The Cadet Mess Hall at West Point is a beautiful stone building, bedecked with the flags of each state, priceless portraits of each academy Superintendent (including the likes of Robert E. Lee and William Westmoreland) and a hand painted mural on the wall of one of the wings. The Cadet Mess was one of my two favorite buildings at West Point, the other being the gym. The food was great, served family style to approximately 4000 cadets at once at about 400 individual tables, ten cadets to a table. For each meal – breakfast, lunch and dinner – the entire Corps of Cadets would march in, take seats, be served by waiters, eat their meal and be dismissed, all in about 30 minutes. It is no longer this way, since many meals are now “optional” for cadets, a result of a study in the mid 1970’s led by astronaut COL (ret) Frank Borman, USMA Class of 1950, which concluded that cadets did not have enough time to devote to studies, and thus some of the requirements on cadet time were relaxed. But in 1972, when I was a plebe, all meals during the week (Sunday evening through Saturday morning) were mandatory. Since the entire Corps was gathered together in one place, whether we liked it or not, the messhall sometimes became the location of “spontaneous” pep rallies for the football team as well as other shenanigans. As was what became known as the Great Food Fight of 1972. My classmate Archie Elam described it this way: “I was a plebe just making it to corps squad tables from first semester on the E-1 company commander’s table (random draw by the 1st sergeant). I bore personal witness to the Great Mural food fight. Started with the football and basketball tables trading jibes. I looked up to see green peas flying overhead and Jell-O coming back in counter-battery fire. The rest was history. Our table commandant with an ice bucket on his head turned the table into a rowing galley aimed to ram other nearby tales! After, the Corps had to stand at attention in South Auditorium for a mass correction session with the Superintendent and the Commandant. All of us had our cadet pay docked!” The “riot” did serve a purpose. Or at least we like to think it did. The Saturday after the food fight, Army went on to beat then #24 in the nation—Air Force— and later went on to win the first Commander – in – Chief’s (CIC) trophy after beating Navy on December 2, 1972 at RFK Stadium in Philadelphia, PA. The flying food did cause significant damage to the hand painted mural and to some of the Superintendent’s portraits, their restoration having been involuntarily paid for by the Corps. In the mid-1980’s, when I was back at West Point as a member of the faculty, I noticed glass coverings on every portrait, a measure that was taken to protect them from any future mischief. But the damage to the mural remained until 2002 when the Class of 1976, plebes during the Food Fight, donated over $500,000 to help fund it’s restoration. That mural remains there to this day, and is one of the academy’s major tourist attractions.
