The Ring that Found its Way Home: A Conversation with Brig. Gen. (Ret.) John W. Mountcastle '65

The full video of this interview is available linked to this article. In collecting some of the inspiring alumni stories of what the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) Ring means, The Cadet co-Editors-in-Chief Richie O'Connell '22 and Cody Bartmann '25 were honored to interview Brig. Gen. (Ret.) John W. Mountcastle '65, who shared stories of his life, including the time he was reunited with his Class Ring well after believing he had lost it forever to the hungry mud in Vietnam. Brig. Gen. Mountcastle was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army after graduating from VMI, served two tours in Vietnam as an armor branch officer in the Central Highlands, then on a Military Assistance Command, Vietnam team in the Thua Thien and Quang Tri provinces. He subsequently served as Chief of Military History and Commander of the U.S. Army Center of Military History from 1994 until his retirement in 1998. One of his two sons, John Claiborne (Clay) Mountcastle, also graduated from VMI in 1994. At VMI, Brig. Gen. Mountcastle was a proud member of The Cadet staff as a news writer and cartoonist, as his Bomb Bio documents, "His penetrating cartoons have often graced the pages of 'The Cadet.' The whole first stoop has on occasion been amazed by his latest word in sartorial lore." Brig. Gen. Mountcastle also holds the distinction of defeating the "Ring Figure curse" that a cadet will either marry his or her Ring Figure date or separate from them forever. In Mountcastle's case, he married Susan, the love of his life, and Ring Figure date shortly after graduation, and their love story continues to this day. The 1965 Bomb documents the Class of 1965's Ring Figure as "…a weekend that will never be forgotten", between a party and dinner dance at the Kazim Temple in Roanoke and the Ring Figure Ball at the John Marshall Hotel in Richmond, including entertainment by the legendary Count Basie. Interview with Brig. Gen. (Ret.) John Mountcastle '65 Brig. Gen. Mountcastle: I appreciate the fact that you guys are taking your time to talk a little bit about one of the old Corps guys. I grew up in Richmond and I got interested in history, even as a kid, because my dad worked for a railroad that was then called the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. It was started very soon after the Civil War concluded, and everybody in my family had been a railroad man, including my great-grandfather, who walked back from being surrendered at Appomattox on April the 9th, turning in his model 1861 Springfield musket on the 12th. He and about four guys from his squad, that was all that was left. They were all from the Richmond area, some from the county, but all from the Richmond areas. And of course, now they didn't have any weapons, so they marched back together. Along the way, my great-grandfather, who was a private for the whole war, found a dead officer lying by the side of the road, a federal officer, it turned out. Anyway, he had a pistol, so he picked up his own little firearm at that point. They were going to be safe because it was rough, it was a very rough situation after we surrendered because these guys had to have paper paroles, but there were a lot of bad people riding around, deserters from both armies. They all had plenty of weapons. So I fell into this sort of history story listening to my grandfather talking about his dad, the old Confederate soldier. My father was in the Virginia National Guard, but then he really worked for the railroad. So that's how I got interested in history. I grew up through the public schools in Richmond, which of course, back then in the 1950s and up until I graduated from high school in 1961, all the public schools in Richmond were segregated. There were two high schools in Richmond, John Marshall High School and Thomas Jefferson High School [where] all the students were white. And then you had Armstrong High School and Maggie Walker High School [where] all the students there were black. When I went up to VMI in the late summer of 1960, 61, it was all male, all white. So things have changed in my view, much for the better now because VMI looks less like a monastery and more like the world in my view. [I] graduated from high school in 61. It was a wonderful high school education, I didn't realize how lucky we were to have that quality education.There were a lot of guys that went up from my high school to VMI. Until I met my roommates, one of whom was from Fairfax, Virginia, one was from California. The guy from California was a great tennis player. But he couldn't even spell the word tennis. He was a great guy. But I didn't realize until I got up there how fortunate I was. And because I found out right away that if I decided to major in history, I would only have to take a limited number of courses in math and a limited number of courses in science. They both scared me quite a bit. So I said, yes, I'll be a history major. And I never changed, unlike a lot of my classmates who began as electrical engineers and civil engineers and ended up in English or in history before they graduated. You had a question here about what brought me to VMI? Well, let me tell you, VMI was not really my absolute first choice, but my dad passed away when I was just about to turn 15.And so I was going into my sophomore, junior and senior year