The Class of 9/11

By NANCY GIBBS, Nathan Thornburgh

It's Thursday night at the Firstie Club, West Point's campus bar for seniors, and the cadets' dress code is college casual. For once, the shoes aren't shiny, nobody's wearing a hat with a plume. Instead, they're in flip-flops, board shorts or jeans, baseball hats or visors, bead necklaces purchased on spring break. But still they give themselves away at every turn. They're like undercover cops infiltrating a frat party. Their shoulders are a bit too square. They don't slouch. They plow efficiently through dishes of peanuts, eyes darting about the room, scanning for friends as they would targets on the practice range.

Three cadets squeeze into a booth along a wall. All three belong to the same company. They have labored through the same obstacle courses together, passed the same calculus exams and are just weeks from graduating from West Point as commissioned officers in the U.S. Army. Greg Zielinski came to West Point from his Connecticut prep school to become an officer and a gentleman but fell in love with the mud and marches of the infantry. Tom Pae, the son of Korean artists, feels his parents' pride in his success and their fear about what comes next. Kristen Beyer was recruited for swimming, not soldiering, and struggled to find her place in the post-9/11 Army--until she first got a taste of flying a Blackhawk. Now she, too, is eager to join the long gray line of West Point graduates alongside her thousand fellow cadets of the class of 2005.

There's a particular buzz tonight. The cadets have just attended their last branch meetings, at which they glimpsed their immediate future in the specialty each has chosen. For most, the future will soon include a taste of war: 71% of the class branched into combat units and could deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan as little as a year from now.

A pair of infantry-bound cadets swig beer and shake off their doubts. What, after all, could be tougher than West Point, where failure to have your books arranged by descending height on your desk can earn you hours of forced marching in the rain? "That's how they get us fired up for Iraq," says one. "After four years here, anything's better." Another suspects that for all the training, they still don't know what they are in for. "West Point is an academic institution, not a training ground," he says. "I think a lot of us are going to be surprised to find that it's a no-s___ business when you leave here. In Iraq either you get it done, or you're in real trouble." A cadet talks about his choice of major, economics. "I really think it's got marketable skills," he says. Pause. "Hopefully, I'll be alive to use them."

Like everything else at West Point, even happy hour has a basic utility for the profession of arms. Far beyond the bright lights of the Firstie Club, there's a twilight war that West Point's class of 2005 will soon ride out to join. With each story swapped, every joke told, the cadets test the strength of their long gray line, that celebrated bond that is both lariat and lifeline, roping them into war and pulling them back out as safely as possible.

It wasn't supposed to be like that. Whatever their image of West Point when they applied, their expectations of a peacetime Army were just another casualty of 9/11. Less than a month into their first semester, the world changed, the mission of the U.S. military changed, and the academy that produces its leaders, a place so dense with ancient tradition and ceremonial weaponry that it feels more like the Harvard of Sparta, would have to reinvent itself as well. Much of the faculty was soon rotating into the classroom straight from combat zones and bringing back combat skills--and scars. The engineering department learned to make replicas of roadside bombs so the cadets could learn how to spot them. Classes in counterinsurgency and comparative religion and sub-Saharan Africa became as essential as rifles and boots. Twenty-three times since 9/11, the cadets have stood in the mess hall at silent attention for a fallen graduate. "What these cadets don't know," says an instructor just back from battle, "is that I'm secretly teaching Iraq every second of every day."

We shadowed three members of the class of 2005--Beyer, Zielinski and Pae--through their final spring march to graduation: this weekend they will parade across the Plain, listen to speeches, throw their taut white hats into the air and go out as second lieutenants into an Army that has signed up for a generation's worth of war. Against the backdrop of Abu Ghraib courts-martial and new reports of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, as the Pentagon fails to meet its recruiting goals and Congress debates the ban on women serving in combat, many cadets too have freely questioned the effects of U.S. policy and wondered how hard that policy will land on them in the years ahead. But they are united in devotion to one another and the soldiers they will lead. They hear the reports coming from the war zones--the tales of terror and torture and the grind of nation building--and conclude that the world needs West Point's brand of physical and moral toughness more than ever. "People may come here for the wrong reasons," Pae says, "but they stay for the right ones."

