sleeping cadets

Many of you, I am sure, have heard about/seen the sleeping cadets (here too) from President Obama's Afghan-plan speech, and it makes me mad (I know, big surprise). Was it unprofessional for them to be sleeping? Yes, just about as unprofessional as the news media searching the crowd for those cadets but still nowhere near as unprofessional as the treatment we received during the process of hosting the event.

Lets talk about sleep for a little bit. Cadets are more tired than the average American, and the average college student. You may think I'm biased (and I probably am) but science is on my side. The sleep patterns of cadets has been a topic of sleep research for years and it has been shown time and again that cadets fall way short of normal, let alone healthy sleep. One interesting fact regarding this is the average time it takes people to reach REM sleep, the stage of sleep where dreaming occurs. The average American takes 45 minutes to an hour to reach this point. The average college student? 20-30 minutes. The average West Point cadet? 6-15 minutes. The high end of our average is a third of the low end of the rest of America's! So yes, we tend to sleep, and sometimes we sleep when we're not supposed to.

That being said, I would still argue that given any population the size of the one in Ike Hall for the president's speech, under the same circumstances would have had the same results. The most obvious evidence for this is the fact that Hillary Clinton was also struggling to stay awake when the camera panned to her. Aside from that fact though, there is still the treatment of cadets the day of the speech.

We had a full day, normal with the exception of the speech. Unfortunately, that means that rather than going back to our rooms after being in class from 7:30 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon, we were in Ike Hall immediately following classes. This would not be a big deal if we were like navy (see funny picture below) but we are not. They brought a few thousand cadets into a warm, comfortable theater, wearing our dress gray uniform (easy to sleep in because the collar prevents the head-bob that helps so many people stay awake), told them they can't move, can't sleep and, oh yeah, you can't have much with you so there is very little to do! If you slept, you were woken up in a not-so-nice, very military manner. Then we all sat there for 4 HOURS before the president even showed up. When he got here and started his speech, the lights went off, and we listened to our boss talk in a very subdued, monotone voice for an extended period of time. How many of you could stay awake through a meeting like that? Let alone how long we had been sitting there and that it was at the end of a normal work day for the most tired population in the United States.
This is classic example of the fishbowl principle (cadet life is like living in a fishbowl- lots of people like to tap on the glass and all you can do is smile and put up with them; similar to the magnifying glass principle), people (especially the media) judging those in the public spotlight without bothering to learn the facts about a situation and the media's hatred for USMA. As if this wasn't enough, they took and posted pictures with captions designed to make us all seem like blood-thirsty savages who want nothing more than to killFor the record, Kill Bin Laden is historical account of Delta Force operatives in the beginning of the Afghan war and On Killing is about the psychological and mental cost of having to kill another human being--both are highly applicable to our lives and the president's speech and neither are a sign that we are blood-thirsty.