by James Salter
He begins, in his careful, undramatic way, to tell a story about a Vietnamese officer he knew who was given command of a division known as “the coup division” near Saigon. The moral turns out to be, in his words, that “generals must become more politically aware but not more politically involved.” He admires George Marshall, a man of strong principles and soldierly attitudes—“one of the outstanding men of this century,” he says simply. And Omar Bradley, Lee and Grant, strike him as leaders of great integrity.
“The symbol of the army,” he explains, “is the mule. The mule is stubborn. It works hard. It’s basically a very honest animal.”
Now, at this moment, the vivid caricatures of Dr. Strangelove—or the threat of holocaust—are worlds away.
The heat of afternoon lies over the green fields of West Point. There are grass cutters at work. The smell of the fairway. A question floats forth, apparently simple, though behind it is a certain amount of suspicion and guile. Could we have won in Vietnam?
The answer comes promptly: “No.”
And the reason?
“The political understanding and the staying power of the Communists,” Berry says, “were greater than those of our forces.”
This must certainly have been one of the more knowledgeable admissions made by any field or flag officer involved in Vietnam. There were generals who wanted in both Korea and Vietnam to go the whole way, to take on China. It would have to be done sooner or later, they argued. Berry was and is not one of these. It would have been crazy, in his view.
He is a man one trusts. Like many soldiers, he comes from the south, from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. His wife is from Decatur, Georgia. They have two daughters and a son.
It was his children who brought him Dostoevsky and Hermann Hesse—and a book he has read more than once, War and Peace. He seems to have read without passion, however. One senses he reads to broaden himself, dutifully, as if trying to learn a foreign language.
“I identify with Prince Andrei,” he says, referring to the nobleman in War and Peace whose bravery in battle was immortalized by Tolstoi.
The mule works hard. It is patient.
Vietnam is past. The presidents who committed us to it are gone, their advisers, their ministers of war; Kissinger is the only important exception. The army suffered badly there. Frustration and defeat. The loss of a sound moral position. The dissatisfaction, even the contempt of much of the country, especially the young, focused on it.
Resignation figures of West Point graduates rose sharply, going up to about 37 percent in the class of 1966. There was a four-year service commitment after graduation, so officers from this class could only begin to leave the army in 1971. Indications now are that the percentage of resigning officers is beginning to go down.
Berry has most recently come from commanding a division, the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The army was buffeted during Vietnam, he admits, but the 101st is far healthier now than it was a year ago, and it will be even healthier a year from now, he promises.
This image of a fighting general himself—behind him the years of dusty encampments, bloody battles, daring escapes, and obedient routine—this dedicated life as it is revealed in his character and face is perhaps the real lesson he will somehow impart to cadets. Among them is probably one who will someday sit in this very office when Sidney Berry is a photograph high on the wall, above the Whistler sketches, the Catlin landscapes. It is a life that is a proof of things which no longer seem to exist.
The cadets come from the great cities now, and from sprawling suburbs. The rural and agrarian character of the Corps is changing. These new young men know little of nature and the kind of everyday hardship that used to be part of American life. West Point can no longer attract the great football players either, or even the very top students, perhaps. Can it compensate, in part, by the fiber of those who do come? And where can they now be found? For a long moment, Berry stands at the window embrasure, cold gray eyes looking out over West Point. Once a fortress that guarded a river, it became a school to guard a nation. There are trophies everywhere, cannon taken in Mexico, the cannon that fired the last shot at Appomattox. Tradition and glory. Enormous eagles carved onto the buildings. An oxide-green General Patton standing near the library.
The afternoon is fading. The light on the river is stilled. Berry is reflecting. He thinks, perhaps, of the America which lies beyond the cities, which seems to be shrinking but which, when one enters it, is as endless as the sea.
“There are still a lot of Hattiesburgs around the country,” he says.
People
September 2, 1974
Ike the Unlikely
He possessed, like his boss, an invincible smile. The era had two of them. Roosevelt’s was the hail of a champion. Ike’s, they say, was worth twenty divisions.
Generals never smile. That was only one of the rules he broke. MacArthur didn’t smile. Bradley either, it wasn’t his nature—besides, his teeth were false. Ike smiled all the way, and his smile was instant and true. Even de Gaulle, a man not easily taken in, was impressed by him and sensed both generosity and warmth.
He never really commanded like Napoleon or Grant. “He let his generals in the field fight the war for him,” MacArthur commented disdainfully, while “he drank tea with kings and queens.” In an even more acidic mood he described him as the “best clerk I ever had.”
We see the grand MacArthur striding through the surf onto the shore of the Philippines, fulfilling his pledge, trouser legs soaked, weathered hat on his head, the legendary figure who fought back from stunning defeat across a battlefield that was an ocean so vast that men’s perceptions could barely cross it and who even after victory did not return home but chose to remain in Tokyo as proconsul and govern the shattered Japanese. He did it magnificently and with remarkable discernment, knowing it would be the capstone of a great career. While poor Eisenhower, whose dream of the future was merely a quiet cottage, had to oversee the demobilization, accepted the presidency of Columbia, for which he was ill-suited, recovered his poise to some extent in command of NATO, and finally lifting his head to the shouts was swept to the presidency by an adoring public. Thus the farm boy and the last of the aristocrats.
