Return to Pointer View home page August 26,  2005

9/11 changed new first captain's direction 

By Spc. Benjamin Gruver
Staff Writer 

The Class of 2005 may have been dubbed the “Class of 9/11,” but the Class of 2006 was the first class to arrive at West Point with their eyes wide open after the events of Sept. 11 and many answered a heart-felt call to serve their country because of it.

No one may be more representative of that than this year’s First Captain, Cadet 1st Class Stephanie Hightower, who was recently selected to lead the U.S. Military Academy’s Corps of Cadets during the 2005-2006 academic year.

The 22-year-old from Rio Rancho, N.M., finished high school in 2001 with no intentions of coming to West Point or joining the military at all. In fact, the daughter of Stephen and Terri Hightower was beginning her freshman year at Texas Tech University just trying to start her college career off on the right foot as a pre-med student.

“Sept. 11 had a very profound impact on my life,” Hightower said. “It really made me stop and reflect on exactly what I was doing for the betterment of other individuals as opposed to just myself.”

Taking care of others is something Hightower said she always wanted to do, as she had always had the desire to become a doctor.

“My father is actually a physician and ever since I can remember I always accompanied him in the hospital,” Hightower said. “In fact I drew patient’s pictures while he gave them an examination. At the end of the exam I would come and hand them a picture and the smile on their face when I would hand them the picture was priceless.”

“It’s the little things that make a big difference,” she added. “To see people smile -- that is all I want to do just make people happy.”

She was beginning to make the adjustment from high school student to college student when Sept. 11,  happened. The day changed the course of many American’s lives, including the course of the nation, but it also changed the direction of a freshman pre-med student at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas.

  “I was coming back from the gym that morning and on the television screen the second plane was just about to hit the World Trade Center,” Hightower remembered. “I remember looking at it and looking at a couple of the helper ladies who were in our dormitory and I asked them what movie this was. They looked at me like I was crazy and then I saw the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen and quickly realized that it was real. I stood there in awe. I had no idea what was going on.”

Over the course of that week the West Point triathlon team member spent time reflecting about what was important to her, where her life was going and her family. At the end of the week she decided to tell her parents that she was going to join the service.

 “I needed to do something quick, at least in my mind, to protect my family and say I played a part in protecting my two brothers, my sister, my mom and my dad, that I had some hand in it,” Hightower said.

To enlist in the military was the new cadet brigade commander’s initial reaction, but her family encouraged her to look into other options, while she continued to further her education. She started by looking into R.O.T.C. programs before stumbling on to the service academies. Initially she wanted to go to the U.S. Naval Academy because she swam competitively in high school and liked the water.

At the beginning stages of the interview process to attend one of the service academies Hightower met Col. Nash Garcia, who she explained forever changed her life.

“Basically, he pulled me aside and said ‘you know Steph, from your interview, from what I gather, you really care about people,’” Hightower explained. “I said ‘Yes, Sir. That is why I want to be a doctor. I just want to take care of people.’ ‘Well let me tell you this,’ (Garcia said). ‘The Air Force is all about planes, you take care of your plane, and in the Navy you’ve got boats, you are in command of a boat, but in the Army you take care of people. You command people.’ And that thought, that concept stayed with me throughout the interview process.”

Originally recruited for women’s basketball, Hightower said the first time she stepped on post and saw all the statues of great leaders and talked with cadets she knew that this was the environment that she wanted to be in.

Hightower entered West Point the summer of 2002 and equated R-Day as her whole first month of college wrapped up in one day. She had already met the challenge of leaving her family, but said she found the transition from being independent to being a part of a group equally challenging.

She quickly recognized that West Point is something special, already with an understanding of what college life is like outside of the academy.

“In college I would argue I had a lot of acquaintances, but there is nobody that I could honestly say that I truly trusted at least at that point in time (after freshman year),” Hightower said. “(Here) I would say that I had true friends at the end of six weeks. There are people from my beast squad that I would trust with my life. I would trust them with anything after six weeks. So to be able to make that kind of transition, I think it speaks volumes of West Point and what they expect of the people that come here and the kind of character that they demand from you.”

Only the third woman to earn the title of First Captain, she has definitely taken full advantage of her three years here. The fall semester of 2004 she was an exchange cadet to the U.S. Air Force Academy, in the summer of 2004 she did her Cadet Troop Leader Training with a ground ambulance team at Fort Polk, La., completed Airborne school also in that summer, is a member of the American Chemical Society, was a company first sergeant her junior year and rose to the position of Cadet Basic Training commander for second detail before being chosen for the highest position in the cadet chain-of-command.

“It is not you who gets to a position like this,” Hightower said. “It is the people around you who have helped you every step of the way, and without them I would definitely not be in the position I am right now.”

As First Captain, Hightower said she wants to make sure that everyone has the tools they need to succeed here at the academy and plans to do that by working on the little things such as finding more efficient ways of utilizing time.

What the Corps of Cadets also get with their new brigade commander is someone not only with a desire to care for others, but someone focused on the positive, something she says she learned from her plebe year literature Asst. Prof., Lt. Col. Jonathan Smidt.

“He had a profound impact on me,” Hightower said. “A very upbeat person, who genuinely loves his job and he made it a point each day to make sure that we focused on the positive and not the negative. It is always easy to see what is wrong. The challenge is to find something good in life.”

According to Hightower he also encouraged his students to settle for nothing less than the very best, and to put forth the best effort that they could give, an attitude Hightower would like to bring out in those around her.

“My focus is more on making people feel important and that their ideas, suggestions and feedback matter because they really do,” Hightower said. “Everyone -- whether they are a firstie or a plebe -- has a specific role, and, in fulfilling that role, each person plays a vital part in our success as a whole.”