Absolutely American Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  The First Year

  Whitey’s Dilemma

  The Aura

  The Theory and Practice of Huah

  Private Rash’s Problem

  The Changes

  Meet the Goodfellas

  Goofballs and Gomers

  Girls to Men

  A Matter of Honor

  Gray Trou and Hudson Hips

  The Two Covenants

  One Nickel at a Time

  Chicken Legs

  Post Night

  Whitey’s Burden

  The $120,000 Rumor

  Through the Woods

  Saving Private Rash

  Keirsey’s Cigar

  Butter Bars

  The Second Year

  Best Summer of Their Lives

  Best Summer of Their Lives II

  Seeing the Elephant

  All Roads Have Wires

  Beat Navy

  The Theory and Practice of Professionalism

  A Number of Adopted Sons

  Black Holes and the Hover Button

  Jake Bergman’s Last Job

  Super-V

  Becoming a Man

  Photos

  The Third Year

  R-Day

  Going Commando

  The Braves

  Beast II Squad Leader

  The Only Time You Can Think About Quitting

  Bull Hill

  Hammered, Slammed, Toast—You’re Done

  You’ve Been Visited by the BTO

  Cooperate and Graduate

  Acceptance

  The Corporation

  Happycadets.com

  Honor

  God, These People Absolutely Hate Me

  Climb to Glory

  Brave Soldier

  The Twelve Days of Christmas

  Bareass Is a No-Go

  The Right Reasons

  Hiding in the Middle

  The Blue Falcon

  Surprise and Courage

  The Fourth Year

  An Army of One

  Best Summer of Their Lives III

  The Ring

  Guppies Never Quit

  Branch Night

  The Corrections and the Hours

  Personal Destruction

  Morning Star

  Black Sheep

  Whitey’s Helicopter

  The $250,000 APFT

  Once an Eagle

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2003 by David Lipsky

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Lipsky, David, date.

  Absolutely American : four years at West Point / David Lipsky.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-618-09542-x

  1. United States Military Academy—History. I. Title.

  U410.L1L57 2003

  355'.0071'173—dc21 2002191339

  eISBN 978-0-547-52375-0

  v3.1016

  PHOTO INSERT CREDITS: Cicerelle, DeMoss, Washington Mess, Goodfellas, Rash on bed, Bergman and Powell, Ferlazzo, and lunch formation: courtesy Mark Seliger/Corbis Outline. Adamczyk: courtesy of Joseph Adamczyk. Keirsey: courtesy of Hank Keirsey. Vermeesch promotion, Vermeesch at Beast: courtesy of John Vermeesch. Herzog in Kosovo: courtesy of Don Herzog. All other photographs by David Lipsky.

  FOR THE FIGHTING GUPPIES,

  AND FOR EAMON DOLAN

  OF ALL THE INSTITUTIONS IN THIS COUNTRY, NONE is more absolutely American; none, in the proper sense of the word, more absolutely democratic than this. Here we care nothing for the boy’s birthplace, nor his creed, nor his social standing; here we care nothing save for his worth as he is able to show it.

  Here you represent, with almost mathematical exactness, all the country geographically. You are drawn from every walk of life by a method of choice made to insure, and which in the great majority of cases does insure, that heed shall be paid to nothing save the boy’s aptitude for the profession into which he seeks entrance. Here you come together as representatives of America in a higher and more peculiar sense than can possibly be true of any other institution in the land.

  —PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT,

  at the West Point centennial, 1902

  Preface

  I CAME TO LOVE, really love, road marching. It’s called a suck or a haze at West Point, but I think the cadets aren’t being fair to it. There’s something wonderful about being in a column of marching people: the gravel popping under soles, the leather flexing in boots, the kind of saddle-top sounds as the ruck (what a backpack gets called in the Army) frames settle. Occasionally someone, out of sheer misery, sighing Oooh, or just blowing out air, which in the general silence is like a whale breaching and then slipping back under the surface. You can watch a leaf float down from a tree or stare at the guy’s rifle in front of you. The boiling down of life to its basic questions: Can you do this? What kind of person are you, and what can you make yourself finish? Can you hang with the rest of us? Those questions don’t get asked much, in the civilian world.

  One night I got stuck with a West Point company that was spending the entire evening on patrol in the woods. They had brought ponchos in their rucks and I hadn’t. It was about two in the morning when the rain started. A nice earth-smelling drizzle at first. Then it became a pretty hard, thundery storm. I’d never noticed that rain makes different noises on different articles of clothing: a kind of spreading, sinking hiss into a shirt, a loud spattery ploink! on jeans. One of the cadets offered me his poncho, but of course you couldn’t accept it. In the dark, I found my way to two trees that had grown so close together that their upper branches formed a canopy. I obviously wasn’t going to sleep, so I marched back and forth all night under this umbrella, rain dripping into my ears and down over my lips. Then, in the morning, at five, everyone shook themselves off and we marched again.

