Photo by videodet, iStockphoto
Photo by videodet, iStockphoto
With Hegseth's rantings about grooming to his assembly of America's top commanders, some history is in order of how facial hair and racism were related in the military.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
This story is about the obsession with grooming standards of some officers in the army. The obsession dates back decades, and it has a history that echoes the history of this country.
Because I reported a day late to the Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, in August of 1969, my assigned place in the alphabetically arranged company formation was to the left of a classmate of mine, Alex Zupsich, the last man in the last rank of the company. I didn’t know Alex at West Point; he was in another regiment and lived all the way across the area of barracks from where I lived.
I had heard of Zupsich, however. He was tall and gangly and was said to have been “blue-darted” by upperclassmen during our Plebe Year. Blue darting was when a group of cadets decided run a cadet out of the academy by ranking him at the bottom of the company in “aptitude for the service” using special, optional evaluations, the form for which was printed on light blue paper.
Zupsich survived an officers’ board that heard his case, and four years later graduated in the top half of the class academically. Standing next to Zupsich in ranks and marching next to him to class and training exercises, I quickly got to know him. He was jovial and kind of goofy and not terribly well turned out militarily. His uniforms didn’t fit him very well, and he marched with an awkward, halting gait.
During his leave after graduation, Zupsich had married a girl back home in Illinois. I say “girl,” because she was 18 and just out of high school. He told me he was very happy having found someone to marry, because he hadn’t gone on many dates as a cadet. Incredibly, he attributed his increased attractiveness to the opposite sex to the mustache he had begun to grow the day after we graduated in June.
Zupsich was one of those guys with what they call a thick beard. As a cadet, he had to shave twice a day to avoid getting written up for demerits for having failed to shave. His mustache grew quickly. By August, it was a luxuriant thing on his upper lip, black and thick and shiny in the sunlight. He was very proud of his mustache and said his new wife loved it.
I was standing next to Zupsich during our formation before dismissal for the day when two captains assigned to be our “platoon advisers” approached him. One of them pointed a finger at his mustache and gave Zupsich an order to cut it off by first formation the next morning. The two captains walked away. Zup, as we called him, said he had looked it up in the regulations and found that soldiers in the army were allowed to have a mustache so long as it did not extend past the corners of the mouth. Zup’s didn’t, but because he had a wide upper lip, the thing looked enormous. He asked me what I would do, if I were him. I told him that he had the legal right to a mustache, and if he liked it, he should keep it.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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