CADET BEYER

THE ACCIDENTAL SOLDIER

Entering freshmen--the plebes--spend the summer together in Beast Barracks, designed to turn all those class presidents and Eagle Scouts into hairless, spotless, expressionless soldiers who for the next year or so won't speak unless spoken to. By the end of August, a certain number typically conclude that it was all a big mistake, that a nice liberal-arts menu would be more to their taste. The plebes going through Beast in the summer of 2001 were tough: only 41 members quit, the second lowest dropout level in 15 years. They would need to be, since the new superintendent who took command that July, Lieut. General William Lennox, was looking to sharpen the standards. "We had to tighten things up a bit," he says, "give more of the sense of what life is like in the Army." The changes were necessary because sometimes "you can lose focus when you're not at war."

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.

And that very nearly became the truth. Cadets have two years to decide whether military life is right for them before they take their affirmation oath. Up to that point, they can still transfer out and owe the Army nothing. Those who stay serve five years of active duty after graduation and three more in the Army Reserve. Like many other West Point athletes, Beyer had not grown up with visions of military glory. In fact, she had barely heard of West Point until its swim coach flew out to recruit her and offered a chance to compete in Division I, get out of Tucson, test-drive military life for a couple of years risk free. She did find things to love about the place. A natural color coder, she appreciated the daily structure that challenged cadets to make the most of every moment. That West Point life recovered its routines quickly after 9/11--albeit with a new, underlying urgency--seemed right to her: the civilian world got too wrapped up in sorrow and memory and nerves rubbed raw. "I think one of the things that made people so sad outside of West Point," she says, "was that they simply were kicked off of their routines."

So for the next two years, she swam and marched and studied and argued with herself about the course she should choose. And as Oath Day approached, so did a war that for some cadets changed their calculations for going to West Point in the first place. The "five and fly" kids who hoped to pass through the Army on their way to riches now found that the road to Wall Street might include a detour through Baghdad. Their families had some strong feelings--strong but by no means uniform--just as the cadets did. Parents who were once proud that their kids would enter adulthood with great skills and no debts now told them, "Hey, we sold our house at the top of the market. We can afford to send you anywhere you want to go. Maybe we should talk about a transfer to someplace ... safer." "The class of 2005 is different from the classes before because, really, they had an opportunity to leave after we were in the war," says Colonel Michael Jones, West Point's director of admissions. "All of these kids are true volunteers."

In the shadow of the Iraq invasion in April 2003, one of Beyer's two best friends arranged to drop out. Another ally, Lisa Huntington, also started the paperwork. Please, Beyer told her as Commitment Day approached, please don't leave me here alone. They talked, day after day. "I was either going to convince her to stay," Beyer says, "or convince myself to leave with her." On Aug. 17, 2003, in the cavernous Robinson Auditorium, Beyer and Huntington stood together among their classmates and took their oath. "We were bawling," Beyer says, "but we made it through."

The day after Beyer made her pledge to stay, she went to her first PL300 class on military leadership. The instructor started off by congratulating the cadets on their decision. They were all great Americans, he said. Then he opened the discussion up to the class.

Cadet after cadet spoke up. Terrorists attacked us, they said. If you were on the fence even in the slightest, if you weren't 100% sure you wanted to be in this fight, you shouldn't be here at all. Beyer didn't know those cadets or whether they knew her or whether they saw her as a laid-back swimmer type without a soldier's steel. Still, their comments cut straight through her and destroyed the frail truce she had made with West Point. "I just shut up," she says. "But I was so angry. 'What the hell am I doing here?' I asked myself. The attitude was, If you didn't grow up just dying to be in the military, you're worthless."

