At the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, they call the class of 1915 “the class the stars fell on”, because 59 of its 164 graduates made brigadier general or higher. Among them were Omar Bradley, first chair of the joint chiefs of staff, and Dwight D Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces in the second world war and 34th president.
The Class of 2002 might yet challenge 1915. As the bicentennial class, they were always marked for attention. Though they entered West Point in 1998, 25 years after the last major war, their final year began with 9/11. In an instant, they knew they would become the first cadets to graduate in wartime since Vietnam.
Lt Gen Daniel Christman was superintendent from 1996 to 2001. Wanting to show West Point to the world, he invited National Geographic to film a reality series, Surviving West Point, which would screen in 2002. He also allowed two authors to observe the cadets closely. Years later, when I set to work reporting a story of West Point rugby, I read both books closer still.
Ed Ruggero, a West Point graduate, professor and novelist, wrote Duty First: A Year in the Life of West Point and the Making of American Leaders. It was published before 9/11, when most cadets figured they would see Kosovo as peacekeepers if they saw a war zone at all. The book is an insider’s account, in some ways a description of a lost world, as innocent as one focused on training killers could be. Even Ruggero’s brief description of rugby leans toward the archaic, describing a scene the pioneers of the game at West Point would have known, back in 1961: “Under the lights of their practice field, the army rugby team churns the turf into mud. Wearing throwback uniforms of striped jerseys and thick, knee-high socks, they slam into each other at full speed. When they pause, they breathe like horses after a gallop.”
One burning September day, I visited Christman at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, across Lafayette Square from the White House. He marched me to an office decorated with civil war art – Grant at the Wilderness, weary but resolute – and pictures with Reagan, Clinton and both the presidents Bush. Back in 1998, Christman said, he went to see Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone. The magazine had published a piece about life on an aircraft carrier. Wenner was “full of appreciation for what the navy was doing and what young naval officers were like”. To a man who bled army black and gold, that was a challenge to meet. “So I pitched a 10,000-word piece: full access for the writer. He introduced David Lipsky to us.”
Lipsky lived with the cadets for four years. He marched with them, ate with them, celebrated their victories and shared their defeats. He was there on 9/11 and he ended up writing a book, Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point, which became a bestseller, as the New York Times put it, “a superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life”.
I began to write about West Point and its 2002 rugby team in 2015, when I set out to find out what happened to the team I played against in London years before. Setting out to understand the academy, its culture and its demands, I didn’t read Absolutely American so much as ingest it. I read other books too, including Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer, a huge novel of 20th-century war used to teach leadership at West Point, and the other nonfiction classic, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966, Rick Atkinson’s epic on the tragedy of Vietnam. But when I came to write about how the rugby players of 2002 came to West Point, lived and grew there and then found their game and their brotherhood, Lipsky provided a perfect introduction.
Describing Jeremy Kasper, a nervous high schooler and prospective recruit, Lipsky wrote: “He made his candidate visit in the winter. Snow everywhere, bleak and gray. ‘I was just having flashbacks to Wisconsin.’
“He watched a rugby game, four cadets were carried off on stretchers, next morning he watched the medevac helicopters fly in. ‘I was like, ‘I am not coming here, I don’t know what these people are smoking, they are nuts.” Six months later, Jeremy was marching the same fields on R-Day.”
•••
Reception Day happens each year in June, when the New York highlands bake. In its way, it is even more of a calculated shock than the relentless indignity of Beast, the six weeks of basic training which follow.
In his 2021 book Robert E Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause, Ty Seidule, a retired brigadier general and former West Point history professor, described how R-Day works. The new cadets arrive in buses. They are hustled to a huge lecture hall. Then, “After a short brief – the army loves briefs – a loud voice announces, ‘You have 90 seconds to say goodbye to your families and your time starts– now!’ So starts a stressful day. The upper-class cadets yell at the new ones purposefully.”
R-Day is shown in Surviving West Point. The new cadets say goodbye to their parents. They are taken to be turned into soldiers. Men have their heads shaved. All are assigned to companies led by older cadets and ordered this way and that. To the novelist James Salter, a cadet in the 1940s, it seemed an “inferno” or “forge”. Unchanging “demands, many of them incomprehensible, rain down”. The new cadets learn four responses: “Yes, sir. No, sir. No excuse, sir. Sir, I do not understand.” They learn how to salute, right hand at the brow. They struggle with huge bags of equipment. Seidule again: “R-Day finishes with a parade. Cadets march through the sally ports, past Washington’s statue onto the Plain wearing their smart gray uniforms as their families look on from the stands, proud and worried. The parade climaxes with the oath.”
