Grade VI Trip to West Point

 

For the past eleven years, the sixth grade and a select group of chaperones have had the privilege of spending a day at the United States Military Academy at West Point.  Mr. Moraitis originally organized the trip with the help of Mr. Roland Trope, an adjunct professor there and the father of St. Bernard’s Old Boy Winston Trope ’10.  This is not your ordinary civilian tour.  Colonel Edward Sobiesk, an armor officer and academy professor, leads the boys into places usually off limits to the public, including the Mess Hall, which may be the grandest dining room in the Western Hemisphere, and the Academic Board Room, the so-called inner sanctum, where the commanders gather to decide, among other things, the fates of cadets who are facing expulsion.

This year on December 12, the sixth grade also got a taste of a sophisticated engineering curriculum, and perhaps a sense of what math can lead to other than grief.  There were mini-classes in robotics, cyberwarfare, data mapping, and photonics (lasers, basically).  The boys actually gasped at some of the professor’s demonstrations, and they missed the menace in his sardonic allusions to Skynet and the Convergence.  Later, in the company of Colonel Bobby Crawford, they toured the mechanical engineering labs:  3-D printers (we want one!), homemade watermills, jet engines, and an array of nifty machine tools.  All this awesomeness could make a person regret pursuing a degree in comparative literature.  If the boys weren’t inspired by the gadgetry, then perhaps they took heed, consciously or not, of Col. Sobiesk’s occasional entreaties to live life passionately and in the service of others.  This wasn’t a recruiting trip, but surely for some of the boys the message hit home.

Lunch was a two-tier affair.  First, the boys had a foodless sit-down with cadets in the Hogwortsian Mess Hall, and then they had a “spirit lunch” in the old officers club—a rally in anticipation of the Army-Navy football game, two days hence.  There were speeches, cheerleaders, spirit videos, pipes, and drums.  The Secretary of the Army was there and made a few remarks.  The boys got pretty good at shouting “Beat Navy!” whenever a cadet or officer around campus asked them, but it didn’t seem to do much good, as Navy, in fact, beat Army, badly and for the twelfth straight year.