It was the beginning of Beyer's darkest time at West Point. "Every day I just hated myself for staying. I hated everybody else." Everyone except her teammates and Huntington, whom she had talked into staying with her. "We got much closer. I could use her as a shoulder to cry on, and she could use me the same way," Beyer says. Ultimately, she decided that the Army wasn't going to change. She had to.

She revisited the mental list of reasons to stay at West Point that she had made over the summer: 1) she had fought hard to leave Tucson and was too independent to drop out and move back in with her family, and 2) she had survived the worst part. By the third and fourth years, cadets can take some electives, like international relations and cultural anthropology. The subjects were getting more interesting, especially as the academy raced to meet new demands. Vincent Viola, a '77 West Point grad who on 9/11 was chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, which stood in the shadow of the Twin Towers, credited his academy training with helping him steer the exchange to a speedy recovery. In gratitude, he donated $2 million in seed money for a Combating Terrorism Center at the academy. The center was up and running by February 2003, under the leadership of Colonel Russell Howard, a former special-forces commander who discovered that cadets have a special gift for unconventional warfare. "They learn how to be terrorists themselves," he says. "The creative terrorist is about the same age as these cadets." He put his students up against lieutenant colonel-- grade officers, and the cadets "kicked their asses in thinking about terrorist threats." Beyer worked with counterterrorism agents leading a cell of cadet "terrorists" who drew up plans for imaginary attacks on real cities. "It just felt very relevant," she recalls.

And then she fell in love--with the sky. After three years of summer war games, she got to spend time with an active-duty unit in Washington, flying Blackhawk helicopters--in her case, the deluxe, leather-seated, air-conditioned kind used to ferry VIPs around. She saw in the members of the 12th Aviation Battalion a value system that more closely mirrored her own. "Those guys are deadly serious about the important things. They really look after the safety of their crew and their aircraft," she says. "But they also know what's not important, and I think in aviation you won't see nearly the stupid small things you see here." Relaxed but driven and supremely competent, the aviators looked like the type of officer she would want to be.

So she returned for her final year with a new commitment. She signed up for LASIK eye surgery so she could qualify for aviation, even though the date fell during swimming season and she was team captain. It was the first time she had ever voluntarily missed a swim meet. She turned down an invitation from the swim-team coach to stay on an extra year as a graduate assistant. She's in a hurry now. She can't wait to get to Fort Rucker (or Mother Rucker, as it's known to cadets) in Alabama and start flying, even though by choosing aviation, with its expensive training regimen, she had to promise an extra two years of active-duty service.

She has come to terms with her place at West Point and her reasons for being there. "If I were one year younger and 9/11 had happened while I was still in high school, there's no way I ever would have come here," she says. "To be honest, I am scared. But I've learned a lot here, and I think I'm ready to lead people, even to war." The once reluctant cadet has even become an evangelist of sorts. Beyer's little brother Billy, every bit as laid back as his sister was at his age, was inspired by her example and applied to West Point. In part on the strength of an essay about why he would be willing to die for his country, Billy was accepted last week. "I'm telling him he should probably go," she says. "I'd think he'd do well at West Point."

CADET ZIELINSKI

LEADING FROM THE FRONT

Some cadets go to West Point and encounter its demands, and for the next four years they pray that they can toe the line and make it through. Others, however, run the hardest obstacle course twice: once to test their technique, the next time to test their toughness.

You look at Greg Zielinski--Z to just about everyone on post--and for a split second you wonder whether he is actually built out of some material other than flesh and blood. Everything about him shines--his nearly shaved head, every buckle and boot, his manner. His father says if Zielinski hadn't gone to West Point, he probably would have been president of a fraternity. He is pathologically social, both liked and looked up to by fellow cadets, especially those who bleed Army green. "Z?" they say. "He's huah," delivering the words with the appropriate Southern drawl--"heezoowah"--as though a Northern accent wouldn't do justice to someone so ... infantry. Upperclassmen give him equal deference. One of his fellow cadets asks him, straight-faced, "Can I still call you Z when you're a general?"