  I never liked the military at all as a kid. My father told us it was the one profession we couldn’t pursue: if my brother or I joined up, he promised to hire strong guys to come break our legs. In his eyes, compared to the military, hired leg-breaking was an act of kindness. So when Rolling Stone magazine first assigned me to write about the United States Military Academy, I fought it. And I mean fought hard, as hard as you can fight Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann Wenner, who can be firm and cajoling in a kind of (at least to a writer) irresistible way. When I gave in, and traveled to West Point, I was followed by members of the Academy’s Public Affairs Office. They chose the people I could speak with, they sat in on the interviews. I saw my way out; I was thrilled and relieved. I said I could not do the story under those circumstances, and I left. A few days later the colonel who oversees the daily management of West Point—Joe Adamczyk, a thin, steely man the cadets nicknamed Skeletor—called back to say it was fine. There would be no one picking out ideal cadets for me to interview, no one escorting me, no doors closed. I could have the run of the place. “We have nothing of which we should be ashamed,” he said.

  So that was the first step toward my love of road marching. Very different from my original idea of the Army. And there was no avoiding the story anymore.

  It had all seemed so foreign, a kind of dense green forest. Slowly,
the trees parted a little, enough for me to step inside, and then I could feel the basic goodness of the place. As I listened to the cadets and understood how they were living, I had a strange, funny thought. Not only was the Army not the awful thing my father had imagined, it was the sort of America he always pictured when he explained (this would happen every four years, during an election cycle) his best hopes for the country. A place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybody—or at least most people—looked out for each other. A place where people—intelligent, talented people—said honestly that money wasn’t what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings and about trying to make themselves better.

  One reason Rolling Stone wanted me on the story was that I’d become a kind of young-person specialist. You specialize at a magazine. On news stories, I mainly covered universities and students. I must have traveled to about thirty-five colleges in the five years before I first went to West Point. From tiny places like Wisconsin’s obscure, homemade-feeling Beloit to a thirty-thousand-student factory like the University of Georgia at Athens to places like Harvard and Yale that made me feel like maybe I wasn’t changing my socks often enough. I’d also written about young TV actors and the young rich and young media executives, people who had every reason to be consistently delighted. And of all the young people I’d met, the West Point cadets—although they are grand, epic complainers—were the happiest. That was probably step two on the path toward my love of road marching.

  Here’s three: My friends had reached the phase, in their early thirties, when things slow down and you can relax and look around yourself again for maybe the first time since college. Before that, life is like sticking your head out the window of a fast-moving car: everything is rushing at you, flattening back your skin, your eyes are blinking and you can barely overhear your own thoughts. Most of those thoughts are “Will I find a job?” and “Can I find a partner?” and “What kind of life am I going to have?” By the early thirties, this stuff had quieted down, and my friends were thinking, “OK, I’ve found a life.” And then the second part hit: “Is this the life I want? Does the job I’m doing matter to anyone else?” It was right at this time that the Army and the Academy dawned on me, and I saw what it meant to live as a group, to share experiences, and to have that sense that other people were honestly looking out for you. And I have to say, that looked pretty good to me too.

  And so, a road march. Everyone dressed the same. Everyone with a clear assignment: You will depart from this first point and you will arrive at this second point, and it will be clear to you when you have accomplished this. It will be difficult (in the Army, they say challenging). In place of the anxiety that comes from jobs that involve only the brain, the pleasure of a task that would engage the entire body. When cadets faltered, other cadets would softly encourage them. “Come on. You can do this. I know you can do this.” The sound of the boots and the smell of the road and the sun on the leaves and this soft, encouraging undertone. When cadets fell, other cadets would move forward, lift them up. I remember, during my first road marches, feeling simply blessed.

  The magazine originally treated the assignment, when it began in 1998, as a journalistic public service. That summer, the West Point superintendent, a three-star general, had parked with some other military leaders at the sort of big roadside welcome center that features a TCBY and a Great American Pretzel Company (so that even rest stops offer the channel-surfing pleasures of a mall) and where there is usually one restaurant with sit-down service. The superintendent was wearing his green class-B uniform, and so were the hungry officers in his party. The hostess looked him up and down, from polished shoes to epaulets, then she smiled and thanked him for the selfless work he was doing as a member of the Parks Department. The superintendent wondered if maybe the gap between the civilian and military worlds hadn’t become too large. A few weeks later, the superintendent and the commandant arrived at the Rolling Stone offices in their full uniforms, marching past black-and-white photographs of Eric Clapton and framed guitars. The initial idea was for me to spend a few weeks on post, follow around a bunch of plebes, write something short. I ended up staying most of the year.