in high school. My mother, who had not worked in years, now had to go back to work because I had a younger sister. And so she was having to take care of us. And she did a marvelous job, wonderful job, but I was not always the perfect son. In fact, one of the last things I did before graduating from high school was completely totaled her car, driving too fast. And luckily, one of my Brother Rats, longtime friend from Richmond, was in the car with me, but he was okay, and I survived. And fortunately, my mother, when she went back to work, had been able to call on a number of her old friends from years past who provided an excellent trial lawyer at my trial in the traffic court. I can still remember the judge looking over his glasses at me and saying, "Young man, I could give you a fairly harsh sentence, but I'm aware, yes, you're going up to VMI. There's nothing that I can do that will be as harsh as your Rat year at VMI. So, you go ahead, and be careful driving." Oh, and he said, "by the way, I don't think you can drive at the VMI, can you?" "No sir, I can't." "And you can't have a horse either, can you?" "No." "No mustache either." "No, Judge." "How about a wife?" "No, you can't have that either, Judge. I won't have any of those." He said, "Good, you're on your way." So I went up there, as I've mentioned, decided to go for history. What did I do as a cadet? Well, I wasn't a very great athlete, but I really enjoyed intramurals. I was a private three out of the four years I was there. They made me a Lance Corporal in my third class year until they decided, well, actually his heart is not in this Lance Corporal business, so they put me back to cadet private. So I was really, for all intents and purposes, a four-year private. And to back up just a step, where did I want to go to college? Well, here in Richmond, the University of Richmond at that time was really just a fairly small Baptist-run college. Today, you go out there and drive around campus, go past the student parking lots. All the cars have New Jersey plates, Connecticut plates, New York plates. But in those days, very few students had cars anyway, and it was a little Baptist college. They accepted me. Really, what I was excited about was my application to the University of Virginia. And oh, the day the letter came, it was not one of those little thin envelopes that says, you know, just one page that says, "Oh, thank you for your interest in the University of Virginia. We'll contact you if we have any open spaces." No, no. It was a fat envelope that meant there's more forms to fill out. I'm getting into Charlottesville. And I was so excited. My mother came home from a hard day's work. And I said, "Look, look, from Charlottesville." She said, "That's nice, son. Let me know when you get your letter back from Lexington." "Okay." Well, in about 10 days, the letter came from Lexington. It was a fat letter. They had accepted me. My mother when she came in from work, I said, "Yeah, I got a letter from Lexington." And then she put on the sweetest smile and she said, "Jack, please know that I want you to go to whatever school you've been accepted at that you really want to go to, but son, I will only pay for you to go to VMI." And so that's how in late August, coming up on September, she put me in the car, along with my good friend who was going to University of Virginia. He went along just to keep her company on the way home. And he told me about that later, you know, what a long drive home it was. She was worried about me because I hadn't been behaving without the good guidance that I was going to get from a Lance Corporal. She was sure of that. As it turned out, my corporal on my very first day would later be the First Captain of the Corps. And after that, Superintendent of VMI, a guy named Josiah Bunting. I was impressed by him because he had a big Marine Corps tattoo on his arm there, but it didn't say like Semper Fi or something like the typical Marine tattoo. He was a very smart guy from up in New England. [It said] Arete, Greek for excellence. Anyway, he was an excellent guy getting me settled on my very first day. I guess one of the things that you probably would find of some interest, I'm not sure, but I kind of liked artwork. And so I ended up when we put together our yearbook, the Class of 65 yearbook, they asked me if I'd do a little bit of art support for different things. So all the cartoons in that bomb from the Class of 65, I did them. They're not very good, but I worked for free so they took them. I also found that as a history major, writing was not terrible for me. I kind of enjoyed it. And by the time I got to be a first-class cadet and still private, a couple of my friends on The Cadet newspaper said, "Hey, how about writing a column that we'll put in whenever you've got one done?" So I did. My little column was called Clean Sleeves because I didn't have any stripes. And it was an opportunity for me as a first-class private to talk about my life at VMI. Interestingly enough, it turned out my son, Clay, who graduated from VMI in 1994, also used to do some work on The Cadet paper, cartoons mostly, and he enjoyed that too. I went into the Army as an Army Reserve officer on active duty for two years. The plan was then the Army's got you for two years, then you come back to the Army Reserve of the National Guard for four more years until your six-year commitment to Army service is totally done. And