Duty First Read Free Page B

makes his way into the crowd moving down the bleachers.
    The candidates start to line up. The first young man holds a guitar case in one hand, a suitcase in the other. The cadet at parade rest suddenly looks a little like Charon, preparing a boatload of souls to cross the river to Hades. When he is satisfied he has all that are coming, he turns smartly and steps out onto the playing field, leading them in a precise file across the fifty-yard line. A door opens in the opposite bleachers. Only one young woman in the line looks back over her shoulder. As they disappear under the visitors’ stands, the families break into applause.
    Maureen LeBoeuf appears again, standing next to the aisle as families file by on the way to the buses that will take them to their tour. Many of the parents thank her. One father chokes on, “Take care of my boy,” and she says, “We will.” When the younger brothers and sisters walk by, LeBoeuf frequently reaches out and touches them on the shoulder. One little boy of about ten, his face wet with tears, looks up at her.
    “It’s going to be all right,” she says. “You’ll see.”
    Many of them don’t meet her eyes. Others try brave smiles. Some blink and squint as if in bright sunlight, although it is a cloudy day. On the other end of the home bleachers, another group is being processed by another colonel, another set of cadre members. Moments later another cadet, a woman, tells this group, “You will move out in ninety seconds.”
    Pete Haglin waited until the last possible minute to turn himself over.
    “I was in the last group to go through at Michie Stadium,” he says later. “I was so excited and nervous I don’t remember much. I do remember walking across the fifty-yard line, and I could hear yelling coming out of the tunnel in front of us, but it was dark in there, and you couldn’t really see what was going on. I wanted to look back, but I didn’t.”
    Haglin has straight, almost-black hair inherited from his Korean-American mother; his height—about five eleven—comes from his father, a 1975 graduate of West Point. The elder Haglin, also named Peter, coached his son on what to expect on R-Day. He’d even made Pete practice reporting to the cadet in the red sash.
    “‘Here’s what you have to do,’ he told me. So I knew. When they said, ‘Drop your bag,’ I dropped it. I didn’t step on the line. It made things a little bit easier.”
    Haglin received his acceptance letter only weeks before R-Day. His parents had already made a deposit for housing at another college. Haglin knows the late notice means the admissions office had to work its way down the list of candidates before it got to his name. But none of that matters on R-Day. Haglin wants to be an artillery officer, like his father, so he takes a long-range view of the Academy: West Point is something to get through on his way to the “real” Army, the one he knows from his father’s stories, and from his experience growing up an “Army brat” on posts all over the world.
    The Haglin family—Pete, his parents, and two sisters—traveled together from Kansas City for R-Day. At the end of the briefing at Michie Stadium, when the ninety-second warning was given, his mother and sister dissolved into tears. But Pete was completely focused on what lay ahead.
    Jacque Messel showed up at Michie Stadium by herself. She and her family had gotten the crying out at home.
    “My parents said that it didn’t make much sense for them to come along, that they couldn’t really spend any time with me … but I think they were trying to make it easier on me,” she says.
    Messel is tall at five nine, with light brown hair and a résumé of clubs, honors, and athletics behind her. Her father is also a West Point graduate, class of 1968. On the night before R-Day, she stayed with the family of her father’s classmate, a retired colonel who works at West Point. Jacque spent the evening watching television and trying to