He was born in obscurity in northern Texas, one of seven children, all boys, in a family that always had to struggle and soon moved back to Kansas. From his mother Eisenhower inherited his chin, high forehead, and steady gaze. She was a hardworking, honest, no-nonsense woman, a pacifist who eventually became a Jehovah’s Witness. “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city,” she told her son.
It was 1890, bread cost three cents a loaf. The plains were still crude and raw, the railroad the sole connection with the rest of the world. He was born into a home where the Bible was read daily, into a town that still lived by the frontier ethic, and into a world where man’s temporal role could be summed up in one word: work. As a boy he grew vegetables behind the house and sold them. He worked in the Belle Springs Creamery, where his father was also employed, after school. Together with his brother he tried to earn enough money so that one of them could go to college, the other to follow afterward. Years later he was asked by someone if he was really a conservative. “Any of you fellows ever grow up working on a farm?” he asked.
At the urging of a friend, he took the exam for Annapolis and for West Point too while he was at it. It turned out he was too old for the naval academy, but the first man for West Point failed the physical and Eisenhower got the appointment. He arrived in June 1911. He had come mainly for a free education. Here he is, making his first, brief appearance as a running back for Army: sandy hair, five feet eleven inches, stocky, called Ike by his classmates. As a measure of his indistinguishability, there were four other “Ikes” in the class. There were also nicknames like Nigger, Jew, Dago, and Chink. It was the class of 1915, the class they later said “the stars fell o
n.” In what could pass for a gentleman’s world, a backwater world as was the army it fed into, they rode horses, studied geology, engineering, natural philosophy, and hygiene, and pitched tents for the summer at the far end of the Plain. It was a closed world that held a certain comradeship and mystery.
He did not seem destined for greatness. Academically he was only average. He was not one of the cadet pantheon; neither was Bradley. He was well enough liked, confident, breezy. He preferred poker to dancing, and his classmates noted that he was fond of shooting the bull.
Caught up in the rising swell of the First World War, he was given training assignments and rose to become lieutenant colonel on his twenty-eighth birthday, but the war ended and he had suffered the classic grief of young officers—he had not seen action. The army quickly shrank. Everyone was demoted. He reverted to the rank of captain and together with Mamie vanished down the dusty roads that led to routine and remote posts—Leavenworth, Camp Meade, Fort Benning—while Jimmy Walker, Lindbergh, and Babe Ruth strode the stage. Lingering behind him, like a faint epitaph, was the opinion of one of his instructors at West Point who, like the others, had found him unremarkable: “We saw in Eisenhower a not uncommon type, a man who would thoroughly enjoy his army life . . .” But not much besides.
The most important group in the United States Army of the ’20s and ’30s was Pershing’s men, the officers who had found his favor either before or during the war. George Marshall, who had been in his headquarters in France, was one. Douglas MacArthur, though he had performed brilliantly as a troop commander, a dashing and gallant figure right out of Journey’s End rising to become the youngest brigadier general in the army, was not. He was too vivid, too pushy, too iconoclastic. He and Marshall never liked each other. They had much in common—both were aloof, puritanical, driven. Marshall, however, had hardly a single watt of military glory. It was the “loftiness and beauty of his character” that stood out, as Dean Acheson noted. MacArthur was not without character, but the thing that shone so unmistakably from him was ambition.
Another of Pershing’s favorites was George Patton, who had gone to France as the old man’s aide and wangled his way into the front lines, commanding the first tanks near the end of the war. Eisenhower met him in 1919 at Camp Meade. Patton was a temporary colonel, tall, glamorous, every inch a soldier. He was rich and so was his wife—he would always be known as the wealthiest man in the army. He owned a yacht, played polo, and taught ladies’ riding classes. He was five years older than Eisenhower, with a high, squeaky voice and a foul mouth with which he loved to shock social gatherings, but he also had shrewdness and an intense love of his profession. It was at Patton’s house one night that Eisenhower met and made an impression on a general named Conner, who a few months later invited him to come to Panama as his executive officer. He was the first of the two important sponsors Eisenhower was to have during his career.
Fox Conner was a Mississippian with the common touch who’d been Pershing’s operations officer in France and had a reputation in the army as a brain. He was always quoted as saying that if we ever had another war he hoped to God we wouldn’t have allies. In Panama he took Eisenhower under his wing, encouraging him to read and discussing with him strategy, commanders, and the fate of nations.
“Someplace along the line there Ike got serious—there isn’t any question about that,” one of his classmates remembered. It’s uncertain exactly when or how this happened. It may have been due in part to the settling effect of marriage or to the death of his young son from scarlet fever a year before Panama. The change may have been something that was coming all along. What we do know is that when Conner arranged for him to get into Command and General Staff, the most important of the army schools, Eisenhower went, determined to do well. Those admitted were already an elect, and graduation high in the class was said to mark a man for future advancement. At the end of the year Eisenhower was number one.
George Marshall always kept a file of officers who impressed him and it’s probable that Eisenhower’s name first came to his attention at this time.