It’s all there on the screen. The cadets march onto the Plain. They take the oath, to “support the constitution of the United States, and bear true allegiance to the national government”. They march away, to their meal in Washington Hall, arcane demands hurled in the clamoring din. The new class is in, swallowed by the great granite maw.
Sometimes cadets quit straight away. More often, some in the class of a thousand or so wash out during Beast. The “institutionalised harassment” the rugby coach Mike Mahan remembered to me is less now, but Beast is still terribly hard.
Cadets are shown military life. They learn to march. They are introduced to tactics and weapons, they are pushed over assault courses and through lake swims, they discover bug-flecked life under canvas and on overnight guard duty, in fierce heat or drenching rain or both. They learn to behave like plebes, lowest of the low, below yuks (sophomores), cows (juniors), and firsties, as West Point seniors are known. It means learning to be told what to do and how to answer those doing the telling. In one particularly strenuous ritual, the cadets learn what it is like to be gassed. They stumble out of a sinister brick chamber in the woods, vomit and cry – and run to the next test. They run and run and run. They march and march and march. They shed weight. It is meant to weed out those who fail to conquer thoughts of quitting.
•••
Among the West Point rugby players of 2002, finding one who will admit to hating R-Day and Beast is a bit like finding a Republican in Washington DC where I live. They’re there, but they’re not lining up to say so. R-Day? Beast? West Point? No problem. Really.
James Gurbisz, a big blond football player from Eatontown, New Jersey, counted himself fit and ready. He had strength, built on gridiron and diamond, and he had determination. The plan was to apply it all to football. That didn’t work out but in rugby it would make him a fit at hooker, the spearhead of the forward pack, one of the toughest positions. He’d done his reading too. He knew what to expect. R-Day, said his father, Ken, was more of a shock “for the parents than for the kids”.
“You’re sitting there, and they say, ‘You got 30 seconds to say goodbye to your kid.’”
“No,” said Helen, his wife. “A minute.”
“Yeah,” said Ken. “It was not a long time. Right? Like …”
“… So, picture,” said Helen. “You have your son sitting with you. Then all of a sudden, he’s got to get up and leave. They’re marched across the field.”
“And next time you see him,” said Ken, “it’s five o’clock. And I think if anybody tells you they weren’t apprehensive, they’re lying. That’s my feeling. Because, you know, I’ve been through the military. Going through basic training, there’s a million questions. ‘How am I gonna do this? How am I gonna do that? How am I gonna fare through this whole thing?’ It’s just normal human nature that you’re going to be somewhat apprehensive.”
“And at five o’clock at night,” Helen said, “when we see them again, now they have their uniform on, the white shirt, the gray slacks, the hair is cut.”
After eight hours at West Point, Gurbisz looked like a soldier. There’s proof, carefully kept. A book, published in October 2001: The Spirit of West Point. On the cover, a phalanx of new cadets, led by older students in crisp white uniforms, marches across the Plain. There, second from the left in the front row, is Gurbisz. He wears glasses, a white shirt with shoulder tabs, gray pants and black shoes. Arms at his sides. Hair shaved. Eyes front. Full parade order.
One cadet quit. Ken and Helen remember names called, the kid coming out, the parents driving away. Elsewhere on the Plain, Gurbisz’s future rugby teammates stood firm. Among them was Zac Miller, a high achiever from western Pennsylvania. Church leader, big brother. Tall, broad shouldered and strong. Rhodes scholar material, it would turn out. I asked his parents, Keith and Rosalyn, how Zac dealt with R-Day and Beast. Keith laughed.
“You know, it takes a certain type of individual to go to West Point, to be a soldier. You’re going to have some that are just really into it. I mean, it’s a mentality. It’s like football players, wrestlers, and rugby players, right? They’re not quite right in rugby.”
Miller would end up a back row forward, a forager and tackler, one of the light infantry, relentlessly in close-quarter combat. Gurbisz would be a hooker, slung between two props in the dark maelstrom in the front row of the scrum.