as it turned out, after going out to the armor officer basic course, which was then at Fort Knox, Kentucky, I was on orders to go to Fort Hood. We'd gotten married, and you couldn't have a wife at VMI, but you could have one very soon after VMI. So we got married in August after I graduated in June and she said, oh I've never been to Texas, we'll go to Texas. And then just before we finished our officer basic course, armor officer basic course, our captain, who was like a student leader, walked in and said, "Hey I need one volunteer who will go to Fort Rucker, Alabama, the Army Aviation Center, because they just had a Army Cavalry Officer who was the recon platoon leader in this in this infantry unit fell out of the helicopter and hurt himself. So who wants to volunteer to go to Fort Rucker, Alabama?" And I thought, well, "Heck, I got this job waiting for me at Philip Morris back in Richmond. Alabama's closer than Texas. I'll go." So off I went to Fort Rocker, Alabama. But I found out when I got down there that what I'd be doing was re-completed in an infantry battalion. And we were like the training dummies, you know, for all these pilot trainees. I'd load up my men on Hueys and we'd go off to someplace like Camp Shelby, Mississippi. If you've never been to Camp Shelby, let me suggest you don't go to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. That made a lot of parts that I went to in Vietnam seem like, you know, vacation spots. But I went down there, and I was doing okay. But one of the things that happened was a lot of my classmates started coming through Fort Rucker. They had learned at VMI by taking a little flight program that the Army DC had to fly light aircraft, little Piper Cubs and stuff. So they got their license, athat helped them a lot when they volunteered to fly Army helicopters. They began the Army helicopter training program, which was extensive, about eight months. And then they all went to Vietnam. I had friends, classmates up at Fort Benning, Georgia, who were going through the infantry basic or jump school. And we had a really good Officers' Club down there at Fort Rucker, Alabama. So these guys would, on weekends, hop in their cars and they'd drive down from Columbus, Georgia, down to Alabama, where we were, at Daleville, a small town. They would go and gorge themselves at the Sunday buffet and then waddle back out to their cars and drive back up to Fort Benning to start another very busy week at the infantry school. So I got to see a lot of classmates and that's how I basically ended up in Vietnam because so many of my classmates were coming through getting their wings and moving off to Vietnam and I had this company commander that I really didn't like very much. And he thought I'd gotten promoted ahead of some of the others there and he thought because I was now his executive officer I was a very handy guy to go over to the PX and get him a large pepperoni pizza for lunch. Well, he didn't need a large pepperoni pizza. He should have been eating a little green salad — he was FAT. I came home and told my wife I don't think I want to do this for a year before I can go back to the Army Reserve or the Virginia Guard and work for Philip Morris. So she said, "I know you want to do something different. You know what's going to happen." And so I said, "Okay, I'm going to go." So I called the Army. And three days later, I had 50 copies of my orders to Vietnam. And off we went. I spent a year there from December '66 to December '67, I got some injuries because I was a tanker and things happened to our tanks. But I didn't get seriously wounded or anything. I made it through 32 years as it turned out in the Army with no Purple Hearts, just some lingering problems that had to be taken care of post-service and they were. I got over there, in fact, I got there just two days before Bob Hope showed up with his Christmas show. I don't remember too much about Bob Hope, he's an old funny guy, you know. I think he hit his high point back during World War II, but I don't think I'll ever forget Joey Heatherton, who was this beautiful girl that was leading the female accompaniment for Bob Hope's show. We had like 4,000 guys sitting on the hillside up in the Pleiku in the central highlands, the highlands in Vietnam, watching Joey Heatherton dance. It was great. I went out there [Vietnam] to the 1st Battalion of the 69th Armored Regiment. That was the Tank Battalion in the 25th Infantry Division, the Tropic Lightning Division that had come over about eight months earlier from Hawaii, Schofield Barracks, where the 25th Tropic Lightning Division had been for years, ever since the Korean War. I was assigned to Company B, 1st and 69th Armored. I met my wonderful company commander, Army football player, great guy.He says, "Okay, Mount Castle, I got the third platoon waiting for you." And I said, "What happened to the lieutenant? Did he go home?" "Well, actually, he's in Japan right now in the hospital." They put me in the commander's jeep and drove me out to where the third platoon was, guarding a bridge that was critically important, and I met my gunner on the tank, great guy. He was scraping the last remnants of my predecessor out of the inside of the tank commander's hatch. Unfortunate fellow had been hit by a glancing blow by a rocket-propelled grenade fired by North Vietnamese troops who were starting to come into South Vietnam. I spent about the