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A Plebe’s Revenge–Well Almost…

Moderator: Hank Nuwer.  Even as a boy I was a sucker for any well-written memoir carried in magazines with names like True, Country Gentleman and Collier’s. My mother was pretty overprotective, but her one nod to my liberty was to allow me to walk about 15 minutes west on Walden Avenue to Novak’s Drugstore, which straddled the line between Cheektowaga and Buffalo, NY.  Somehow I developed a friendship with Mr. Novak that led to his permitting me to gently read through all of his magazines on the visible rack, although forbidding me from reading the enticing ones behind the counter that displayed only their titles. Anyway, today I get similar pleasure from reading first-person accounts in magazines, book memoirs and in blogs. One entry that caught my attention today in Warsaw where I am spending the summer was the store of a “plebe sneak” at West Point.

Here is the author’s bio: After starting a job with IBM as a System z Client Architect, Sean P. McBride founded Millennial Mainframer as a platform for young IT professionals to express thought leadership around the mainframe space while networking and sharing lessons learned. Sean is a former Army Officer and West Point graduate interested in history and technology.

I’ll start you off with a brief excerpt and furnish a link so you can finish the piece. Great job, Mr. McBride, SIR!

Excerpt:

Today is December 1, 2013. Today I turn twenty-eight years old. Today is also approximately the ten year anniversary of the most interesting “birthday party” I’ve ever been to. . . .

Ten years ago, I was a first-year cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. First-year cadets at West Point are called “plebes,” which is a Latin term that denotes the underclass. Much like the barbarism of antiquity, plebes at a military academy are treated like crap. They clean the barracks, deliver the newspapers, pick up the trash or recyclables, march not walk, and salute all of their superiors with a chipper attitude. They also are expected to memorize the meals of the day, the football schedule, the main articles of the New York Times, West Point lore, and errata about the heroes of the American Empire.  Failure of any of these tasks is never pretty.

The corps of cadets is organized into companies of around 120 cadets each, and each company has a slightly different culture. To my misfortune, I was a plebe in company A-2, known as the Spartans. Due to the historical legacy of Spartan military discipline and oppression of the enslaved Helot underclass, company A-2 was well known for their thorough and systematic hazing their Plebes.

At West point, there is one socially sanctioned avenue for plebes to exact revenge on especially brutal upperclassmen: the “Birthday Party.” In such a birthday party, the plebes break into the upperclassman’s room, tie them up, and demean them in some way. Often this might be tying them up, placing them in the communal open shower, and spraying they with ketchup, mustard, etc. stolen from the mess hall. Of course, the specific recipe of revenge would always slightly vary from upperclassman to upperclassman.

So there was one Spartan upperclassman that was considered especially mean and vindictive towards the plebes. He loved to ask obscure and seemingly impossible-to-memorize trivia in the hope of being able to scream at and bully a plebe. Considering that his grades weren’t great, his physical fitness was poor, and other aspects of his life likely sucked, bullying seventeen and eighteen year old plebes was likely the high point of his life. Given his general asshole-ish-ness, it was guaranteed that this guy was going to get one hell of a “birthday party.”

So the Spartan plebes geared up as if for the battle of Thermopylae. We put on football equipment used by the intramural football team. We drew battle plans and planned to stay in formation to be able to overwhelm the upperclassman and subdue him quickly and painlessly. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out to plan.

See link to rest of story, please. –Hank Nuwer

By Hank Nuwer

Journalist Hank Nuwer is the Alaska author of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives; Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, High School Hazing, Wrongs of Passage and The Hazing Reader. In April of 2024, the Alaska Press Club awarded him first place in the Best Columnist division and Best Humorist, second place.

He has written articles or columns on hazing for the Sunday Times of India, Toronto Globe & Mail, Harper's Magazine, Orlando Sentinel, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. His current book is Hazing: Destroying Young Lives from Indiana University Press. He is married to Malgorzata Wroblewska Nuwer of Warsaw, Poland and Fairbanks, Alaska. Nuwer is a former columnist for the Greenville (Ohio)Early Bird and former managing editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Alaska.
Nuwer was named the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists columnist of the year in 2021 for his “After Darke” column in the Early Bird. He also won third place for the column in 2022 from the Indiana chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He and his wife Gosia, recently of Union City, Ind., have owned 20 acres in Alaska for many years. “The move is a sort-of coming home for us,” said Nuwer. As a journalist, he’s written about the Alaskan Iditarod sled-dog race and other Alaska topics. Read his musings in his blog at Real Alaska Daily--http://realalaskadaily.com and in his weekly column "Far from Randolph" in the Winchester Star-Gazette of Randolph County, Indiana.

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