Broken Perfection

Johnathan Grigg

Ms. Smith

ERH 102-01

10-13-16

Broken Perfection

“Rats, meet your cadre!”, one of the first things heard on the first day of hell week. From this moment on I knew that the next 6-7 months of my life was going to be very different than what I had expected. For this I had my lovely cadre to thank. Little did I know that on my first day at VMI I would be stepping into the eyes of a community much bigger than anything I had ever been involved with and that my cadre would hold me to a higher standard than I had even held myself at times, causing me to push myself farther physically and mentally than I had ever gone before. Words like hateful, demeaning, arrogant are all words that could be used to describe Cadre but you learn that without them in your lives your chances of success at VMI would significantly decrease.

Cadre are meant to break you down to your core and strip out every piece of individuality within you and then from the bottom start to build you back up. In order to have the privilege breaking down rats you must first be selected to be cadre. With that being said it is not something that just anyone can do. To get selected to be cadre you generally need to have a good disciplinary record, good grades and a good physical fitness score. Additional to those requirements you must work well with others and have respect among the cadre community. Having respect from the current cadre community is perhaps the most important aspect for one to focus on when attempting to be initiated into the cadre community because it is your current cadre that will solely choose who becomes

corporals next year. you must also be picked as one of the best corporals out of hell week in order to advance. You begin hell week with 10 corporals and only 4 move on to become squad leaders. However with that being said the majority of the Cadre that isn’t called to be a squad leader after hell week still serves during the year as a corporal in the cadre. but instead of being a primary squad leader they are a reserve corporal and are used when one of the other four corporals can’t make it. After serving a year as a corporal if you wish to become a sergeant and receive an officer position you must go and have several meetings before the commandants staff and then you must submit a list of what roles you wish to have and the staff will deliberate over which position would work best for you and then you will be assigned your role as a officer. Therefore in the cadre community there are many different aspects of leadership roles in fact there are eight different leadership positions in cadre. All of which possess different roles and responsibilities. For example the most important role would be the CO or the commanding officer. The CO is in charge of the entire company and there is only one per company. One step down from the CO there is the XO and the FPL (first platoon lieutenant). You can not become a CO, XO or FPL if you are not a first class-men. The unique thing about Cadre is that every title you receive is earned and not given. By that I mean that in order to reach a position like CO you must prove yourself to be a leader during your time with cadre as a third and second. Becoming a member of cadre is no easy job and each member is held to an extremely high standard because they are mainly the ones that will be responsible for shaping the future of VMI.With that responsibility cadre are all granted a certain amount of respect from Rats.

Cadre receives respect from Rats primarily because they demand it however they also receive respect because they take literally hours out of their week and weeks out of

their summers in order to train us with the hopes of us one day being able to become cadets. Rats show cadre respect primarily in which they communicate with one another. From day one at VMI rats will here the phrase “don’t cut your eyes”. This merely means don’t look at anything other that what is directly in front of you. If you are able to achieve this task of not cutting your eyes it shows your cadre that you are listening to what they tell you to do no matter how big or small and it shows that you respect them. Believe it or not body language plays a huge part in communication and it lets someone know if the words coming out of there mouth are truly what they mean so doing simple things like standing at attention or displaying simple military discipline are all ways you can communicate with your cadre that you respect them and the system in which they are trying to push you through.

Cadre also show their own specialized way of communication (swales, 221) with the members of the community themselves. For example instead of referring to each other by first names they communicate to each other by there rank followed by there last name. Another example of how cadre communicate within the ranks they will say things like “corporals post” which communicates to the corporals that they need to get at the front of each squad.In addition to that they communicate with one another for some issues by going down a chain for command so by that I mean that a CO, XO or FPL will give an order to their sergeants and then the Sergeants will deliver that order to the corporals and then the corporals will help execute that order with the Rats.

Rats executing orders passed down through the chain of command by cadre is essentially the core of the ratline. The majority of the time the tools (Kain and Wardle, 277) that cadre uses in training rats is what seems to be a simple set of orders just passed down

to Rats and expected to be performed to perfection. An example of this would take place every Wednesday during cadre training time. Cadre training time is an exercise conducted every week with the hopes of an During these training sessions cadre will teach rats how to do things like break down and clean their rifles as well as set up various uniforms. After being instructed on how to do whatever the task at hand is the rats will be tested on what they had just learned and Rats will continue to be tested upon proper completion of the assignment. Cadre will often use the tool of what seems to be controlled chaos while asking a Rat to perform a test, by this I mean that Cadre will do things like yell or give you less time than needed to complete the assigned task. This is done because Cadre want Rats to understand the entirety of what they are doing and by making Rats perform in a chaotic environment it makes the people who don’t understand what they are doing stick out even more and this allows cadre to pull them to the side and give them more instruction on how to complete the task at hand.

As each task is completed Rats move closer and closer to completing cadres main objective which is to turn rats into model cadets. At VMI cadre will consistently speak to Rats saying that everything is done for a purpose. With that being said, during hell week my CO, Mr.Stuart told me, “The Rat line is not a sprint but a Marathon”. This resonated with me because it made me realize that although Cadres final goal is for the Rats to become model cadets, I realized that there are many other goals we must meet in our rat line as there are many checkpoints in a long marathon before we can reach the final destination. When Cadre feels that the Rats have properly met all of the goals placed before them and that they are ready to come together as a class and be recognized as cadets at the institute they have one final challenge that we must accomplish. The final challenge is called “Breakout”.

This challenge consists of is a day long event and it is essentially meant to be the most difficult workout of your life. Breakout will challenge you physically and mentally and if you can accomplish it you will have successfully broken out of the rat line and completed the ultimate objective of your cadre which is being recognized as a model cadet that has been prepared for four successful years at the Virginia Military Institute.

Breaking you down to your core and rebuilding you from your brokenness. That is essentially What Cadre does. It is a community that contains a tremendous amount of responsibility at VMI. When interviewing a Cadre member I asked him why did you choose to join the cadre after your rat year. He responded by telling me that he saw becoming apart of the Cadre community as a way to improve his future because he knew that having the background of leading cadets would make his résumé much more attractive to future. Everything at this institute is earned not given and He wanted to ensure that the Rat Mass of 2017+3 would have the long and painstaking marathon required in order to earn the title of a VMI cadet.