Love and Hate at Texas A&M
Facing accusations ranging from rape to bad manners, tradition-bound Aggie corpsman can’t decide whether to welcome women or drive them off.
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More annoying to true-blue Ags is that these women seem reluctant to embrace wholeheartedly the Aggie way as exemplified by the corps. In particular, they resist Aggie alterations of military traditions, like the endless recitations of campusology, the boys-will-be-boys antics like the “flying buzzard,” in which an upperclassman commands a freshman to spit in another upperclassman’s food. They gripe about being “crapped out,” or punished for not having a dinner knife pointed towards Kyle Field at the end of a meal, and about having to do umpteen push-ups before they can go down the hall to the rest room in the middle of the night. Aggies argue that such experiences build the kind of camaraderie and leadership necessary in wartime; and while that notion may be debatable (the military has rid itself of many such techniques), something about the corps still seems to work: Texas A&M still produces more commissioned officers than any other school outside the service academies, and its graduates have long served with distinction, most recently in Desert Storm.
But the battle of the sexes at A&M isn’t really about military readiness. The women in the corps, in fact, may be more interested in a military career than many of the men. The women are the ones who stress that A&M is the only military college in Texas and is, therefore, an important stepping-stone to a successful military career. Women who want to be soldiers join the corps because they have to: Any student, male or female, who wants to take part in ROTC must belong to the corps for the first two years. While there are males who join the corps to advance in the military, far more members are what are called drill and ceremony cadets, who join up because their fathers and grandfathers did. For them, the corps is a fraternity with a military gloss. They are drawn to the organization to test themselves against traditions established generations ago. In this striking bit of role reversal, it is the men who are locked in sentiment and the women who would be very happy to dispense with it entirely.
The reason the women don’t admire so many of those traditions is that too often the men hide behind them in their attempts to drive the women out. That is also why, ultimately, it’s the day-to-day life of the corps—as much as any headline-grabbing crisis—that is enough to dismay even the most halfhearted feminist. A school investigation of the cavalry did not turn up the brutality the original accuser had described, but it did uncover the kind of hazing that is against corps rules: Male cadets refused to talk, ride, or march with her; she was also pelted with horse manure while pushing a wheelbarrow. The woman who accused a fellow cadet of rape was belittled and criticized by ranking corpsmen. She was finally driven out of the corps and gave up her dreams of a career as an Air Force pilot; the corps held a disciplinary hearing for the man she accused (he quit the corps the day after the alleged incident), but she was never informed of the hearing.
Essentially, the male cadets and their supporters on campus believe that the women should conform to corps standards, that they should gut up and take it just like the guys do. But in many ways, the deck is stacked against women. Those who can’t live up to Aggie standards are viewed as wimps, while women who do are pegged as lesbians. And while the military may use humiliation to build discipline, the corps’s techniques are too often doled out solely on the basis of gender. One woman reported that when a corps member said he’d like some milk, another corpsman indicated a female cadet with large breasts, and announced, “We could have her pump it out for us.” In another episode, female cadets said they were told to raise their hands by putting up their “dick skinners.” Another woman was told, “Do push-ups like you want it slammed up you.” There is, too, the notorious Bag a Wag ribbon that male cadets wear after supposedly having had sex with a female cadet. Carolyn Muckley, who is part Vietnamese, says a corpsman phoned her with a threat to “rape your Viet Cong c— until it bleeds.” It is true that corpsmen call each other faggots with good-natured affection, but such epithets directed at women are neither good-natured nor affectionate, and no one could mistake their use as character building.
Members of the corps like to maintain that they treat everyone the same—that such language is just part of the trial by fire they require. But they don’t treat everyone the same, and in fact, they can't treat everyone the same; the sexual element women have brought to the corps has changed the rules of the game, as the men always knew it would. Take quadding. Guys stripping down another guy, spread-eagling him, and pouring water on his genitals is one thing. As Henry Cisneros says, the guys who did it to him were the best friends he ever had. But guys stripping a woman down to her underwear, spread-eagling her, and pouring water on her genitals is something else entirely. Quadding a woman is a sexual assault, and it cannot be condoned. The Aggies have reached another point where some of their beloved traditions will have to go.
