This week I returned to Lexington, Virginia to celebrate with my Virginia Military Institute (VMI) classmates—Brother Rats we call ourselves—the 55th anniversary of our matriculation as cadets. On 21st of August 1969 we found ourselves immersed in a spartan lifestyle. It would bring us together in a lifelong bond.
Four years later, we would graduate. Many of us took our places in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps as second lieutenants. A few even managed to secure a commission in the US Navy by electing to attend Naval Officers Candidate School after graduation. A number of us would make a career of the military while others excelled in both public and private endeavors. Indeed, there were members of our class who after a few years of military service decided to strike out on their own in the business world.
Our class produced doctors, lawyers, engineers, businessmen, entrepreneurs, bankers, financial advisors, teachers, clergymen, psychologists, police officers, judges, senior military officers, legislators, and even a few authors. Taken together, that military college located on a plateau in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was where many successful young men would learn the skills to excel in life.
I was honored to gather with them this week to recall and recount the nascent moments of our arrival at VMI. It was an abrupt affair. One day we were long-haired, wise guys, and high school grads. The next day we were forged into discipline where lighthearted things were replaced by serious ones.
No longer were we individuals. No longer did any of us have station or special status. Our cadre sergeants and officers could not care less what our religion was, our race, who our mommy and daddy were, where we attended high school, either public or private, or our economic class. None of that was important. We were now all the same. True equality, not only before our God, but before our drill sergeants, many of whom we thought at the time had celestial power over our lives. We were Rats. Now Brother Rats.
We endured the same rigors, stood in the same ranks, experienced the same stress and in the process were melded. Forged might be a better way to put it. And that tempering in the heat of discipline served us well then and later. We all owe a great debt to VMI. But not simply to its gothic structures. Rather to those who were transformed by the Institute’s rigor, traditions, and uncompromising standards of integrity, academic excellence, and physical conditioning. That included many of our professors who were also VMI graduates, but particularly the leaders in the Corps of Cadets who took their role seriously. It was a transcendent one.
Their charge, one that would fall to us after they graduated, was to continue to hand down to others the best VMI could offer the incoming Rat class. And the result? Whether you were contemplating a career in the service or elsewhere, one thing was inevitable. When you graduated from VMI, you were ready for the challenges of life. And as we all know, a life lived well has many challenges.
I recall after becoming a VMI cadet that some would say, “Why did you go there and put up with all of the stress and abuse?” Sometimes I wondered but never regretted it. In life, it’s a challenge to do the hard things when lured to easy ones. A smooth highway is more enticing than a rough alternative. Indeed, entering the arena and doing battle with one’s fears and self-doubt and being willing to live in a challenging environment that summons the soul to take a path less taken is a young man’s first stride toward manhood. That occurred for me on 21 August 1969.
In an address at the Sorbonne, Paris, on 23 April 1910, President Teddy Roosevelt said this.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
Roosevelt was not a VMI man. But reading this, I wonder if he would not have been very much at home being one. That’s speculation on my part. But this is not in doubt. The men I matriculated with on the parade ground at VMI on that hot and humid August day would enter the arena. They would be marred by dust and sweat. They would strive valiantly. And they would triumph over their fears and doubts.
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