The officers in the department of military instruction puff up at the mention of his name. "Z--that's my guy," beams a broad-chested major. Another says, "Greg Zielinski is the kind of cadet that makes you love teaching here." For them, Zielinski has molded himself in the Army's image of the proto-officer: strong, blunt, earnest, demanding. Even with four years to shape cadets, West Point has mixed success installing their program of warrior ethic in teenagers from so many walks of life. So when they see Zielinski adopt it all so naturally--chin out, eyes front, shoulders squared--they see total victory.

Underneath the polish, however, Zielinski has his insecurities about where he came from and where he's headed. He came to West Point as a rebel. Growing up among the preppies of Fairfield, Conn., the brother of a Princeton-grad investment banker and a son of a media executive, he was drawn to military life because he wanted something more than just a good job. He originally had his heart set on going into the Navy to become a fighter pilot, but when he visited West Point, he fell in love with its emphasis on the basic relationship of leader to soldier, its elemental emphasis on men, not machinery. He didn't focus on just the dreamier ideals. The minutiae of leadership and the daily self-assessment--Am I doing enough to prepare myself?--became an obsession. As he rose into his first leadership roles during sophomore year, Zielinski calmly assessed his relationship with his high school sweetheart. "I needed to be more available for my men," he says. "The relationship was keeping me from being the best leader I could be." He broke it off.

More than anything else, Zielinski is looking for practice, not theory, and the West Point faculty is changing to meet that demand. If the typical college professor floats somewhere high above the real world, at West Point instructors are expected to bring the real world with them--not just in private but in public as well. In Iraq, generals admit that the captains and lieutenants often know more about how to combat the insurgency than they do. It is, they say, a platoon leader's war.

Captain Chris McKinney, who led an infantry company during the first months of the Iraq invasion, had been brought to West Point to teach Fundamentals of Tactics. His easy ferocity inspires wide measures of terror and devotion among cadets. "I just hate that guy sometimes," says one, "but I would feel safest going into combat with him over my other instructors, definitely." To Zielinski, whose unit at Air Assault School had to withstand McKinney's withering inspection, the weakest instructors are the ones who act like your buddy. "When I see someone being tough with me, like Captain McKinney," he says, "I think it's a good thing. You only learn more that way."

McKinney knows that once they have tasted combat, his cadets may view his methods in a new light. "Later on, they are going to understand why I jump on mistakes," he says. "Later on, those might be fatal mistakes, ones they can't take back." He looks for ways to test both their knowledge and their instincts as they prepare for a battlefield where friend and enemy can be indistinguishable. He is a walking album of case studies: You're leading a platoon, he tells his cadets, and one of your men is lying wounded in the middle of a minefield. You go meet with a local farmer, who knows how to lead his herds safely through the field, so he could help rescue your comrade. But he won't talk; if he's seen collaborating with the Americans, he and his family could be killed. What do you do?

Many cadets' first reflex, he says, is to hold a pistol to the farmer's head. McKinney challenges them: Well, are you willing to pull the trigger, then? And wouldn't that endanger the lives of some of your men if the farmer's tribe wanted revenge? If he still refuses and you don't pull the trigger now, will you have lost credibility with your team?

Others suggest offering the farmer protection, an idea that McKinney rips apart even more quickly. Never promise these people anything you can't deliver, he says. They remember those things.

Finally, McKinney gives the answer to the case study: There is no answer. Not one single answer, anyhow. It's all just guesses, and McKinney's guess is that you should leverage the strong Iraqi aversion to having a death on one's conscience. Tell the farmer that the soldier lying out there is a human being and that his death would be on the farmer's head. In other words, use your judgment, considering everything you have learned about the place and the culture and human nature.

