Suzanne Rice

Jim Bachta was our perennial Brigade Boxing Champ at 132 lbs¹.  He graduated 189^th in our class.  I was 35 files behind him at 224.²

We both branched Armor.  Luck of the draw moved us nearly simultaneously from the Armor Officer Basic course to Airborne School (where we shared an apartment with classmates Lew Riggsby and Don Smith) and Ranger School to a tour in Germany to a tour in Vietnam to a second tour in Germany.  During the second tour in Germany, we’d occasionally weekend together, touring parts of Europe we could reach on our BMW motorcycles.  One summer we traversed North Africa, which is another story.

When the Army had finished with us in 1975, we moved into an apartment near Heidelberg and enrolled in an international relation master’s degree program, intending to find civilian work that would allow us to stay in Germany.  It turned out that employers were hiring only MBAs for the interesting jobs.  We should have checked first!  We dutifully got ourselves into the MBA program at Stanford, and again rented a place together off-campus.  Among the things the sparsely furnished house lacked was a coffee maker.

To economize, we went looking for a used Mr. Coffee at the local Goodwill store.

We found three.  One looked much better than the other two.  I picked up the nice one and headed toward the cash register.  “Just a minute,” says Jim.  “Maybe, we should plug it in first, to at least see whether the little pilot light comes on.”  I thought that was overdoing it for so simple a device, but out of respect for my classmate and friend, I sought out a power outlet.

When I plugged in the nice-looking Mr. Coffee and switched it on, we heard a large circuit breaker nearby open, and all the overhead lights went dark.  And no pilot light on our Mr. Coffee.

We told the staff about that defective Mr. Coffee, and selected one of the scruffy ones to replace it.  When the store lights came back on, we plugged that one in.  The little pilot light came on nicely, and the hotplate under the pot began to warm up. The store lights stayed on. We bought that one – $6, I think – and took it home.  It was still working fine when we graduated from business school 18 months later.  We donated it to the rental house.

The lesson:  Class rank matters. 

Notes:

1. Boxing was and remains a mandatory plebe (Freshman) physical education course, and also a winter intramural sport. The best boxers are encouraged to enter the annual Brigade Open Boxing Tournament, where single-elimination matches determine a brigade champion in each weight class. Unlike most other sports at West Point, boxing was new to practically everyone, so it was a good measure of native athletic ability.  Usually cows (Juniors) or firsties (Seniors) won these individual brigade championships, because it took experience to develop the skills. Jim Bachta was an exception to the rule. He won the championship during his plebe, yearling (Sophomore), and firstie years.  During cow year, he had broken his nose sparring with Jim McDonough, a heavier classmate and, I think, our only Golden Gloves alumnus. The boxing program in 2019 is similar, with two additions:  1. When women joined the Corps in 1976, they initially took a female-oriented self-defense course in lieu of boxing.  Over time they demonstrated their toughness and lobbied for taking the same boxing course as the men.  From 2016, they have taken the same boxing program as the men, boxing other women.  2. In 1976, boxing returned to the intercollegiate sports world with the birth of the National Collegiate Boxing Association.  Army has fielded a team from the beginning of this era, and is consistently dominant, having won seven national championships.  At this writing, Army is the defending national champ.

2. Class rank: Most things cadets do – academics, leadership, sports – are graded in one way or another.  These grades are continuously tracked and combined into a single evaluation, “General Order of Merit”.  Individuals’ GOM scores are rank-ordered to determine class rank. For firsties, class rank determined order of selection for branch and first duty station.  At graduation, we received our diplomas in order of class rank.  Everyone’s class rank was published, and we all knew well where we stood.  Although class rank has other components, academics are most important.  We commonly gauged our classmates’ intellectual capacity by their class rank.

Cadet photos courtesy of the Jack Engeman Collection, the Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Editor’s note: Every five years, the Class of 1969 meets for a reunion. At each reunion, a memorial service is held to commemorate the lives of those classmates who have died. It is a solemn yet beautiful occasion that reminds all that these men who once shared the classrooms and fields of West Point have been taken home, but they are not forgotten and cherished still by their classmates, family and friends. Jim Russell presented this reading to the assembled classmates and families as they marked the 50th year since their graduation from West Point and remembered 124 of their classmates.

I’m going to read an excerpt from a book by a 20th century German Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner (1904-1984). The book is structured as a series of letters to God, each posing a complaint about some aspect of the human condition.

One chapter, about losing long-term intimate friends, seemed particularly salient now, as we’re losing about a classmate per month. And unlike the combat losses we fully anticipated 50 years ago, these losses to the ravages of age are in some ways harder to accept.

Here’s Karl Rahner on losing his friends:

O Lord, I should like to remember my dead to you, all those who once belonged to me and have now left me. There are many of them, far too many to be taken in with one glance. To pay my sad greeting to them all, I must travel back in memory over the entire route of my life’s long journey.

When I look back in this way, I see my life as a long highway filled by a column of marching men. Every moment now, someone breaks out of the column and goes off silently, without a word or wave of farewell, and is swiftly enwrapped by the darkness of night stretching out on both sides of the road.

The number of our marchers becomes smaller, at first slowly, and now more quickly. The new men coming up to fill the ranks don’t really replace those who have gone. The only ones really making this pilgrimage with me are the ones whom I set out with, the ones who were with me at the start of my journey, the dear ones who are close to my heart.

The others are mere ”companions of the road”, who happen to be going the same way as I. There are many of them, and we all exchange greetings and help one another along. But the true procession of my life involves only those bound together by real love, and this group grows ever smaller. One day I myself will break off from the line of march and leave without a word or wave, never to return.

My heart will always be with them, with my loved ones who have taken their leave. There is no substitute for them; there are no others who can fill the vacancy when one of those, whom I have really loved, departs, and is with us no more.

In true love, no one can replace another, for true love loves the other in that depth where he is uniquely and irreplaceably himself. And thus, as death has trodden roughly through my life, every one of the departed has taken a piece of my heart with him.

So, that’s Karl Rahner on the subject.

He wrote these words in 1938. I doubt he ever heard of West Point. But he captures the experience we’re having, losing our brothers, brothers who in our case have been with us nearly since our birth as men, and certainly since our birth as a class.

We West Pointers are privileged to love one another better than most men can do in their lifetimes. What a gift, but also what pain, as we watch our brothers “breaking out of the line and going off to the darkness of the night.”

God bless our classmates.

God bless our class.

Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence, written in 1938 and published in the US in 1999 by St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, IN

(Over 800 classmates and family members assembled from all over the world for the 50th reunion.)