Known for years mainly as a coach of post football teams, Eisenhower was now viewed differently. The Army didn’t exactly stand on its head for him, but in a few years he found himself in Washington working for the assistant secretary of war and then for the chief of staff, a man of dizzying ego, phenomenal memory, and comprehensive knowledge who liked to refer to himself in the third person—in short, MacArthur. They had adjoining offices with only a slatted door between them. When, on his retirement, MacArthur accepted the post of military adviser to the Philippines, he took Eisenhower with him for what MacArthur said would be a year or so.
They arrived in Manila in September 1935. Already balding, wearing a white suit and straw hat as did MacArthur, Ike is in many ways fully formed—the man who, unknown to himself, will command the war. He stands dutiful and frowning in the tropical sun as his renowned chief poses. He was twenty years into his profession now and still a major. Years later a woman asked him if he knew the celebrated MacArthur. Yes, he knew him, Eisenhower said, he’d studied dramatics under him for seven years.
In the Philippines they worked to create a defense force. There was little money or equipment, and as the hundreds of ordinary days drifted behind there began to appear, drawing closer and closer, the storm they all knew was coming. Everybody felt it. One evening on an antiquated radio Eisenhower heard Neville Chamberlain declaring war. The first flicker of lightning. In far-off Europe catastrophe had arrived.
Eisenhower went to MacArthur and requested to return to the States, feeling he would be needed more there. He left at the end of 1939 and began a series of assignments as what he had always been, a staff officer, first at regimental, then division and corps level. He bumped into Marshall at some maneuvers soon after getting back. Duty in the Far East, everyone knew, was duty with houseboys, servants, amahs. Even privates got spoiled. With the barest of smiles Marshall inquired, “Well, Eisenhower, have you learned to tie your shoes again?” It was only the second time they had met.
In the fall of 1941 in huge maneuvers held in Louisiana, Eisenhower stood out as chief of staff of the victorious Third Army. He got his promotion to brigadier general just as the dust of the maneuvers was settling. It was late September. Two months later, all negotiations at an impasse, a powerful Japanese strike force left port and slipped into the fog of the Northern Pacific under sealed orders that when opened read “Pearl Harbor.”
It is easy to see in retrospect the confusion and fears, the long ordeal the end of which no one could foresee, the great wave that swept over the nation and half the world, the greatest event of the century: the Second World War.
Summoned abruptly from San Antonio to Washington a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to fill a need in plans for someone who knew the Far East, Eisenhower went directly from the train station to Marshall’s office. He was to face an immediate test. For twenty minutes Marshall outlined the grave situation in the Pacific with its nearly insoluble equations. Then he looked at Eisenhower and said only, “What should be our general line of action?”
Eisenhower had just arrived, he was unfamiliar with the latest plans, he had no staff. He hesitated for a moment and then said, “Give me a few hours.”
Sitting in an empty office he thought at some length and then with one finger began to type out his recommendations. He went back to Marshall. The Philippines, with their weak forces, would probably fall, Eisenhower said. Nevertheless, everything possible should be done to help them hold out. This was important. All the peoples of Asia would be watching the coming battle there—they would accept defeat but not abandonment. Meanwhile, Australia was the key—it had to be built up as a base of operations and the long line of communications to it kept open at any cost. “In this last we dare not fail.”
When he had finished, Marshall said just four words: “I agree with you.”
Now began des
perate days, during which they tried to find men, aircraft, equipment, and, above all, ships to carry them to distant garrisons. The news was worse and worse, naval disasters, staggering Japanese triumphs. The days were eighteen hours long and Eisenhower came home exhausted to his brother Milton’s house in Falls Church for a sandwich at midnight. In three relentless months, however, he had Marshall’s confidence and was wearing a second star.
Allied strategy was, Europe first—the defeat of Germany before anything else. The Americans favored a direct, cross-Channel invasion of the continent to which the British agreed in principle but with deeply ingrained reservations. For a nation that had known Gallipoli and would soon know Dieppe, the idea of a seaborne assault against a strongly defended mainland was not something to be viewed with enthusiasm. Ike had been responsible for drawing up plans for the invasion force to be built up in Britain and he offered Marshall a profile of the sort of officer who should be sent to command it, someone who was flexible, whom Marshall trusted completely, and who might further serve as Marshall’s deputy when the former was named to lead the invasion (which was expected). A month later, an officer “then almost unknown,” as Churchill called him, arrived in England and was welcomed at Chequers for the first time by the prime minister, who was wearing a siren suit and carpet slippers. That officer was Eisenhower.
They were to become very close, and it was always Ike’s good fortune to have a supporter on one side as staunch as on the other. For his own part, he had come with the determination to get along with the British. You could call a British officer a bastard, the word was, but you could not call him a British bastard. He became a champion of Allied cooperation. It was not merely a question of the British agreeing to call lorries trucks and the Americans in exchange to call gasoline petrol, it was the task of hammering out an acceptable common strategy and bending difficult and proud commanders to fight side by side. The war was not waged in a spirit of pure harmony. Generals have ambitions. Nations have their goals.