For born warriors like Zielinski, the opportunity to put those lessons into practice can't come soon enough. Yet while West Point has been producing generals for 200 years, not every generation hears the same call. When Major Jason Amerine was attending West Point in the early '90s, the appeal of a career in uniform was fading. The Berlin Wall fell during his freshman year. "We went from the cold war to a thousand points of light," he recalls. "The feeling was, What are we doing?" During the first Gulf War, in 1991, the academy took to playing I'm Proud to Be an American again and again in Eisenhower Hall. "I just thought, O.K. already, I get it," he recalls. To this day, he can't quite bear to hear it. It's his version of Gulf War syndrome, he jokes.

When he graduated in 1993, Amerine was commissioned a lieutenant in what had essentially become the world's most muscular police department. His first taste of combat, during a Cuban-refugee riot in Panama in which every member of his unit was wounded, was not even labeled combat. None of his men got Purple Hearts. He was in a hotel in Kazakhstan when word came of the 9/11 attacks. Within weeks his team of 12 special-forces soldiers was dropped behind Taliban lines with little more than weapons, cash and a mission to start a Pashtun insurgency. In one fire fight, Amerine and eight of his soldiers, with the intermittent help of Afghan irregulars, stopped an advance of 1,000 Taliban soldiers. Just as they were descending triumphant on Kandahar, an errant U.S. bomb hit, killing two of his men and leaving Amerine with shrapnel in his leg, a busted eardrum and dark, hard memories of a war that had him putting his best sergeant in a body bag.

Amerine's war-hero status--he was a guest of honor at President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, although he ceded his position at Laura Bush's side to another survivor from his special-forces team--seems to give him license to act as a great counterweight to the misty-eyed patriotism of West Point. He was recruited to teach international relations--and the realities of war. "Major Amerine doesn't sugarcoat anything," says Cadet Jonathan Lum. "His basic lesson is, There's a percentage of you that will die."

"I'm always completely honest with my cadets," Amerine says. "That's what I would want for myself." He manages to pack a war's worth of heresy against Army doctrine into a 50-min. class. He presses cadets to enunciate a meaningful difference between insurgent leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi and West Point icon and Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Pole who was the foreign fighter of his era. What is a terrorist? Amerine asks. Someone who flies planes into buildings, says a cadet. The Japanese did basically that, says Amerine. Someone who kills civilians, says another. The U.S. did that in Dresden, Amerine replies. He is the tireless devil's advocate, forcing cadets into deeper analysis and dense moral ground.

His faith in the essential goodness of the Army, the justness of the cause, he says, informs even his most piercing criticisms. It's delicate detente that all of West Point nurses--how to create well-informed junior officers without their giving in to cynicism. "I'm hoping to produce cadets who, after having lived through all the blood, all the horrors, will still absolutely believe in what they're doing," says Amerine. He told his cadets about a website that offers a host of Iraqi decapitation videos, but he didn't assign it as required viewing. "Just because they're cadets who are going to go to Iraq doesn't mean I need to make them watch people getting their heads cut off," he says. Sometimes, after his class discussion veers into the dangers that lie ahead, "I look to see that the cadets walk out kind of quiet, with their heads down, like I'd just told them my mother died. Then I know I've reached them."

Before long, many of those cadets walking out of Amerine's classroom will be officers in Iraq, commanding units of their own in an environment as hazardous and chaotic as West Point is placidly structured. If there's one doubt that eats at the world of certainties Zielinski has built for himself, it's whether he will be able to earn the respect of NCOs--noncommissioned officers. In the real Army, it's the sergeants--experienced, usually older enlisted men and women who serve at lieutenants' sides--who keep the green young officers from making deadly mistakes. The skills needed for leading enlisted troops, who are often older or from lower incomes or rougher cultures than the cadets, is a constant teaching mission. The academy places an NCO in every company barrack, both to mentor and to act as leadership guinea pigs. But the future leaders of the Army are being auditioned in Iraq now--which is why Zielinski is eager to get to the front. "I'm tired of waiting, of hearing what we're going to do," he says. "I just want to go do it."

