96, a veteran of service in Bosnia and now a Chapman University law student as well as a major in the Army reserves. Such is the bond in the long grey line that, before the applause had died, Bob Sorley was making his way up the aisle to shake the hands of a fellow cadet and his proud father.

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