West Point is located 50 miles north of New York City on Route 9W. It is available for private tours. www.westpointtours.com. Those tours begin at the visitors center located just outside the main gate. Photo ID is required to purchase a ticket and upon boarding the shuttle bus.
Our tour guide on our one hour tour (two hour tours are also available) was a very knowledgeable teacher from a nearby school district. As luck would have it, the guide's son, who will be a third year cadet at the Academy was also on the bus. We learned that third year cadets are called "cows"; first year cadets are plebes, second year cadets are yearlings and fourth year cadets are called "firsties."
The initial fortifications at West Point during the Revolutionary War were developed by a Polish engineer, Thaddeus Kosciuszko. A monument to Kosciuszko is located near Clinton Field. It was his defensive strategy for West Point that the infamous traitor, Benedict Arnold, had offered to provide to the British because Arnold felt he had not been given adequate credit for his role during the battle of Saratoga. Arnold escaped to England and his British contact, Major Andre, was hanged.
Architecturally, one of the most impressive buildings on campus is the non-denominational Protestant chapel. (There are also Catholic and Jewish chapels on campus). The chapel is in the Gothic style and can seat some 1500 people. In addition it is said to have the world's largest pipe organ in a religious setting. According to our tour guide, some 100 weddings are held there each year. Cadets are not permitted to be married while at the Academy so there is a rash of weddings immediately after graduation.
"Duty, Honor, Country". Those were the words spoken by General Douglas MacArthur, a 1903 graduate of the Academy, upon his acceptance of the Sylvanus Thayer Award. Those words basically sum up the philosophy instilled in the cadets at West Point. One other word characterizes those cadets, men and women, who pass through this hallowed campus and it is craved on a bench over looking the Hudson Valley:
As our tour bus was leaving the campus, our tour guide pointed to a building and said that was the building where intelligence experts had reviewed some of the documents taken from Osama Bin Laden's compound when he was killed.
At the completion of our tour, we stopped in at the Thayer Hotel, just inside the main gate. The hotel is named for Sylvanus Thayer, one of early superintendents of the Academy, who was responsible for the engineering emphasis of the curriculum. We had an excellent buffet lunch in MacArthur's, a restaurant in the lower level of the hotel with outdoor space overlooking the campus and the Hudson Valley.