CADET PAE

A DEBT REPAID

If being worried about their future is hard on cadets, it's nothing compared with what their parents are going through. For the class of '05, the coming of war changed the math. Parents who were proud of their kids for taking on the challenge of West Point faced a test of their own when it became clear that in this war and in wars to come, there was no safe specialty, no escape from the dangers of combat. "Ten years ago, parents were pushing their cadets to come here," Lieut. General Lennox observes. "Now it's the other way around: a cadet is pushing his own parents into accepting the fact that he wants to go to West Point."

Cadet Pae's parents had a special respect for the U.S. military, the kind that is unique to liberated people. During the Korean War, American G.I.s gave Pae's father Hyongchol Pae their rations when he was a starving refugee from bombed-out Seoul. They eventually taught him English on a Korean air base and helped him immigrate to the U.S., where he could thrive as an artist, raise a family. From his vantage point in history, the artist Pae had quietly drawn the connections between the U.S. military and freedom.

So he supported his son's decision to go to West Point, with the idea that Pae would study business and build his management and leadership skills. "After growing up in a Korean family, West Point is a breeze," says Pae's roommate, Steve Kim. Stripped of their civilian lives, cadets cherish what they have, polishing cheap shoes to perfection and meticulously caring for each of the five items of civilian clothing that Firsties--as seniors are called at West Point--are allowed to own. In Pae's case, those are immigrant values as well. It may be an imagined past or an idealized vision of the immigrant present, but there was something about the earnestness of West Point that fit Pae snugly. "People think that because my dad's an artist, that means he's in the backyard smoking weed or something," he says. "It's not like that. My parents are conservative. They have a hard-work ethic. Very Korean values."

If over the first two years Pae grew more comfortable, his parents, or at least his mother Okbun Pae, grew less so. It seemed as if the values they had instilled in their son--to set goals, accept responsibility for your actions, keep your promises--were driving him closer to danger in a war they didn't understand. His mother cried when she saw a newspaper photo of soldiers sleeping in a ditch they dug for themselves during the initial push into Iraq. Pae made light of it--"They looked comfortable to me, Mom." But to this day, her worrying abides--pride and fear marching step for step. "Every time I read a newspaper article or see on TV these boys dying, on both sides," she says through an interpreter, "my heart hurts." Her voice cracks on that last phrase. A devout Catholic, she says she just tries to release. "I don't think about the politics. There's nothing I can do if he goes there. I just pray for his safe return," she says.

But in time, Pae's parents came to see a larger debt being repaid. "I came to this country with an empty fist," says Hyongchol. "But now we own a house, have two sons. We have enjoyed so much here, and I always have felt like I was riding on a train without a ticket." For a family that journeyed to this country for artistic freedom, it took a soldier of a son to finally pay the fare.

Over the four years, Pae's intentions shifted away from finance and toward a combat branch--in his case, armor. It's an indication of the strains on today's military that West Point has changed the rules surrounding branching. Starting with the class of '02, anyone who chose to specialize in back-office fields like finance would still be required to serve first in a combat unit. Not coincidentally, the number of finance officers graduating from West Point this year matches an all-time low: two. Cadets get to pick their branches in order of their class rank; once the most desirable fields, like aviation and Medical Service Corps, are filled, the other cadets are assigned to various combat branches, whether they like it or not. Ultimately, combat was a choice that Pae made gladly. Leading in a combat unit, he told his parents, was the best way to guarantee rapid advancement in an Army career.

To address the issue of cadets who are not quite so committed to a lifetime in uniform, the latest West Point innovation is Branch for Service, a program cadets took to calling Branch by eBay. It solves several complex problems with a simple trade. The Army's problem is that too many officers are leaving after their minimum five-year commitment. The cadets' problem is that if you don't have excellent grades, you often can't get the branch you want. The problems intersect because studies have shown that cadets who got their first choice were 10% more likely to stay beyond their minimum service. The simple proposal, beta-tested on the class of '05, was to have cadets bid on how much extra service--a minimum ante of 18 months--they would be willing to offer if they could get their first branch choice. After receiving all bids, West Point decided to award first choice to anyone who had offered two extra years or more of service. The program was a wild success: average students got into competitive branches like aviation, and West Point won the Army an additional 51.5 combined years of mandatory officer service.

