The Aggie Bonfire Tragedy
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The breadth of participation is astonishing; Aggies say Bonfire is the largest student-organized project in the nation. Total participation is around five thousand students. Two thousand of them turned out this year for the first day of harvesting logs. Cut, as it is called, takes place on weekends, usually on rural land whose owner has donated the trees for the bonfire. It goes on for almost two months and involves the use of chainsaws and axes to fell trees, machetes to clear brush, and tractors and large trucks for heavy-duty work. Once the center pole is in place, construction begins. At one time fish were not allowed to work on the stack, but today they form the backbone of the workforce; most upperclassmen live off-campus, away from the Bonfire frenzy. If freshmen didn't work on Bonfire, one witness observed, it wouldn't get built. By the night the stack is burned, the fish have been molded into Aggies. No other campus activity can fill that role. That is why Bonfire is so important — not just to students but also to older Aggies. It preserves the A&M they remember.
That is the sacred part; here is the profane. Until this year, cutting has been regarded as far more dangerous than the actual construction of Bonfire. Two ambulances are on hand at the cut site, and for good reason. Lacerations are common. So are injuries to hands and feet during the backbreaking work of hauling logs. A&M keeps track of injuries by the week with a form that includes such categories as "Amputation" and "Trauma-Blunt." In 1993 the injury total hit 79; in 1998 it was down to 37. Still, the official description of injuries is sobering: "foot cut with ax," "shin cut with machete," "smashed right index finger," "fractured vertebra" (incurred during "groding," or horseplay, involving other members of the student's residence hall). In 1996 a pickup truck taking ten Aggies back to campus from the cut site, eight of them in the bed, flipped over after the driver lost control. One student was killed, and it could have been much worse.
Injuries aren't the only problem at the cut site; located many miles from campus, it is an opportunity for making mischief. In 1997 one of the residence halls smuggled in a stripper. One year the landowner repeatedly brought beer to the cut site. Beer and chainsaws don't mix. After a hazing incident in 1998, the Student Organization Hearing Board imposed sanctions on the Texas Aggie Bonfire organization, including a requirement that a statement addressing hazing be delivered each morning at the cut site before anyone can work. The futility of this remedy did not escape the sanctioners: "The Board recognizes that this task will require some thought and effort in order to ensure that the daily announcement does not turn into a joke."
Nor has the stack site been free of incidents. In 1996 no fewer than three Aggies fell off the stack at different times. One hit four levels on his way to the ground, suffering head and internal injuries; the toll of the other two victims included a concussion, a broken foot, and a broken wrist. In 1998, campus police found a keg of beer in a shed near the stack. They also found an intoxicated student unconscious and vomiting — a life-threatening situation — who was not being tended to by anyone. That same year, the A&M administration received a letter from a graduate who came to town to watch Bonfire burn. He was appalled to see a member of the Corps of Cadets sporting this slogan on his helmet: "If I knew niggers were this much trouble, I'd have picked my own God damn cotton."
The problem with Bonfire is that it is red-ass (sometimes abbreviated as RA) culture run amok. The administration has never known quite what to do about it; it needs RA Aggies to uphold the school's uniqueness and guard its traditions, but it doesn't need drinking, hazing, racism, and strippers, and it has never figured out how to get one without the other. The redpot traditions exemplify RA culture. One is that no woman may set foot in a certain area of the stack site unless she has slept with a redpot; an Aggie who described herself as weighing 95 pounds wrote a letter to the student newspaper two years ago protesting that a redpot had shoved her when she breached the boundary to avoid a mud puddle. A wide-ranging witness statement given by a female member of the corps told how each group of redpots fills a jar with ejaculate and sets it atop the stack to burn. "The other education," which works so well in service areas like student government, doesn't always work so well with redpots. In 1993 a redpot was cited for bringing 53 beers to the stack site after midnight. Redpots had to know about the keg that the police found in 1996; their job is to know everything. Redpots knew that a stripper was going to be smuggled into the cut site in 1997 and didn't stop it. Redpots exceeded the height limit for the 1999 Bonfire. This is not the leadership that the other education has in mind.
The result of the RA attitude is that, while almost every Aggie loves the hoopla of Bonfire night, many Aggies do not want to be involved with the building of Bonfire. In the late eighties objections to the slaughter of trees led to the formation of an organization called Aggies Against Bonfire. But at A&M, any organization whose name begins with "Aggies Against" is unlikely to succeed. A&M is a positive island in a cynical sea; students put signs in their dorm windows touting their organizations ("Pro Bonfire"). In the best A&M fashion, Aggies Against Bonfire disappeared, to be replaced by Aggie Replant, an organization that plants trees in the spring to make up for those that were cut down in the fall. The RAs know that their support is dwindling. "I've seen lots of negative attitudes across campus," a Bonfire crew chief said in an interview for academic project in 1998, "and sensed the feeling from both students and administration that people do not appreciate Bonfire. Every year there are fewer and fewer Pro Bonfire signs. That bothers me. Bonfire is Aggieland."
My heart wants to have a bonfire," Ray Bowen says. "My brain gives me the problem." An Aggie-educated engineer, class of '58, Bowen understands all too well what happens when dynamic forces disrupt a million-pound stack of wood. Now, as A&M's president, he is waiting for the Linbeck commission to weigh in before he decides the future of Bonfire. "You'll be able to track the decisions we make against that report," he says. But he has already made up his mind about one thing: If there is to be a bonfire, it will be a student-run event. "We thought about building Bonfire with professionals," he says. "We concluded that students wouldn't come out to watch it. This set of students feels an obligation to keep the tradition going. If they are totally disconnected from it, then all that's left is a stack of wood."So the question is, can Bonfire be made safe and still allow A&M to remain true to its culture? It can certainly be made safe — smaller, for example, and built according to a different design, this time one that is written down and subject to quality assurance by a faculty structural engineer. A 45-foot tepee-style bonfire, for example, would be stable; it would also require half the volume of wood used in the present wedding-cake design and would reduce a lot of the problems associated with Bonfire: too many trees cut down, too many injuries incurred while cutting down those trees, too much time spent working on Bonfire to the detriment of classwork. But at what point do these changes mean that the cultural benefits of Bonfire, the prolonged bonding of so many new members of the Aggie family, cease to exist? This is A&M's dilemma.
