It takes a certain kind of weird for six freshmen to lay on top of each other on a couch wearing matching jackets, khakis, and tucked-in polos. It takes an even stronger kind of weird for that to be a completely ordinary situation for everyone involved. Something that I found out early on as a member of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets is that personal space only exists for the purpose of completely disregarding it.
Some of our habits can, admittedly, be a little unsettling to those around us, but they're important parts of our identity. We eat together, work out at 5:00 AM together, do homework together, and sometimes shower together if there’s not enough time to wait for another stall to free up.
Or just for fun. Those are called Shower Parties. Like I said, most of us stopped caring about personal space a long time ago.
It's true that we're all a little crazy. This is a story about how we got that way.
Despite the scrunched-up shoulders and goofy faces, we weren't always as close (either physically or emotionally) as we look in the photo above. In fact, we didn't even choose to hang out together, but rather, we were forced to do so in a bid to create unit cohesiveness. Our upperclassmen instructors, or "cadre", named one method of achieving this goal “Unity Pass.” The entire freshman company received a minuscule amount of time to eat and relax together before returning to the barracks for more instruction, drill practice, or "not hazing". It was on those passes that we often found ourselves squished against one another in the Student Center's BreakZone. However, when your free time consists of the same routine with the same people every weekend for an entire year… Well, it does gets tiring.
Every two-hour Unity Pass in Training Company 1-2, as my freshman unit was known, always followed the same formula. First, walk to Moe’s and eat terribly unhealthy Mexican food for thirty minutes. Next, go to the Frosty Parrot and eat terribly unhealthy frozen yogurt for thirty minutes. With one hour remaining of our precious free time, the BreakZone provided freshmen cadets with billiards, ping pong tables, several Xboxes, and couches to catch up on the little sleep we managed to get.
And that was it. Every night, every weekend, every month for two semesters, twenty-two college students who may or may not have initially liked each other were forced to spend quality bonding time. No partying. No alcohol. No "college experience."
Because we were given so few options for what we could do for fun, we needed to find other ways to amuse each other. It's well-known in the military that the most important thing to pull you through combat isn’t a powerful rifle. Nothing is more valuable than a reliable “battle bud”, someone who would risk his or her life to save a comrade’s. The same rule applied to a year’s worth of enduring "not being hazed" as freshman cadets, and being bored out of out of our minds (which, by the way, is where the idea of shower parties came from). Whether we liked it or not, the people that we spent countless hours with in the basement of an old student center became family.
That sounds cliché, after all, the word "family" is overused nowadays and lost a lot of its meaning. However, when I say they became my family, I mean that they’re more important to me than the people I actually share DNA with.
The man in front holding the flag is my 23-year-old roommate. We call him “Grandpa” not just to tease him for his age, but also, out of respect for wisdom and insight beyond his years. Despite being over six feet tall and 200 pounds of intimidating muscle, the old man is the gentlest and deepest feeling member of our group. The heart tattooed on his bicep mirrors the one he wears on his sleeve. And even though, he has a 5-year old's sense of humor, we also spend countless nights awake sharing thoughts on love, God, and humanity.
In a hyper-masculine, testosterone-filled environment it is easy to imagine women having difficulty receiving equal opportunities to succeed. The one girl in the photo was outnumbered by 21 guys in our Training Company. But if someone tried to tell her that women don't belong in the military, I have no doubt she could turn the offender into a broken, bloody pulp. Then, without missing a beat, proceed to put on a pair of earrings and turn heads as she walked out the door. I have learned more about loyalty and family from her than anyone else. Following a hard breakup and the death of a loved-one, my honorary sister called or texted me without fail every two hours for a week to make sure I was okay. In her own words, “You don’t mess with our family - our real one or our chosen one.”
There were also those who dutifully served as class clowns for Training Company 1-2. Among their preferred antics was a rapid series of five knocks on my door as they returned from the showers prior to the evening’s “lights out”. If I was not standing immediately next to the door or reacted too slowly to lock it, what followed can only be described as a shameless yet masterful display of male anatomy. As the door swung open and one of the pranksters burst into the room, bathrobes and towels were hastily discarded by the offender, gyrating his body (all of his body) and serenading the room with “Swagger Jagger”. I, meanwhile, would stand doubled-over with laughter and simultaneously kick myself mentally for failing to prevent the same prank that had been carried out dozens of times before.
From the goofiness and smiles on the couch that night, an observer of our antics would never imagine what we went through in order to become the inseparable group we are today. Our faces did not reveal the hours of getting screamed at, the weeks of having individuality stripped down to nothing and traded for strict uniformity, the months of absolute s*** that we endured at the hands of upperclassmen who were sometimes no more than a year older than us. We probably just looked like a bunch of kids goofing around, acting like idiots, and making each other laugh with our own stupidity. And truthfully, we still were a bunch of kids. But those two precious hours on Fridays and Saturdays were sometimes the only chance we had to act like ones.
The beginning of New Cadet Week on August 17th, 2013 threw us into an environment where we unknowingly traded our innocence for a pair of combat boots and a can of shoe shine. Platoons of 18 and 19 year-olds were handed simulation rifles every Tuesday and taught how to search the dead body of another human they just shot. While normal college students went out on Friday nights drinking and partying, we returned from our two hours of free time to clean hallways, meticulously prepare uniforms, or face the wrath of our cadre for some unknown offense. Civilians around us enjoyed the hook up culture of college, with no need to worry about finding a soul mate until they are ready to settle down. We, on the other hand, know that if we are not married by the time we graduate, we'll be shipped around the world for years with no one waiting for us when we come home.
We became adults before we got the chance to finish being kids. I have no regrets for joining the Corps, which has created countless generations of strong, honorable leaders. The best memories of my life will undoubtedly be of the times I spent as a cadet. However, a couple years of hindsight has made me realize that the decision to join the VTCC was a much bigger one than I could have imagined.
So yes, we're all a little crazy. But I’ll take six people squished together on a couch in BreakZone. I’ll take the penis jokes that tend to make up most of our childish sense of humor. Hell, I’ll even take the Shower Parties. That's what we have left of who we were before that warm August day we heard our First Sergeant yell: "Training Company, atten-TION!"
