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Some critics question whether West Point should exist at all. In an editorial titled "Is It Time to Abolish West Point?" the editor of the monthly Armed Forces Journal, Benjamin Schemmer, a West Point man ('54), noted that it costs taxpayers $226,190 a year to train and educate each cadet. Tongue in cheek, he went on to suggest that the West Point barracks be turned over to New York State as a prison facility.
West Point loftily answers the critics by summoning up its warrior ghosts: Grant, Lee, Pershing, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Patton. "These kids," Commandant Boylan grandly declares of the current crop of cadets, "are the bearers of the crucible of all that is good in the U.S."
By such flights of self-promotion, West Point invites skepticism, if not ridicule. Yet there is no denying that the institution still succeeds in training officers who are educated about both the world and its wars, and are proud of their vocation. Perhaps most important, today as in the past, is that its graduates endeavor to live the West Point motto, no small feat in a nation often racked with doubts about its military duties and responsibilities. "We really believed in 'Duty-Honor-Country,' " says retired Colonel John Wheeler Jr., class of '42, "and we still do. The place gets hold of you. When I marched in my first parade I broke down and cried." Open-minded and unafraid to criticize West Point, Cadet Captain Lissa Young is hardly a military martinet. Yet old grads will not be surprised to learn that when Young takes her place in the Long Gray Line on Saturdays, she too sometimes has to swallow back tears of pride. --By Evan Thomas