On R-Day 1998, Joe Emigh also stood to attention. He was a laidback kid from southern California but he’d been through a year at the West Point prep school, down at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. That helped lessen the shock, but he had another weapon all of his own. Faced with shouting upperclassmen, Emigh fell back on a resource he would draw on all four years at West Point: his relentless sense of humor.
“Joey was a funny kid,” said his dad, George. “He never really talked about much. I asked him, ‘How did you handle the hazing part?’ And he said, ‘You know, the biggest problem I had was just trying not to sit there and laugh and smile, because that only made it worse.’ That stuff never really bothered him. It was tougher for him academically. Joey wasn’t the best, but they had all the resources. He couldn’t get lost at West Point.”
Emigh went up the Hudson with Jeremiah Hurley, his prep room-mate, a big wrestler from North Carolina who would become a rugby prop, binding onto Gurbisz when the packs locked together. Brian McCoy, a football safety from Texas who like Zac Miller would end up in the back row of the scrum, had been to the prep school too. On R-Day, those kids already knew how to keep equipment and uniforms in order, how to make their bunks, how to lessen harassment and punishment or cope when it landed regardless. Those who did not know all of that were more vulnerable – and the upperclassmen knew it – but most found ways to adapt. Among the future rugby players in the class of ’02, Bryan Phillips and Nik Wybaczysnky, giant football linemen from California, were simply too big to care. Both would end up in the second row, the engine room of the scrum. Dave Little was a linebacker who became the No8, at the back of the scrum, linking forwards and backs. He came from San Diego. Like Emigh, like most of the rest of the team, Little came east to play football, figuring the academics would be tougher than the physical challenge. And like Emigh, he thought “the old reputation it had for how hard it was, with the hazing and so on, didn’t seem particularly earned”.
Clint Olearnick, eventually Emigh’s partner at center, came from Colorado. He didn’t have football interest but he had the grades and the physicality, over 6ft and square. Unique among the rugby players, he had played the game in high school. After a flirtation with the US Naval Academy, he was able to persuade a Colorado senator, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, to recommend him to West Point.
“I didn’t have a problem,” Olearnick said, of his immersion in Salter’s inferno. “I actually enjoyed it. You know, when I showed up for R-Day and Beast, I had already started shaving my head in high school. So the whole culture shock, the guys getting their head shaved? I had to grow my hair out before I went to West Point, because they wanted to shave it. It was probably only a half inch of anything. And so I showed up, and Beast was easy for me. R-Day was pretty easy. I’d always lived somewhat of a structured existence, playing a lot of sports. My dad was, I wouldn’t say hard, but he was a disciplinarian, expected a lot. I think a lot of the folks were scared when we showed up, but I knew it would all balance out in the end.”
If Olearnick approached life with a sort of brutal Zen, Pete Chacon, who in rugby would be a wing, revved himself up every day.
He was from California, too, from a hardscrabble corner of Oakland. He couldn’t afford college, so he planned to join the Marines. His dad suggested he try the service academies because he was smart and a good wrestler, small and wiry, and the government would pay his fees. Like Clint, Chacon looked at the Naval Academy on the Maryland shore. Then he realized “they make you do all the swimming, and screw that”. Like Olearnick, he secured support from a senator, Barbara Boxer, for a place at West Point. When he flew in for his candidate visit it was his first time out of California, give or take a visit to Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
“So that was kind of crazy,” he said. “It was a little bit of a shell shock for me to leave California for New York, climate-wise. But I was a freak. I loved school. People always tell you not to volunteer for things. Don’t volunteer in Ranger School. Don’t volunteer for extra duty when you’re at the academy. That’s bullshit. If I was going to be there, I was gonna make the most of that time. I volunteered and did extra stuff, and I just loved it.”
Of R-Day, Chacon remembers “some big speech. It was, ‘Hey, look around. Everyone here, to your left, to your right, was the team captain at school, was an MVP of their sport. He got straight As. So did she. But here, they’re just average.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Who wants to be average?’ You know, that speech impacted me significantly. Like, they were trying to get us to just accept that we were just going to be middle of the pack. Or that we were just there to experience West Point. It just pissed me off. I thought to myself, ‘Fuck that. That is bullshit.’ I just rejected it.”
