by James Salter
Perhaps I dreamed that I was the writer, and the irresistible woman who had not had the least whim denied her was a symbol for film itself.
There was another final script, which in fact ascended a bit before crashing, as the result of a director’s unreasonable demands, and I suppose there might have been another and another, but at a certain point one stands on the isthmus and sees clearly the Atlantic and the Pacific of life. There is the destiny of going one way or the other and you must choose.
And so the phantom, which in truth I was, passed from sight.
I have forgotten the names of the concierges at the Inghilterra and the Baur au Lac. Images, though, remain, innominate but clear. Driving the roads of Southern France: Béziers, Agde—the ancient countryside, husbanded for ages. The Romans planted quince trees to mark the corners of their fields; sinewy descendants still grow there. A woman, burnished by sun, walked down the street in the early morning carrying an eel. Many times I have written of this eel, smooth and dying, dark with the mystery of shadowy banks and covered with bits of gravel. This eel is a saint to me, oblivious, already in another world.
To write of people thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well—in describing a world, you extinguish it and in any recollection much is reduced to ruin. Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again.
There remains, though, in the case of those years in the movies, a kind of silky pollen that clings to the fingertips and brings back what was once pleasurable, too pleasurable, perhaps—the lights dancing on dark water, as in the old prints, the sound of voices, laughter, music, all faint, alluring, far off.
The New Yorker
August 4, 1997
The First Women Graduate
“Fennessy!” the first classman at the head of the table called. It was in the dining hall with its six great wings. “Look up here.”
Fennessy raised her eyes.
“Do you notice anything about my hands?” He was holding them up.
“No, sir.”
“I’m not wearing my class ring.” The heavy, gold ring that is a kind of passport and instantly recognized in the Army was missing. “I’m not going to wear it again as long as there are cheaters here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I’m taking it off forever if there’s ever a woman first captain. What do you think of that?”
“I think it would be a waste of a good ring, sir,” Fennessy replied.
That was in 1976, just after the worst cheating scandal in the history of West Point. Robin Fennessy was a plebe. She was twenty-one years old and had completed three years at the University of Colorado, where she studied molecular biology on an ROTC scholarship. When the chance came to go to West Point with the first group of women, she said, why not? This month she is due to graduate—one of 61 women out of the 119 who entered originally.
The most famous military school in the world sits on majestic ground overlooking the Hudson. It is fifty miles upriver from New York City but the distance cannot be measured in miles; it is really fifty years upriver. The drive goes north on graceful parkways, through the woods of the Palisades, tract towns, and into country that has existed almost unchanged since Revolutionary days. West Point was a fortress then.
It is still a kind of fortress, vast and serene, far from the megacity with its crowds, its glittering energy and broken streets. West Point is the chapel of the Army, a “holy place” in Patton’s solemn words. It is also college, country club, and Forest Lawn. It is a separate world in which the great constellations are Bradley and Eisenhower, a world of order and old brick quarters where anyone of greater age or rank is still called sir.
There are some 10,500 West Pointers on active duty in the Army, about one officer in eight (in the expanded Army of World War II it was one in a hundred), but they possess an influence out of proportion to their number and have always been heavily represented among the generals. Their distinction has been so well confirmed that, as one non-graduate put it, “If I knew nothing about West Point and one was coming into my unit, I would expect him to be everything on the basis of reputation alone.” All of its graduates, in service or out, together form an exceedingly loyal and cohesive body. Their cadet experiences unite them with a powerful nostalgia. They have taken the voyage together. The school, for all its solid, terrestrial image, is like a cherished ship, a ship that does not love in return.
In recent years it has been battered. The defeat in Vietnam, humiliating to the Army, was especially stinging to those who provided the ethos for it, led it, and were its most devoted and ambitious servants. The demoralization came to a climax in 1970 when the then superintendent, General Koster, stood on a stone balcony in the mess hall and announced his resignation. He had been implicated in the cover-up after My Lai. Koster was never tried but his career was ruined.
