“Get out of my g—damned room!”
“You bit me, you bastard—I’m bleeding!”
I ran into the hallway. A cadet was pointing in the direction of his room yelling for help. I grabbed one of the two cadets fighting, and pulled him away from the other. The cadet I grabbed had red marks around his neck and a bite mark on his right thumb, a bite mark outlined in purple and oozing blood.
The other cadet wore a bloody lip and a swollen eye. Both cadets being held back were still fighting but through words as if they were possessed wolves barking back at each other one saying,
“It’s not over come here!”
I grabbed the cadet’s sandals and took him out of the room telling him to calm down and that I needed to take him to the health center. The anger that I could see in his eyes was intensely engulfed in fury that I could tell that he cared more about hurting the other cadet rather than worrying about his own wounds. As I was holding him back, all he could do was rant about the cadet’s actions and stupidity. The other cadet heard him and came out of his room charging at him with a pocket knife saying,
“I’m going to kill you!”
At that point, the other cadet had run upstairs in a blink of an eye as if he had teleported in fear and everyone was holding the cadet with the pocket knife back and a senior leader had grabbed the knife away from him.
All that was in my mind was getting the cadet with the bloody hand to the health center. When security came to our dorm, I kept the cadet with the severe hand calm until security companied him and was taken to the health center.
One thing that Culver is famous for is bringing teenagers into the academy and making them disciplined leaders. Although I learned the fundamentals that Culver teaches about leadership and making ethical decisions, I know that I am not a leader yet. Everyone has their faults and I know that I am always committing mistakes and making unethical decisions.
During the day of that event I was the senior hall officer of where that action had taken place. The fight had occurred minutes after taps and if I had done my job as a hall officer to keep everyone in their rooms maybe I could have prevented that fight. What I have learned through my Culver career is that you do learn from your mistakes and you can improve as a leader when accepting your mistakes and correcting them. In a couple weeks of counseling for both cadets, their wounds had healed as so their friendship.