“IF A WOMAN REALLY WANTS TO go out there and stay up all night and get mud all over her and cuts on her hands from bailing wire and get stuff spit on her clothes, then that’s her prerogative,” one alumnus said dubiously of the women who want to help build A&M’s annual bonfire. That women want to do just that has always been the hardest thing for many Aggies to grasp. Just like me, they want to work hard and push themselves to the limit—it’s part of being an Aggie, after all. On this fall night, for example, the busy construction site that will produce the annual bonfire celebration is abuzz with male and female voices. For years, the only job women could get at bonfire was to distribute lemonade and cookies to the males who moved the logs, but now there are women in flannel shirts warming themselves near the campfire, wearing hard hats that say “Give Me Your Panties Bitch” and “F— Your Own Log” (“I borrowed it from my boyfriend,” explains one woman). Though women still don’t run the bonfire, they now do help with the heavy lifting, moving the massive logs onto the even more massive log tower that will be ignited in just a week or so. This is progress, Aggie style.
In the thick of things is junior Margine Duarte, a corps first sergeant from Nicaragua. She is a pretty woman with long, dark hair and a wide, generous mouth, someone who gives the lie to the female cadets’ Big Bertha reputation. This is Duarte’s third bonfire—in the past she has started earlier, helping, in her words, to “chop trees and push logs.” Now she comes to the site mostly to “motivate” the freshmen she supervises and because she thinks building the tower is exciting.
Duarte loves the corps. She has stayed in—even though she cannot get a military commission because she is not a U.S. citizen—hoping that the leadership skills she is developing here will help her get a job with a multinational corporation. She represents the kind of woman the men in the corps can live with. She’s not a complainer, and she has the more tolerant boys-will-be-boys attitude necessary for surviving life in the corps. (The women who accused the corps of discrimination were “insecure,” she says; the corps members pick on the most sensitive women.) At the same time, Duarte knows the score. She doesn’t date corps members (“Because I work with them, and I know what they’re like”), and she doesn’t do anything that might invite abuse. “When I walk, I walk very confident, and I want everyone to respect me so they won’t do that to me,” she says. “I’m pretty sure they do it behind my back, but as long as I don’t know about it, I don’t care.”
The question at A&M, really, is whether women should conform to the corps, as Margine Duarte has done, or whether the corps should conform to the women. The answer is that both must do both. The women have to embrace those traditions that are not debilitating, and the men have to forsake those that are.
The dream of Aggie diehards is that life in the corps can be made so unpleasant for women that eventually they will either leave the corps or stop whining. As the events of this fall have proved—to say nothing of decades of losing legal battles—this is a doomed dream. How much bad publicity can A&M withstand, how many lawsuits can it afford to lose, before it reforms the corps and moves the school that last step into the modern age? The corps will lose this fight against women, just as it has lost all the others, because it is fighting against the future. Already the latest investigating panel has recommended a plan for cadets to take leadership classes—a euphemism for sensitivity training. It has also been recommended that real military officers return to supervise the corps dorms. The number of men in the corps continues to dwindle, and if it is to survive, it will have to not just tolerate but welcome women like Margine Duarte, who can be more loyal to the corps than to her sex, who still believes in the best the Aggies have to offer—the chance to belong to something bigger than herself, the chance to practice loyalty and leadership.
“Margine, are you bored?” an officer snaps when he catches her chatting. “Help us move logs.”
Duarte excuses herself and jogs over to take her place beside her buddies, slapping on a hard hat as she goes. In unison, ten women heave a huge log onto their shoulders and haul it toward the base of the tower, just a bunch of hardworking women doing their best to send the Aggie myth shooting up in smoke.
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