next, oh, I don't know, maybe three months learning my craft as a platoon leader. All of my NCOs were great. They had been in different units all over Germany. Two of them had German wives. They taught me a lot. I learned a lot from them. One thing I learned was the Chinese were supplying the North Vietnamese communists with lots and lots of, as it turned out, World War II-era American-made anti-tank mines. And along with the local Viet Cong, South Vietnamese communists, they really knew their landscape. And they knew where a 60-ton M48A3 tank could go across a stream, okay, where it's fairly shallow, mostly rock bottom, not mud. And that's when they would put their mines in. And so I hit, as it turned out, eight mines in that first year I was there in Vietnam. And we were able to put the tanks back together, but it was really hard. The typical damage done when one of our tanks hit one of those mines [was it], would blow off a couple of road wheels, blow the track apart, bend some of the road wheel arms. Took a lot of hard, hard work to put the tank back together. But we did a lot of that. And I think that probably one of the things that were I to do it all over again, I would not have done one morning in late February, early March of 1967, I would not have been working on putting GAA [Grease Automotive and Artillery], grease on a new road wheel arm hub at two o'clock in the morning because I had to get my tank fixed because we were leaving the next day on a new mission. I never noticed that that ring, which I'm showing you now, slipped off my greasy finger. The sun came up [and] we got the track put back on. We led out off the Fire Base and headed down toward An Khe. And as I was looking down at my left hand on the turret, I said, "Oh my gosh, just one ring." I got this wedding band, but no Class of 65 Ring. "Man, my wife is really going to be mad at me when she finds out I lost my ring because I had greasy fingers and was not using my head. I bet it's going to be expensive for Jostens to make me a new ring", but I had a lot of other stuff on my mind, so I didn't think about it too much. We didn't go back to that base for another three or four months. We were operating in a different area over near Cambodia, and by that time I'd sort of, well, I kind of forgot about having my ring. Occasionally, I'd see VMI guys. There were a lot of them over there in Vietnam then. And I don't know why, they would always tend to look at my naked fingers, you know, and say, "Not wearing your ring, are you?" I said, "No, it's somewhere along Highway 19 on the way to An Khe." "Oh, well," [they'd say], "that was stupid to lose your ring." They would always get that point in. Anyway, we moved back to the old operational area. It had overgrown by that time. They needed us back there to secure it so that helicopters could start coming in and bringing in all the stuff that we needed. By that time, I was no longer a platoon leader. I had been promoted up to be the company executive officer and I was there working on some ammunition requisitions after we'd been on this ground back, now after four months, but I was busy. When this young kid walked up, he's a PFC, I didn't really know him, He was new to the company. And he walked up to me and said, "LT. My tank commander sent me to you." I said, "Yeah, what's your name?" And he told me his name and said, "I think I found something. I think you want it. I was digging dirt for foxholes and this shiny ring came out of the dirt. My tank commander said, '****, that's Mountcastle's ring. That's the XO's ring.'" At that point, that sergeant won my undying gratitude because there were any number of people in the little town of Pleiku, Vietnam, who would have been more than happy to buy that gold ring from that sergeant, and he could have split the winnings with the PFC. But no, they brought it back. And I thought about that for some time. They didn't sell my ring. They brought it back to me because, as the sergeant said, "it's really important to the lieutenant." And it was. I didn't really realize how much it meant to me until they put it back in my hand. I tucked it away in my duffel bag, and I didn't wear it anymore until I was getting on the plane, the Freedom Bird, to head back to Virginia. I didn't plan on making a career of the Army. I went back to work for Philip Morris, I went in the Army Reserve, but I got a call after I'd been back for a little while in the States, and it was from this wonderful Colonel. He had been my battalion commander, Paul S. Williams. I was proud of the fact that he was a VMI grad. He called me, he's VMI class of '51 and he was a wonderful commander. He got to know the names of the truck drivers. He would go down to where guys were loading ammo, sweating like pigs and just tired out [and say], "Let me give you a hand with that there, Sergeant." And when he found out I was a VMI guy, he was really good to me. In fact, just before he left Vietnam, got his medals and was heading back to the States and going to get promoted, he said, "Mountcastle, I find out that when you went to R&R, you went to Hong Kong and had a bunch of suits made so that you could look pretty when you got back home to Richmond." I said, "Yes, sir. I'm going to look good at that Philip Morris." He said, "Are you sure about this? You know, you're not a bad tanker. You're pretty good. I said, "Well, actually, I've got this job offer. I think I