  When that time was over, I didn’t believe the story was fully told. I decided to rent a house in Highland Falls, and stayed until the plebe class graduated four years later—the only time West Point has let a writer in for such an extended tour of hanging out. I saw cadets in combat with themselves, unlearning many of the skills and instincts that had brought them to West Point; I saw some cadets thriving; I saw lots of suffering (academic, physical, homesickness); I saw spot meanness and acts of great generosity. My friends were full of questions: What kinds of people still wanted such a regimented life? Why would cadets willingly put themselves through it? Didn’t they realize the way they were living was out-of-date? Those were questions I set out to answer. But I mostly wanted to give people the experience of spending forty-seven months at the United States Military Academy, an experience that only around sixty thousand people have had since the place got up and running two centuries ago. I learned how to read a uniform and how to tie many types of knots. I learned that soldiers are people—that when I flip on the news and there’s some officer in a helmet standing before a tank, I’m looking at someone a lot like myself, who’s lived through most of the same events I have, eats the same drive-through, can trace the same internal map of favorite movie dialogue and TV scenes, but who has made the decision to put on a uniform and serve in the nation’s military.

  I’ve changed the names of several cadets, mostly at their request, including people involved in an honor hearing and three cadets who endured various hardships—a consuming relationship, loss of rank, separation from the Academy. Scott Mellon, Kim Wilkins, Loryn Winter, Nick Calabanos, Mrs. Como, Virginia Whistler and James Edgar are fictitious names—real people under a verbal false nose and eyeglasses. Otherwise, the names and nicknames in this book are the cadets’ real ones. I followed the men and women of one company, G-4, from the months they arrived at West Point until the day they graduated; this is their story.

  PART ONE

  The First Year

  Whitey’s Dilemma

  IF YOU IMAGINE the ideal West Point cadet, you’ll come up with someone very much like Don “Whitey” Herzog. Since meeting his first veterans, Whitey has wanted to go military. “Just something special in their eyes,” the twenty-one-year-old explains. “They learned brotherhood, service—they learned what real honor is.” For ten years, Whitey ran his life like a checklist: West Point, then the Infantry, then the Rangers, the Army’s elite.

  At West Point, cadets wear gray, but when they dream about their futures, it’s all green, the posts and uniforms of the United States Army. Each summer—while their civilian peers are walking the beaches or rubbing their eyes at some internship—the United States Military Academy sends its juniors and seniors to spend five weeks in their futures, leading troops with regular Army units. Because he’s the number thirteen–ranked military cadet in the one-thousand-member class of 1999, Whitey got his dream in July of 1998 and trained with the Rangers. They outfitted him with laser-sighted weapons, night-vision goggles, a hundred pounds of gear and tackle, and sent him on practice missions: evacuating pretend hostages, breaking up pretend ambushes. They’d fly to some classified place, do the job, swing back to base with the sun coming up. Riding outside a helicopter, Whitey felt the wind slam his face, watched his boots sway over the Florida night. “Three in the morning, going over supermarkets and bars,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘Man, I wish my buddies back home could be seein’ this.’” Whitey grew up in the cold pubs-and-hockey town of Buffalo, New York. (His brother-in-law, Mike Peca, is captain of the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres.) His parents separated when he was ten—dad a dentist, mom a paralegal. Whitey first heard the words United States Military Academy from one of his mother’s boyfriends. First day of high school, teachers invited questions for the guidance counselor, an
d Whitey was the kid with his hand raised. “How do I get into West Point?” he asked.

  Like any mountain, the climb to West Point is cut with paths, the ropes and bridges left by other climbers. West Point wants scholars and athletes with good leadership potential. So Whitey ran cross-country, grubbed for A’s, campaigned for student office. On the side, he was moonlighting as an ordinary teenager: smoking cigarettes, chasing girls, getting drunk at Allman Brothers concerts. Next morning, he’d go be student body president at the Jesuit high school. “Real Jekyll-and-Hyde stuff,” he says.

  West Point cadets make a simple deal: a tuition-free education in exchange for five years as Army officers. Every September, the seniors pick their branches of service. If you like to drive tanks, you go Armor; if you enjoy measuring the world’s challenges on a scientific calculator, you go Engineers. (If you’re a business major, you hook up with the Finance Batallion and get called a Finance Ranger.) But if you have the true calling, you go Infantry. Tell a West Point administrator you’re considering the Field Artillery, he might nod. Tell him you’re thinking Infantry, he’ll clap you on the back and grin. Of course, Infantry skills are also a hard sell should you ever decide to leave the military. “Think like a civilian employer,” one senior explains. “Say ‘Engineers,’ that implies you can think a little bit. Spend five years with the Infantry, OK, you know how to sleep in the cold and you know how to kill people. It doesn’t set you up for success.” For the Army, Infantry means you’re serious; for Whitey, it was the second stop on his checklist, the road back to the Rangers.

  Whitey Herzog is sandy-haired, tall and skinny. He has soldier’s eyes: entering a room, his eyes do a quick reconnaissance skim, picking up the areas of interest, filtering out what’s nonessential; then they turn friendly. On his uniform, he wears the bronze star that indicates he’s in the top 5 percent of his class militarily, which means that for four years he’s performed West Point’s duties the way West Point wants them done.