Chacon was able to channel his frustration into fiercer effort, to forge a path through what Craig Mullaney, a Rhodes scholar from the Class of 2000, would call the “chaos, noise, and dumbstruck terror” of much of academy life. Chacon applied the same ferocity to academics as to physical challenges. Among the rugby players, some were smarter than others, Zac Miller seriously so, specializing in computing and math. Mo Greene, Matt Blind, and Jerrod Adams, three football players who like Chacon would become backs in rugby, were academic high-fliers too. Andy Klutman, a big man who became Jeremiah Hurley’s fellow prop, would end up a doctor. Others found the classwork tougher. But another thing Mullaney noted was that as his squad leader told him, R-Day and Beast were meant to teach a serious lesson: “Your only chance of surviving … is to work together. The only way to fail is to fail one another.” As George Emigh told me, even those like his son Joe who found classwork tough found support among classmates and teammates.
Rugby reinforced the process. Simply by not being the Great God Football, it fostered an outsiders’ bond. It was tribal, irreverent and fun. That suited those for whom the hardest part of West Point was the adjustment to military discipline.
Particularly for plebes, life is undignified by design. They are required to memorize Bugle Notes, a small leather-bound compendium of academy arcana. The honor code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” The Alma Mater–“Hail Alma Mater dear / To us be ever near / Help us thy motto bear / Through all the years” – and other rah-rah songs. How many gallons of water in the reservoir: “78 million gallons when the water is flowing over the spillway.” How many lights in Cullum Hall: “340 lights.” The right answer to a question about a cow: “She walks, she talks, she’s full of chalk, the lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the nth degree.” More, to be thrown up whole on demand.
In the long run, that sort of stuff helps instill understanding of order and discipline and how to pass it on. But some will always have difficulty keeping a straight face, and it wasn’t a coincidence that some found a home under Mike Mahan, the rugby coach who once chafed at officialdom himself.
•••
There was a good field to play on, up by the Plain in the shadow of Washington Hall and the Chapel, and the superintendent, Lt Gen Christman, was fond of the sport and said so. But there wasn’t much equipment, and there wasn’t much money, and the team trained on a rocky field up a steep hill at the far ass-end of the fort. Most of those who slogged up there to train, who traveled economy for games at Dartmouth, Harvard, Ohio State, and Penn State, drank and sang together, thriving on their outsider identity. Some admit to struggling with the orders and rules. Matt Blind, the captain, happily remembers incurring and walking off his fair share of hours – official punishment in the form of marching, weapon shouldered, across the bare barracks yards. And yet he and his players happily say they would die for their own authority figure, Mike Mahan.
If there is one rugby player from the Class of ’02 who sums up this outsider-insider model, it is one whose army career shows both why he thrived at West Point and why he might have flunked out altogether. It is the fly-half, the quarterback of the team, Mo Greene. Born in 1980 in Binghamton, New York, he grew up in north-eastern Pennsylvania on a farm he helped to work. After West Point, he ended up in Special Forces. When I first wrote about the rugby team, he chose not to take part. Years later, a lieutenant colonel, he was heading for civilian life. Asked why he didn’t speak first time around, he directed me to My Share of the Task, a memoir by Stanley McChrystal, the general who led Joint Special Operations Command and in 2005–06 supervised the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. I read this description of men McChrystal commanded, from a unit, as fate would have it, called Green: “The operators shared many traits. They tended to be hyperfit, opinionated, iconoclastic, fearless, intelligent, type-A problem solvers who thrived without guidance.”
West Point is not designed for iconoclasts, which means that in small numbers it breeds them. In the summer of 2021, when I met the players for a weekend at Matt Blind’s place in Massachusetts, Greene’s place in the team was clear. Shorter than the big forwards, dark and intense, supremely fit, he spent the whole weekend with his shirt off (or would’ve, if the stewards at Fenway Park had let him). He sat at the center of every conversation, argument, or song. He didn’t bark orders – the other big dogs, Clint Olearnick and Jeremiah Hurley, wouldn’t have let him, never mind Matt, the quiet captain, hosting, watching, shaping – but there Greene was, at the hub of the drinking, nostalgia, and laughter, 48 hours straight.