probably ought to go." He said, "All right, son." Well, three months after I've been back, going to work every day down at Philip Morris, looking at these old men in their 40s coming to work there on Monday, looking like they'd rather take a beating than come to work there. I'm home that night, the phone rings and I pick it up. "Mountcastle? This is Colonel Williams, calling from Washington." Well, he got promoted. Now he was the head of the armor assignment branch in armor personnel in the Army Personnel Center up and out in Alexandria and he said "Are you bored yet?" Well, I didn't want to say yes, so I said "Well, sir, I do miss my soldiers." He said "Yeah, okay well, we've got a company waiting for you, a tank company out of Fort Riley in Kansas. I want you to think about this. We want you back. You come back in, we're going to make you a captain, we'll bring you in the regular army and you'll be on your way." He said, "There's one thing I want to make sure you understand though. There'll probably be another tour waiting for you in Vietnam within about nine to 10 months." So I thanked him for his call. I put the phone down. My wife said, "Who's that?" I said, "Col. Williams." "Is he the man that was your commander?" "Yes." "Why were you talking to him?" I said, "Well, he's asking if I want to come back in the Army." And that girl at that point, who had not married this young VMI grad with any idea of making Army a career, she didn't plan on being an Army wife either. So I'd already done two years, I ended up doing 32 years in the US Army. We had two children together, one born in Fort Riley, Kansas, one born in Nuremberg, 130th General Hospital and U.S. Army Hospital in Nuremberg, Germany. That girl moved 29 times in 32 years, because I had three tours of duty in Germany. Army, along with our allies, beat the Germans in '45, Army moved into the western part of Germany, nobody, not Eisenhower, not Patton, nobody thought that we were going to be there in any numbers 10 years, 20 years, 30, 40 years later. And yet there we were because the Soviet Union had increased its strength and had completely come to control all of Eastern Europe. And here in our Defense Department, we were very concerned about the fact that, you know, some February morning at about two o'clock in a snowstorm, the Eighth Guards Tank Army would come crashing through the border and capture Frankfurt or Nuremberg or something like that. So there we were. But the buildings we moved into were not these great big structures like you find at Fort Bragg or Fort Wood or Fort Benning. It was just these old little German regimental Kasernes, they call them. You know, we might have put in, once we moved tanks and personnel carriers in there, we put in concrete in the parking area. Maybe then originally we'd build a little post exchange or commissary or grocery store. But what it meant was, if you got a new assignment in Germany, one to the next, or got promoted, you got a new job. It wasn't like just driving over to the other side of Fort Hood, Texas. No, it was picking up everything that you had with you, your wife if you had one, your kids if you had them, the dog, bicycles, and so forth, what little furniture the army would let you send to Germany, and driving 50 kilometers down the Autobahn to your new job. And of course, they'd say, "I'm sorry to say we don't have any government family quarters available for you, so if you can find a place to live 'on the economy,'" as they said, "we'll let you know as soon as there's something available." And that's what happened to me. My first of three tours of duty in Germany, I spent two years as a tank company commander, and then I got picked to be the general's aide-de-camp, the commanding general's aide. That meant moving down to Ansbach, a different place, and it went like that all the time. So, question about what other VMI people that you bump into along the way, quite a few as it turned out. Brigadier General Tom Tait was assistant division commander in the third infantry division mechanized when I was back in Germany then as a battalion commander. And I was one of the third battalion in Germany to get the new, at that point brand new, M1 Abrams tank. So Tom Tait was a great guy to have, he was a VMI graduate, class of 1955, and he later would get promoted to two-star and be the commander of the armor center at Fort Knox. But he was a great example for all of us that knew him in the third division, the barn division. And then another VMI graduate that was very impressive was Colonel Robert Wagner, commander of the Second Cavalry Regiment, Second Army Cav down in Nuremberg. He would later serve as commander of the Cadet Command, the Army Cadet Command. The one guy that made the biggest difference of all, was that Lieutenant Colonel Paul Williams that took the time to learn the name of the filthy dirty tank crewman who was working so hard to get his tank up and running, would give him a pat on the back and say, "You need a bandaid for that?" He was a wonderful guy and he retired with three stars as a commander of the United States Fifth Corps in Germany. Wonderful man, great VMI grad. So I guess if I were to think about what the ring means to me, it's a symbol to me, it's a symbol of my pride and having gone up the hill in Lexington, spent the four years, graduated, and with enough of a reputation for getting the job done that so when the Army decided