WAR GAMES: Cadets under Zielinski's lead face off against teams from Britain's elite Sandhurst Academy
(3 of 13)
The changes become even more necessary when you are. Sept. 11 brought a screaming collision between theory and practice at the nation's oldest military academy. Instantly there was massive security on the post. Gates closed, civilian traffic blocked, snipers on the rooftops, military police stationed every 50 yards or so, checking IDs. "All you had to do was bring one truck bomb into the tunnel under Washington Hall during lunch," says a cadet, "and you could really change the future of the Army." It was not just the shock of the images. "I remember walking to my class, past all these rooms," Pae recalls, "and every single instructor had CNN on." Cadets fielded calls from frantic parents, who had also been watching the news and seeing the future explode. As midnight approached on the night of Sept. 14, the cadets stood at attention and heard the ceremonial gunshot over Trophy Point, as the bugler played taps in memory of those who had died. "It became very real very fast," says Cadet Rob Domitrovich, another plebe that year. "The whole mentality of West Point changed. All of a sudden it went from if ... to when."
Just after Sept. 11, Lennox was walking around the post with his command sergeant when a cadet approached him. The cadet told the general that he wanted to leave, enlist, get out there in the fight. The instinct made Lennox proud, but as more and more reports surfaced of students wanting to quit so they could be deployed right away, Lennox grew concerned. At dinner on Sept. 13, he stood looking out over the entire corps from the balcony high above the mess hall and delivered his message. "I preached tactical patience," he says. "I told them that they'd be needed. As officers."
For Beyer, a shy 18-year-old swimmer from Tucson, Ariz., who had arrived just 10 weeks earlier, the weight of history was overwhelming. After 9/11, the cadets were deluged with honors--praise, medallions and miles of thanks from yellow-ribbon America--that most didn't think they had earned, at least not yet. "People really loved to tell us that we're great Americans," she recalls, "but I really didn't think we were all that great. We're just college kids." Strangers started coming up to her on the street when she was in uniform, thanking her for what she was doing. "I tried to be gracious about it," she says, but she kept getting the feeling she was being thanked for a sacrifice she had not yet made. Eventually she stopped telling people that she went to West Point.