Vol. 142: Taps for military academies

There’s a better way... or maybe not

Surely you’ve heard the joke about the Jewish couple who desperately search for a school that will tame their incorrigible son. Public, private, Quaker, Jewish, military academy— no matter where they send him, he remains the same wild monster.

Finally, in desperation, they enroll the boy at a Catholic school— where, virtually overnight, he becomes a model student. When his parents ask the nuns for their secret, the sisters are mystified. “We’re not doing anything,” they tell the parents. “Your son is a lovely boy.”

A few weeks later, on Parents’ Day, the boy takes his folks on a tour of the school. After visiting the classrooms, the labs, the gym, and the assembly hall, they wind up in the chapel, dominated by a bloody Jesus suffering on the cross. “See what they did to the last Jewish kid who misbehaved?” the son asks.

Trump’s alma mater

When I was a teenager in the ’50s, the default solution for boys with discipline problems— or parents who felt overwhelmed by those problems— was not a parochial school but a military academy. Here, in a bucolic setting (often a deceased business tycoon’s former estate) removed from urban chaos, suburban car culture, meddlesome relatives, and seductive girls, thousands of testosterone-charged budding juvenile delinquents were whipped into shape by military officers passing time between wars as professors and surrogate parents. At least that was the theory. (Donald Trump’s parents, for example, shipped him off to New York Military Academy.)

Perhaps because World War II had deprived so many boys of male father figures, military academies flourished in the postwar years. My own school, Fieldston in New York, was psychologically about as far as you could get from a military academy: progressive, co-ed, and atheistic, with a casual dress code— the kind of place where kids were encouraged to think for themselves and even to disagree with their teachers. Nevertheless, two of the six schools on our football team’s schedule were military academies. In the world of private school football, you couldn’t avoid them.

Holden Caulfield’s alma mater

Growing up in New York City, I knew nobody who attended a military academy. But one year on a Christmas vacation, I ran into a kid who was enrolled at one of the most elite soldier schools of all: Valley Forge Military Academy, founded in 1928, whose alumni include General Norman Schwartzkopf, leader of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1990; General H.R. McMaster, Trump’s unjustly maligned national security adviser; the current Maryland governor Wes More; and the author J.D. Salinger, who disguised his school as Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye.

(Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s protagonist, viewed the institution as “dreary, regimented, artificial” and full of “crooks and phonies.” To attract wealthy students, the school used deceptive advertising, such as an image of a boy on a horse, though Holden noted there were no horses on campus.)

What’s it like to attend a military academy, I asked this fellow. What are the teachers like? I was genuinely curious.

“They’re amazing,” he replied immediately. “No matter how far you run, they find you. One guy made it to downtown Philly, but they caught him.”

Yes, I said, but what about the teaching?

“I know a guy who got as far as Washington, D.C.,” he said. “But they caught him.”

I pressed him again for details about campus life.

“One guy got all the way to North Carolina,” he said. “It didn’t matter. They found him.”

Can you blame me for drawing conclusions about their priorities— faculty as well as students?

The curtain comes down

Even today, I know of almost nobody who had a good experience at a military academy. One of my friends had a son whom he describes as “bright as hell,” but who spent much of his time “deliberately annoying adults.” This troubled lad flunked out or was thrown out of five junior and senior high schools. Did Valley Forge Military Academy straighten him out? Not hardly. He “royally hated” the place. There, he was thrown out for carving “Fuck you” on his arm with a razor blade. The school administrators’ primary concern, according to my friend, was not the boy’s welfare but their fear that they would be held liable if he killed himself.

I could be wrong about military academies, of course. My Philadelphia friend Walton Van Winkle spent four years at LaSalle Military Academy on Long Island— not for disciplinary reasons, he says, but because that school was a family tradition. Besides, it was operated by the Christian Brothers, which distinguished it from other schools that were run strictly by the military. “Although I and a few others did not have that great an experience,” he says, “there were many who did and still speak fondly of their time there.”

In any case, America’s military academies today share one big common characteristic: They’re mostly defunct. LaSalle closed in 2001. My Fieldston School’s two football rivals– Eastern Military Academy on Long Island and Cardinal Farley Military Academy in Rhinecliff, New York– are both gone. Culver Military in Indiana has reinvented itself as a private co-ed boarding school. Donald Trump’s alma mater, New York Military Academy, went bankrupt in 2015 and survives today as a mere shadow of its former self. And just last month, Valley Forge Military Academy announced that it will close for good next May. At its peak in the 1960s, Valley Forge enrolled more than 1,000 cadets. Ten years ago it enrolled 300. It currently enrolls just 86.

Yesterday’s hero

What happened? You could argue that military academies disappeared because the world changed. Fatherless boys are no longer the phenomenon that they were after World War II. Thinking minds came to be valued more than blind obedience. Drill sergeants lost favor to therapists and social workers. Coeducation became an asset rather than a liability. (One of the great values of Fieldston was that we students learned to relate to the opposite gender as friends and classmates, rather than mysterious distant sex objects.) The military itself lost much of its luster, thanks to American misadventures from Vietnam to Iraq.

In the ’70s I wrote a magazine piece about Arnold Galiffa, Army’s All-America quarterback of the late 1940s. After graduation, Galiffa led a combat platoon in Korea and played pro football for a few years. But by the 1960s, the prestige of both West Point and military service had declined, and Galiffa was virtually forgotten— a classic “yesterday’s hero.”

This unfailingly gracious and decent human being— whose decency was born, perhaps, of his “good soldier” training— spent the last 22 years of his life as a goodwill ambassador for U.S. Steel, addressing sports banquets where most people in the audience had never heard of him.

Most dismaying of all to Galiffa, his own teenage son showed no interest in attending his alma mater. “I’d love to play for West Point, Dad,” his son told him. “But I don’t want to go into the army.”

OK, I get it. But suppose, just hypothetically, that you live in a country whose president and defense secretary have a grand total of 12 months’ combat experience between them. And suppose their idea of military strategy is to spend millions of dollars to gather hundreds of their generals and admirals from deployments throughout the globe into a single room for the purpose of telling them to lose weight and shave off their beards and mustaches. And suppose they publicly question the wisdom of promoting Blacks and women to command positions. And suppose these shenanigans are observed by hostile foreign governments, not to mention their allies. To what institution would you consign such a president and defense secretary in order to pound some military sense into their heads?

Do you get my drift?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com