they wanted to get a few more faculty members up to West Point who weren't necessarily graduates of West Point, they sent me an invitation to come up and teach history, military history at West Point. "Oh, and by the way, we will send you to Duke to get your master's degree." And when I found out that if I worked extra hard and passed a couple of foreign languages, how about that, I could get my PhD, and I did. And so for me, it was something that I could always be proud of and still am. I am very, very proud of this ring on my finger, proud of the fact that, you know, my friends in this area, my classmates, people I've just met today, not before, like Colonel Morris, we have this in common. And I have it in common with both of you guys, sitting up there with Rats running along the fourth stoop as fast as they possibly can. Any other questions for me? The Cadet: Yes, sir, there are a couple of things that we wanted to touch on regarding your ring figure and you receiving the ring. You already covered most of what we had in terms of your background, which was perfect. When it came to your ring figure and your ring presentation, was it the same back then as it is still, where you received it in your second class year? Brig. Gen. Mountcastle: Yes. The Cadet: So you received it in 1963 then, correct? Brig. Gen. Mountcastle: That's correct, in November 63. And in fact, as I mentioned to Colonel Morris, I have the photo of the girl that would marry me, Susan Miller in those days, now Susan Mountcastle, mother of our two sons. She was my ring figure date. The Cadet: Are there any particular details that you have about your class's ring design that hold special meaning both to you and your Class? Brig. Gen. Mountcastle: Yeah, I guess I would, because we had decided that we wanted to, in '65, we wanted to replicate what was sort of our class symbol. It was a picture, of course, of the Stonewall Jackson monument. And we quoted him as a reminder to people, because we were within sight of, you know, the culmination of our experience up there and we were leaving. And so our ring says, "You may be whatever you resolve to be."And of course, 1965. And that has been something that I've thought about because, I'm gonna be honest now, once I made that decision after just being out of the army for just a few months, to go back and follow my heart, that wasn't uniformly applauded by a lot of people. I had classmates who said, "Why in the world would you do that? You know they're going to send you back to Vietnam." And they did. I was an advisor with the Vietnamese for a second time. And my wife, bless her heart, you know, she said, "We're going to do what's going to make you happy." She was a wonderful Army wife the whole time. But there were times when I would look at that ring and I'd think, "This is going to be a hard one", you know, getting ready to take my whole brigade, three tank battalions and a mech infantry battalion with Bradleys, M1A1 Abrams tanks up on the border to make a special demonstration to discourage the Soviets from taking the Nuremberg group of approaches because Intel had said we've been getting a lot of message traffic coming out of these guys and they're moving people down into Czechoslovakia, as it was called then, to get closer to Nuremberg and Bavaria. And I think about that sometimes. "You may be whatever you resolve to be." I resolve to be, in my heart of hearts, the best leader I can be for these soldiers. And as it turns out, you know, once we stopped the draft in '73, the Army changed from being a mostly bachelor force to much more of a married army. And so we had these young girls and little kids and their husbands that joined the Army. They weren't going to tell their wives, "All right now, they're going to send me off to Germany for about three years, you just stay here in Cincinnati, I'll be back for you in three years." No. The wife said, "No, I'm going with you." And the husband would say, "Yeah, but you don't speak German." "I'll learn German," she would say, and then they came. And so it wasn't just taking care of the soldiers. It was feeling responsibility for their families. My wife had a tremendous amount of help in that regard because she and the other officers' wives would go to great lengths having little bazaars, making stuff that the soldiers could buy cheaply like really, really good bowls of chili on a cold day down in the motor pool. And they would take all that money and they would then ensure that the children for these enlisted soldiers got some Christmas presents. They wouldn't get much because a PFC doesn't make much money, spec four doesn't make much money, but they'd get something on Christmas day, they'd get something thanks to the work that the captain's wives, the first sergeant's wives, Susan and her company commander wives working with her could provide for those little two-year-old, four-year-old kids who could come down in the morning on Christmas and there would be something wrapped for them. So, the [VMI] ring goes a long way, doesn't it? Do you have a story to share? Please send it to The Cadet at info@cadetnewspaper.com Please help The Cadet remain independent and cadet-run - The Cadet is 100% self-supporting through advertising and tax-deductible donations, true to its origins in 1871. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us remain so at: https://thecadetfoundation.org/participate-and-support/