The corps of cadets had gradually been increased in size from 2,500 to 4,400, and commensurate with these larger numbers, in 1976 came the greatest cheating scandal ever. One hundred and fifty-two cadets were found guilty of collaboration on a take-home problem in electrical engineering and dismissed—ninety-eight were later allowed to return—and cheating, it was agreed, had been far more widespread. In the same year, over strenuous and deeply felt objections, women were admitted for the first time. In 1977 a highly critical report mentioned among other things West Point’s negative attitudes and resistance to change. Added to all this, the football team was moribund. It could not beat Navy and had not been of national prominence for almost twenty years.
The problems West Point was facing seemed to call for something other than the stewardship of another career-minded general. As it had in 1919 when MacArthur was sent in to straighten out things after the war and made a dazzling, unmilitary entrance in grommetless cap and worn puttees, the Army reached far, this time to the retired list. The man chosen had made his way to the top as White House staff secretary to Eisenhower and adviser to Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon on defense and foreign policy. This was General Andrew Goodpaster. He had retired in 1974 after a career that just missed chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs but included Vietnam and five years as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. From there he went to the Citadel to teach.
Goodpaster is not a typical general. He is tall, white-haired, and reserved. He’s a grandfather and drives a white Mercedes. There is something pedagogic in his manner and he is exact in his speech, as befits a man who often gave advice to the powerful. When he was first asked, at Christmas in 1976, what he thought of selecting a superintendent with greater than usual academic qualifications, someone who might remain longer than the usual three years, he replied that he was in favor of it.
“Let me ask you a funny question,” the chief of staff then said. “Would you consider it?”
That spring, taking off one of his four stars, he returned to active duty as the Supe. Although it was only one of the areas to which he had to give his attention, honor—and related matters—was the most important to him. It was the determining issue on which he was prepared to come back, Goodpaster says.
The honor system is as old as the school. Originally it derived from the officer’s code, the aristocratic idea that an officer was a gentleman and as good as his word. Over the years the corps was so intimate and its notion of honor so close to society’s that not until MacArthur’s reign was there an invincible definition: a cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal. To this, unwritten at first, was added the clause: nor tolerate those who do.
The honor committee, vaguely secret, with its unobserved trials and chairman’s book passed down from hand to hand, enforced the code. If a cadet was found guilty, he was expected to resign. If he refused and there were no military charges on which he could be dismissed, the tradition was to silence him—he lived and ate alone, no one speaking to him except on official matter
s. In the eyes of the corps he had ceased to exist. The silence lasted for life. This harsh but thrilling bit of schoolboy justice was struck down in 1973. By then, though the authorities were unwilling to recognize it, a different kind of young man had begun to enter the academy, in fact all the academies. At Air Force things were so bad that during the 1970 graduation ceremonies the new superintendent could hear groaning as certain cadets received their diplomas.
West Point failed to pick up the warning signs: earlier cheating outbreaks, changing attitudes expressed by cadets, even rumors of bribery on the honor committee. The dishonesty and cover-up in Vietnam and Washington, the years of permissiveness and protest had an effect. Like a dam breaking, the scandal of 1976 swept through company after company, in some nearly wiping out an entire class.
The most difficult part of the honor code is the toleration clause, the obligation of one cadet to report another. Although truthfulness may not be foreign to American values, informing is. MacArthur himself ironically claimed to have lived according to his parents’ admonition: never lie, never tattle. The Naval Academy has no toleration clause, but at West Point a cadet who observes an honor violation and does not report it has committed a violation himself.
This is not the only problem. The code is simple, but the workings of the system are more involved and must be scrupulously taught. A cadet may not lie but neither may he quibble—tell a partial truth. Of a disheveled cadet who had reported late for duty, an officer demanded, “Where have you been?”
“Sir, I’ve been to the library,” was the reply. It was true, but he neglected to say that was where he’d met his girl and they then spent two hours out in a field. He was tried for honor.
Nor is the question of stealing as clear-cut as it seems. Someone who sees money drop out of another’s pocket and does not return it is guilty of a violation. A cadet who was at Eisenhower Hall, the social center, found that someone had taken his raincoat from the cloakroom. Raincoats are identical. He took someone else’s. He was found guilty.
Self-reported violations are treated no differently from others. Nor does the seriousness of the offense matter. It is a code of iron. Fortunately it makes some exception for social situations or cadets would be monsters of candor and a foolish “I love you” could wreck a career.
