Hard corps: how to end sexual assault at military academies.

• Author: Schroeder, Kirby D.

In April, I returned to the rainy Vermont campus of Norwich University, the nation's oldest private military college and birthplace of the R.O.T.C. program, which I'd attended as a cadet nearly three years before. The annual Junior Ring Ceremony was scheduled to take place in two short days, and three years' worth of anticipation was about to be released in a barrage of blank 75mm Pack Howitzer shells, the presentation of a treasure trove of enormous glittering rings, a six-hour dance in Plumely Armory, and by some long-awaited off-campus comradery. The members of the freshman "Rook" platoon with whom I'd shared the first few months of my cadet experience--the two dozen men and women of Golf Company, Second Platoon, Class of 2004--had rented a condo for the weekend in the ski-resort town of Rutland about an hour's drive south of campus--along with several other Norwich platoons. On Saturday night, proudly sporting their new rings and after dancing at the ball, most of the platoon gathered there.

At some point in the night, one of the men from my platoon wandered over to another platoon's condo to hang out. While there, Cadet "Garcia" had been opening" various doors, drunkenly searching for a bathroom, when he came across a young woman he didn't recognize, passed out on a bed in the dark, alone. He lay down next to her and starred to touch her sexually. As it happened, she was not deeply unconscious--only snoozing--and she woke up to discover that the man accosting her was an intoxicated stranger and not her cadet husband. She called out for her husband who immediately phoned the police, and within an hour the local authorities bad arrived to arrest Garcia on a sexual assault charge.

At Norwich, as at any military college, rumors travel faster than a .30 caliber round. Two of my Rook buddies decided to host a "Rookie Meeting" in their room the following night, and called everyone from our platoon on campus to attend. No one missed the meeting who could have been them. About 15 of us assembled hi the two-person room, closed the door, and began to talk. It was a sobering conversation; if Garcia's attitudes and behavior towards women had been unique within the platoon, we could simply have condemned him and moved on. But they were not: I had heard cadets tell stories in the past about sex with passed-out or intoxicated women, stories which were meant to be humorous. The men in these incidents may have understood that such behavior was morally suspect, but they certainly wouldn't have called it rape. Faced with Garcia's arrest for an otherwise seemingly trivial act, we started to confront our own complicity. One of the men present had the courage to put it this way: "The fact is, there are probably four of you here that I would trust to be in a room alone with my sister. And I hate that---I hate that about us." I could see some of the men glancing around the room as he said this, forming their own short mental tallies of those in whom they would dare place such a trust. We may have all been "buddies," but we also knew that not all our buddies shared the same set of values when it came to sexual decision-making and the understanding of what constitutes a sexual assault.

It would have been too awkward for any of us to have shared the names on our lists with each other, but I like to think my buddies' lists would have included my name. I was a full-time graduate student in the department of sociology. at the University of Chicago when, with the support of the Norwich administration and the notification of its Corps of Cadets, I had enrolled as a 30-year-old freshman recruit in the fall of 2000. I was to have the same experiences there as all other cadets while gathering material for my dissertation on gender, institutions, and emotion management. The Housing Office found me a compatible 17-year old roommate with whom I would share living space in the barracks. I participated in the Navy R.O.T.C. program and attended undergraduate classes, and on the night of Dec. 11, 2000, I was recognized as a Norwich cadet along with the rest of the Class of 2004 in a ceremony which was genuinely one of the proudest moments of my adult life. As a doctoral student, I was nicknamed "Doc," and I became a part of the corps' social fabric. But like many cadets I also grew deeply ambivalent about Norwich: I loved the corps, but behavior like Garcia's was one of the things I hated also. It was a malignancy within male-cadet identity.

The general public has only recently been made aware of the degree of the sexual-assault problem within military academies, a problem which administrators have been confronting since the academies decided to enroll women in 1976. This past spring, a female cadet at the...