Military School Gave Me Nightmares and an Identity (Both Still With Me)

I arrived at Hargrave Military Academy in Virginia with a 1.2 grade point average and no understanding of what institution I’d actually been sent to. It was Southern Baptist, which I didn’t know was a specific thing until I was there and it was everywhere, honor code on every piece of paper, prayer before every meal, church twice a week, and classes that were impossibly small. Six students in calculus. Twelve in physics. Teachers who knew your name and what you were struggling with and whether you’d been up until two in the morning studying or whether you’d been giving up. The whole institution was built around the idea that you were a person, not a number in a system, and that was both the most supportive and most dangerous thing about it.

Mr. Burke taught chemistry and physics and moved through the halls like he was genuinely interested in whether you understood half-life and radioactive decay. Coach Klein ran the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the honor council, which meant he was the person you went to when you needed to tell the truth about something you’d done, and Mr. Ramsey was the photographer and yearbook sponsor who spent every afternoon in the darkroom with students who had figured out that they could pour their entire emotional life into a photograph if they just stayed still long enough. Reverend Cohen and Mr. Cather were the chaplains, and they ate in the cafeteria with students. They walked the dorms during study hall. They knew you as a whole person, not as a student, and that meant they could warn you about room inspections that were happening tomorrow and cover for you when the politics got ugly, which it did.

I spent that summer between junior and senior year running the junior school division, which meant I was in charge of younger kids who didn’t know me and didn’t respect me and didn’t care about my authority because I hadn’t earned it yet. That’s when I figured out that listening to kids worked better than lecturing at them. If a kid was acting up, if he was late to formation, if he wasn’t following rules, the fastest way to change it wasn’t to yell louder. It was to sit down and ask him what was actually wrong. Usually something was actually wrong. His girlfriend had broken up with him. His father had said something brutal during a phone call home. He wasn’t sleeping. He was homesick. Once you knew the actual problem, the rules problem solved itself because the kid wasn’t fighting you anymore. He was fighting the thing that was actually broken. That discovery shaped everything I became as a teacher.

Senior year, they named me Battalion Commander. I’d only been there two years. Other kids had been there four, five, six years, and most of them expected that one of them would get it. There was immediate backlash, immediate questions about whether I actually deserved it, and underneath that were power struggles between the senior military instructor and the commandant, both of whom had children at the school and both of whom had their own agendas. The commandant was hell-bent on trying to find a reason to take away my rank, to prove that I wasn’t worthy of it, and I walked around for months knowing that every mistake I made, every moment I failed, was being catalogued as evidence.

The staff around me, though. They rallied. Mr. Burke and Coach Klein and Mr. Ramsey and Reverend Cohen and the others, they paid attention to what was actually happening instead of what the political narrative was saying was happening. They covered for me when they could. They warned me about things. They reminded me that I’d earned the rank because I actually cared about the kids in my company, because I actually listened, because I actually tried to do the right thing instead of the thing that looked good. So I graduated. And the rank was still mine when I left.

I’m forty-seven years past that now, and I still have nightmares about it. I dream about the commandant, about standing in an office trying to defend myself against charges that weren’t fair, about watching adults play politics while kids just wanted to know if they could trust their leaders. I dream about it regularly enough that it’s shaped how I lead in my real life, how I run my classes, how I make decisions when students are involved. I chose to be the kind of leader who eats in the cafeteria, who knows your name, who shows up. I chose that because I watched what it looked like when leaders actually cared, and I watched what it cost when they didn’t.

The thing about institutions is that they’re either built around the whole person or they’re built around compliance, and there’s almost no middle ground. Hargrave was built around the whole person. That meant the standards were higher. That meant you actually had to be honest, actually had to try, actually had to show up as yourself instead of just performing the role. It also meant that when the institution failed you, which it did when the commandant decided to use you for his political struggles, the failure cut deeper because you’d been taught to believe that integrity mattered.

Mr. Burke and Coach Klein and Mr. Ramsey, they all modeled what it looks like to be an adult who actually cares about young people as full humans. They ate with us. They knew our names. They intervened when things got ugly. They didn’t try to hide the fact that the institution was imperfect; they just made sure it didn’t crush the kids underneath. That’s the difference between authority and impact. Authority is what happens when you’re in charge of something. Impact is what happens when you actually care about the people in it. I learned that at seventeen, and I’m still learning the details of it now, and I’m still having nightmares about the moment I learned that institutions can fail you, even the good ones, especially the good ones. But I’m also still showing up the way those men taught me to show up, because that’s what I learned when it mattered.