A thriving black market in war knowledge exists for the cadets in e-mails from the front lines. When a member of the class of '05, Mark Erwin, led a platoon of new cadets at Beast Barracks last summer, he took a break from the drilling, cleaning and weapons assembly to tell his charges stories about what his brother Lieutenant Mike Erwin, West Point '02, was learning in Iraq. When Mark invited the new cadets to write Mike a letter, 35 of the 39 did just that. "If you ever doubt that you took the right path in life," Mike wrote his little brother, "just take out these letters and read them. These kids really looked up to you and respected you. One girl wrote how you made her cry but in time you made her a better leader." The long gray line, now 6,000 miles long, not only provided succor to a lonely lieutenant but also came back to give a first-time cadet leader a sense of his own potential.

Pae gets advice from a friend in Iraq who stresses the need to be flexible--he was trained in field artillery but found himself immediately doing convoy operations in humvees. The mission is changing, he warned Pae; get ready to change with it. Pae has noticed a shift in tone, through the tips on which books to save for reuse in officer basic training and in the half-hearted jokes about Iraq's being better than West Point. His friend seems less like the goofy cadet Pae remembers and more like a sober officer steeling himself for the times ahead.

THE FIRSTIE CLUB

Most cadets are too busy to reach the club much before 9:30 or 10, and a reinstated curfew this year requires them back in barracks by 11:30. That gives them exactly one hour to blow off the kind of steam it would take most people a week's worth of drinking to expel. "The Firstie Club is like Alcoholism 101," jokes a cadet. "One hour to drink as much as humanly possible."

The members of the class of '05 are up to the task. They line the bar three deep and come away with $5 pitchers of beer in each hand. Zielinski carries three pitchers over to a booth and breaks into leader mode, calling friends over, drinking a beer with them, clapping a hand on their shoulders, moving on to the next guy. He sits back down and charts out the bar crawl he will lead to Highland Falls that Saturday. They'll start, it's decided, at Hacienda: "Great margaritas, supercheap." If this is the night for the cadets to savor the choices they have made, then he'll also offer his ode to the infantry. "Everything is based off the infantry. Take engineering--that's just smart infantry. But I love it. I love the men."

Pae has come to the Firstie Club, a rarity for him. He sips his beer as others gulp. Cadets from his company squeeze into the booth and talk excitedly. Some look back: Remember the kid who brought a skateboard to Air Assault School? Others look ahead. Pae is looking forward to posting to his unit in Germany. Great weekend trips. His parents had wanted him to post to Korea, but Pae resisted. Units in Korea are just as likely as units in Germany to deploy to Iraq, he told them. What Pae didn't tell his parents was just how ready he felt to get in the fight. "Yeah, I'm excited," he says. "I know it sounds funny, but we've been training for this for a long time." Over in one corner, a table of massive men in camouflage are talking to some cadets; Pae eyes them with a mixture of awe and ambition. They are the commanders of armor officer basic training, which Pae is looking ahead to. "It's really rare to be able to talk to the leadership over a beer like that. You won't be able to do that when you're down there," he says.

Kristen Beyer is here too, sober and in jeans, a pink blouse and flip-flops. She has been making the rounds, smiling broadly. She's not talking military, not thinking military. She just likes being with friends, nodding along to the music. There are a few other characters in attendance--the cadet band thrashing out speed-rock covers, a Vietnam War hero dispensing advice at the bar, an exchange cadet from Uzbekistan playing drinking games in the corner--but by and large, it's all Firsties. The mood is convivial and congratulatory. The Firstie Club is like a sports bar where the cadets gather to cheer on their favorite team: themselves.

Last call, yells the bartender. Last call for alcohol. The cadets share one last beer--or three. Within 10 minutes, all have filed out into the night.