College is supposed to be fun. No longer under the umbrella of parental supervision, hanging out with friends, ordering a pizza delivered to your dorm, maybe sleeping in a few mornings, missing a class, going home on weekends. College is not marching to breakfast, shining shoes, cleaning a rifle, enduring eight months of intense physical training, being humiliated, or treated like a prisoner of war.
Unless, that is, the college is The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina.
2025 Elizabethton High School graduate Louis Seth Whitehead entered The Citadel in July 2025 with more than 800 recruits, and on Recognition Day, March 21, 2026, Whitehead was still there. Many “knobs” (first-year students), deciding The Citadel was not for them, quietly left, as on Recognition Day, 682 knobs beat the odds and took the Citadel Oath and became cadets…