NIGHT AT THE OPERA.(The Talk of the Town)

Ernest Lee, a cadet at West Point who comes from Sacramento and hopes to serve in South Korea's demilitarized zone, has musical tastes that are appropriately youthful, if not particularly martial. "I am kind of into the indie scene right now," Cadet Lee explained the other evening, standing in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House. Lee, who is tall and upright, and has very short dark hair and a habit of ending his sentences with the words "Sir" or "Ma'am," was, along with nine other cadets, attending a performance of "Turandot." The cadets were all uniformed in dress gray: tapered wool pants or skirt and a high-necked black-trimmed jacket that nipped dashingly in at the waist, and, in their hands, peaked caps, which served as handy receptacles for the evening's program. It was the first time that any of them had been to an opera house, though some of them had attended a production of "La Traviata" that visited West Point last semester. As Andrea Travis, one of five female cadets in the all-volunteer opera squad, explained, "I've been to 'Phantom of the Opera,' but this is a little different."

"Turandot," Puccini's lush last work, in which a cruel Chinese princess is won from her commitment to chastity by witnessing the self-sacrificing power of a servant girl's love, was not selected for the cadets on account of the military lessons delivered by its plot, although the Princess Turandot's penchant for beheading suitors and the tragic servant Liu's ability to withstand torture at the hands of soldiers do have an unfortunate applicability within today's theatres of war. The opera was chosen for the accessibility of its story and the melodiousness of its arias, according to Douglas Cohn, the C.E.O. of Standard Holdings Group, who has initiated a program to help create what he calls "Renaissance officers."

Captain Cohn, West Point Class of '68, volunteered for service in Vietnam, where he spent nine months before being retired on medical grounds. (He took five bullets and lost a thumb in combat.) He dates his own love of opera to a music-appreciation class that he took in high school. "Opera is one of the highest forms of art," he said. "It helps raise the human spirit; it gives meaning to life; it gives continuity to life; it gives purpose and civilization." Officers who are exposed to opera are, Cohn maintained, less likely to permit such occurrences as the looting of the Baghdad Museum. "A well-rounded officer is ...