F Troop and Other Citadel Stories

Mess

176 Mess The French word mes is roughly translated food, or a portion of food. That word, in turn, comes from the Latin word mittere, which means, among other things, to send for. The word“mess”means to send for food. Sometime around the fifteenth century the English military began using the term mess to describe soldiers eating together. In the military, as well as in the civilian world, mealtime is an important part of the day. The Citadel world of the 1960s revolved around mess. The Citadel mess hall churned out three square meals a day, seven days a week. On Mondays through Thursdays there were three mess formations per day, one at sixfifteen a.m. for breakfast, one at noon for lunch, and one at six p.m. for dinner, which all cadets were required to meet. On Fridays, due to general leave, the six p.m. mess formation for dinner was optional; on Saturdays both the noon and evening mess formations were optional, general leave still being in effect; and on Sundays the noon mess formation was optional , since attendance at religious services was required in the morning and general leave ended at six p.m. The cadets met these formations in the barracks and marched off to the mess hall, a sprawling building located behind the barracks, large enough to accommodate the entire corps of cadets, some two thousand strong, at one seating. Each company was assigned its own area of the mess hall. The meals were served on long tables covered with white tablecloths, fourteen cadets to a table, one mess at each end of the table, each mess consisting of seven cadets. There were two, sometimes three, knobs at each mess, and either four or five upperclassmen. As each company reached and entered the mess hall on the march, the individual cadets dispersed to their assigned 177 Mess company areas and to their assigned tables. Except for the knobs, everyone stood quietly behind their metal chairs awaiting the saying of grace over the meal. The knobs were busy: hurriedly preparing to serve the upperclassmen , filling their glasses with juice, their cups with coffee, if it was morning; their glasses with ice and pouring the beverages, usually water or tea, if it was noon or evening. The table settings, knives, forks, spoons, plates, and napkins, had been placed ahead of time by the waitresses, called waities, by the corps. The communal blessing completed, the corps sat down, the knobs careful to sit on the front three inches of their chairs. The waities brought the food to each table, balanced in large serving bowls on even larger serving trays and placed it on the tables or handed it directly to the knobs, who passed it on to the upperclassmen. Only when all the upperclassmen were served, their plates and glasses full, were the knobs allowed to serve their own plates. Even then, before eating each knob in turn was required to hold his plate in front of his face, the edges of the plate grasped between the fingers of each hand, and ask permission of the mess carver, who sat at the head of the table, to commence eating. Gaining consent to eat was not easy. Sometimes perfect recitation of an obscure bit of plebe knowledge, such as the number of bricks in the smokestack attached to the laundry, or the direction in which the eagle on top of Bond Hall was facing, was a prerequisite. Often permission to eat was denied throughout the meal. Knobs were accustomed to little or no food passing through their gullets into their stomachs during the typical mess hall dining experience. Knobs had to keep a close eye on the food and hand off as quickly as possible to a passing waitie any empty or near empty serving bowl for refilling. No matter how unpalatable a dish might be, an upperclassman kept waiting for a second helping spelled trouble for all the knobs on the mess. Teamwork among the knobs was essential for the running of a happy mess and directly related to whether the knobs on that mess did or did not manage to eat. All knobs, even those who entered the Citadel as string beans, skinny as rails, lost weight at the beginning of the year. It was the inevitable result of an unprecedented regimen of exercise and physical activity and little 178 F Troop and...