BEING ON TIME

I told my roommate, TK, to give me the keys to his car. He did and I walked up to a group of girls who were standing together talking before leaving West Point for home. I asked the girls if they knew where the Oldsmobile dealer was just past Highland Falls. One said she did, so I handed her the keys, pointed out the car, and asked her to drop it there. She said she would.

As we walked toward the cadet area, TK asked who she was. I didn’t know, but she looked familiar. I was pretty sure she dated a classmate and had for at least a couple of years. TK was worried. What if she doesn’t take the car there? She will.

The next Saturday TK got down to the Olds place as fast as he could and was pleasantly surprised to find his car there. There was never any doubt in my mind, of course it wasn’t my car. But the girls who had been dating cadets were nearly as imbued with the motto of West Point, "Duty, Honor, Country" as we were. If that girl wanted to marry her cadet and stay in our class, she had to act honorably. Anyway, most people are honest, and we had no choice.

For anyone who hasn’t gone to one of the national Service Academies that probably doesn’t make any sense. Being on time is not just important, it’s utterly mandatory. There are thousands of stories to illustrate that but I’ll tell you the one that was close to home.

I was at Ceda’s house for the weekend and it snowed about a foot and a half overnight. It was still snowing in the morning when we got up and the accumulation was getting deeper. Ceda’s father told me that all the roads were closed and that I should just stay there until they were opened again. I informed him that I was either getting back to West Point that day or I was going to perish trying. It took some convincing but he finally understood that I had to be back on time. He then volunteered to drive me and Ceda said she would go along. The roads were closed and we were plowing through deep snow the whole way. To make matters much worse, that part of the world is mountainous and we had to make our way up long, steep hills. Somehow we made it.

But my classmate Red Warner didn’t. He was in New York City trying to take a bus back to West Point. The busses weren’t running. In desperation he hired a cab to drive him there. The cabbie wanted $50. We only made $111 a month, so that was roughly half a month’s salary. Red readily paid it and the cabbie slogged through the snow as best he could. Red was ten minutes late. The Regimental Board gave him a punishment of 15 punishment tours, 22 demerits, and one month of confinement.

There’s a perfectly logical reason for the insistence on timeliness. In the Army, operations are often closely coordinated, sort of like the quarterback throwing a timing pass to a wide receiver. He expects the receiver to be in the place he throws the ball, and if he isn’t, well, at best it’s an incomplete pass. Of course, in the Army it’s not a game, even when it is, because it’s preparation for war and in war you can’t afford mistakes.

I remember one night in particular. I was a platoon leader of the third platoon and my company commander, Captain Blood, gave me an order at midnight to attack an objective about 8 miles away at 6 AM. It was a tough assignment, but we could do it. As we were about to start out, my excellent platoon sergeant, Sgt Haas, asked me to put Sgt Johnson, a squad leader, on point. It seemed that Johnson wanted to be promoted and needed that sort of experience. So I did.

Johnson didn’t know how to get there so he shot a compass azimuth and started in that direction. Soon we were mired in a swamp. It went that way for hours until I knew we had almost no chance of getting to the objective on time. I thanked Sgt Johnson for his leadership and told him that I wanted to teach him another way to get through the woods. I told him to stay in the lead except to do what I told him. I then took us up onto the high ground and we nearly ran the rest of the way going in the approximate direction, always correcting when we veered one way or the other to avoid a swamp. As luck would have it we came out to the woods right where I wanted to, with the objective in sight, and it was just 6. It took a few minutes to get the troops on line for the attack, during which time Capt Blood found me and started chewing me out for being late. I was actually attacking and it was 6, but I wasn’t on the objective at 6 so he decided I was late. You can’t be late in the Army. Oh, by the way, he had been driven there in his jeep. Just thought you’d like to know.

So, you understand that you have to be on time, every time, and that’s how we came to give TK’s car to a girl that I thought looked familiar.

For starters TK wasn’t allowed to have a car. He had bought one early and kept it at the Olds dealer just a few miles away. He could then get a ride to the dealer, usually from me since Ceda had access to a car, and drive around all day on Saturday and Sunday, returning the car to the Olds dealer Sunday night.

On this particular Sunday Ceda wasn’t at West Point, she had stayed at college in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We decided to take TK’s car and visit her. I called her so she would be around when we got there and we started out. First there was the problem of getting to the dealer’s. Then there was the problem that I had only made that trip once and wasn’t entirely sure how to get there. But we made it and Ceda was waiting.

The first thing Ceda said was you need to start back right now. I didn’t think so, we had just arrived. No, there was just enough time to get back, she said. It took her probably half and hour to convince us that we had to start back right then, in fact a half hour ago. We left in a hurry.

We went as fast as we thought we could get away with, and probably a lot faster than that, actually, but West Point didn’t seem to get closer. We finally pulled onto the New York State Thruway at 5:25. We had to be in supper formation at 6. It didn’t seem possible.

We kept going as fast as we could, thinking all the time that we were going to be late. When we turned off onto the road to the back gate we realized for the first time that we had a chance. The problem was that we were in civilian clothes. We had our uniforms with us but we wouldn’t be able to change into them. I suggested that I would change while TK drove and then he could change while I drove. We did that and changed drivers on the back road at about 70. It shouldn’t have been possible, and in fact, don’t try this at home.

We pulled into the gymnasium parking lot, the closest parking spot to our company, at 5:55. For the first time we thought of the car. We couldn’t just leave it there. We couldn’t come back and drive it to the dealer’s. What could we do?

I saw the girls standing together chatting and, well, you know that part. We walked into formation as the bugle sounded "Assembly", I looked over my squad and reported to my platoon leader, TK, "First Squad all present." To everyone else it looked like a routine supper formation.

Postscript: in the early days of the war in Viet Nam, tv news was desperate for frontline coverage in a war where there was no front line. TV crews would accompany combat assaults, hang around landing zones, and generally search out any interesting footage. They couldn't get shots of American attacks, since that would require them to go along, and they obviously couldn't do that. So they mostly got coverage of Americans being killed. The first of that type of news I ever saw was of Sgt Johnson being killed on an LZ. RIP, old friend.