“I was an excellent student,” he said of how he came to West Point, an eager free safety or fullback. “I was a good athlete. I had a love for football in particular, even though I was just 5ft 10, 160lb. My junior year of high school, I started getting recruited to play at West Point. My father’s cousin was a retired major, a pilot, flew in Vietnam. And so we had a dinner where it was time to talk about the benefits of West Point, of the army. This is like 1996, ’97. Still largely a peacetime army. And so we talked about all that good stuff.
“I wanted to play Division I football. And I wasn’t getting Division I recruiting letters from anywhere else. So I pursued the West Point deal. I had the grades. I thought, ‘Whatever, I can do it.’ And then in my senior year at high school, they got a new football coach, and I got a letter that said they were not recruiting me anymore. The process to apply to West Point, it’s not a short process. So I was more than kind of committed. And my thinking was, ‘Well, I’ll just go walk on. They recruited me. Surely I can do this. So full speed ahead.’ And I don’t come from a wealthy family by any stretch. We’re poor. The idea of going to college for free? It resonated. And so football and scholarship, that was what put me at West Point.”
In the summer of 1998, for those not recruited for football but still dreaming of pulling on the gold and black, there was a chance to impress the coaches.
“There was a big cattle call for all these scared-to-death cadets. ‘Those who want to try out for the football team, go over here.’ I didn’t know him at the time, but Blinder and I were there.”
Matt Blind was the same sort of kid as Greene, if blond and less of an extrovert. He was from rural Ohio (“45 minutes south of Cleveland, 15 minutes west of Akron, out there in the farms”), and like Greene he had strong grades. Also like Greene, he wanted to play Division I football. Also like Greene, at 5ft 6 and 160lb, he was undersized. West Point took an interest, but it faded. Luckily for Blind, Sherrod Brown, then a representative from Ohio, nominated him, so off he went. Like Greene, he went straight to Michie Stadium.
Greene said, “We did some dips, and we did some running, and then they took heights and weights and stuff like that. And essentially, for I think almost all of us, it was like, ‘No thank you. We have’ – and pardon my crass language here – ‘a lot of 5ft 10, 175lb, slow white kids,’ you know? We have our pick of the litter of those. So it didn’t work out. But like most determined people or people that were overachievers at high school, I was determined to not quit. And so I spent my freshman year as best as I could continuing to train in the weight room, and I played intramural football, doing all the things I thought I could do. I thought I was going to get another shot. And it just never came. And so I was pretty crushed.”
The same went for Blind. No Division I football meant no real purpose outside the classroom. In it, they did fine. Greene would finish fourth in the class, Blind in the fifties. But both needed physical release. Both needed the bonds of a team.
To Blind, the hierarchies of West Point weren’t much of a problem – “kind of a joke, almost, hard but not unbearable.” He got more of a surprise when he met his roommates.
“In Beast I roomed with Andre Wright, a kid from San Bernardino, California. Actually, he was the first Black guy I’d ever known in my life. And I loved him. Then my first roommate for the academic year was another Black kid named Korey Hines, from the Bronx in New York. And my third roommate was a kid named Jonathan Childs, from Trenton, New Jersey. Also Black. To me, then, it was just crazy. Where I came from, in Ohio, there were white people. It was a 100% homogenous white farm community. And then my first three roommates at West Point just so happened to be Black kids from kind of rough neighborhoods.”
They say college opens your eyes. For Greene, it was a mental challenge too. Without the hierarchies of football, the coaches, plays, and orders, he struggled to contain his natural iconoclasm, his resistance to the accepted ways of getting things done. Luckily for him, like Blind, he found his way to rugby.
Greene said, “An outsider would probably look at the cadets and say we’re all kind of cut from the same cloth. But when you’re in that world, you know, there’s obviously tribes of people. And I’d say the rugby team was definitely, like, my people. And the thing it gave me, for better or worse, was an escape from the academy.
“As an underclassman, you need a place to go. To be with your people. Your brothers. You need something to pour yourself into, emotionally and physically. To just absolutely drain yourself, in practice or a game. That was what kept me going—what made me able to persist through the drudgery of the academy.”
West Point is a test. It is meant to make cadets struggle. When Mo Greene found rugby, he found in Mike Mahan a mentor who felt the same way about the harassments and indignities, but loved the place nonetheless. Greene found what he needed. He could make it through four years.
This is an edited extract from Brotherhood: When West Point Rugby Went To War by Martin Pengelly, published in the US by Godine