Despite these almost theological intricacies, Goodpaster feels that the code is a minimum. Beyond it he sees larger questions of virtue. Of the men who were once cadets it will be asked, does he treat people with fairness, does he meet a challenge with courage, does he stand up to be counted?
Honor is the battle line along which West Point has chosen to make its stand. It is like the single square on a chessboard toward which all pieces are directed.
Joe Franklin, the brigadier general who as commandant is responsible for the military training of cadets and in charge of much of their life, says, “I feel the country looks at West Point as the honor of society. If you can’t maintain it here, you’re doomed.”
There have been some recent changes in the honor system. Trials are now open and conducted with the participation of members of the corps at large—two from each class including plebes—as well as members of the committee. There is a legal officer who serves as a kind of magistrate, but the proceedings are essentially between cadets. If the finding is guilty, normally there is still only one punishment: dismissal. The superintendent, however, can modify the sentence.
“There are people who support the honor system strongly and there are those who don’t. I’m one of the latter,” a female cadet says. She is a first classman and highly regarded. “There’s too much witch-hunting.”
“I believe in the honor code,” another says, “but I have some trouble with the system.”
“Sometimes I think they carry it a little bit too far,” another first classman, a male, says.
The honor captain is James Coe, six feet five, good-looking, with corn-colored hair and a slight cast in one eye, a basketball player from Minnesota who became disillusioned with the game and gave it up, never touched a ball again.
“I’d be the first to admit I’m a very naive young man,” he says, “but I feel the biggest thing we try to do is teach an honor ethic—a personal ethic that goes beyond the code. On an individual level,” he admits, “I think there is some discretion on the part of both reporting cadets and members of a full honor board.”
Coe would like to see a return to a simpler concept. “One thing I’d like to do,” he reflects, “is reduce the size of the corps. You can hide in the corps now. In the old days you could concentrate on people.”
There was a time when the Army was small and a regular officer was above politics and beyond deceit, without exception or qualification. The question today is: should West Point worship an integrity that is greater than the nation’s, and how much greater should this integrity be? There is an obvious danger when colonels and generals see themselves as sole guardians against corruption. On the other hand, a lack of honor among officers would be equally frightening—we saw the discolored edge of it in Vietnam.
“I don’t say you don’t have to compromise in the Army,” a captain from the class of ’69 says, “but here it should be different.”
A former first captain and Rhodes scholar adds, “We haven’t solved honor problems yet.”
The chapel still dominates the gray granite buildings like a cathedral in a European city, but the idea that held everything firm is altered, the idea that brought a single, uniform body of young men together not only on Sunday mornings but also in daily meals, parades, and view of life. The new corps has a different identity, multiracial and bisexual, and in it are the hidden stresses found in a solid but amalgamate mass.
This May for the first time there will be women in the graduating class. As second lieutenants they will face problems nearly as great as any they have overcome. They are certain to be watched closely by everyone in the Army. Those who are marrying—about half, and with few exceptions they are marrying classmates or recent graduates—are not assured of assignments with their husbands, although the Army will make every effort to do this. And further along there are the difficulties of raising children in a house where both parents are full-time soldiers.
The women in the class of ’80 entered four summers ago. Some of them may have known what they were getting into, but even these probably had an imperfect idea. Beast Barracks, the first two months of cadet life, is a period of intense physical and psychological stress and a rite of passage. There is shouting, heat, formation running, too much to be done in too little time, a nightmare of anxiety come to life. On a scale of stress from 0 to 100, where a change in residence is 20, marriage 50, and death of a spouse 100, Beast Barracks is estimated to be 300. There were women who missed their periods until November. Some, like women in concentration camps, missed them for a year.
In the spirit of absolute egalitarianism, there were, apart from some minor differences in physical training—women did not take boxing and wrestling, for example—no concessions. The women wore the same uniforms, ate the same food, and lived under the same regimen as the men.
The biggest problem was the running. Women who dropped out were looked down upon by the males. Jim Coe recalls, “I said, what are they here for? There was a woman in my squad who epitomized why women shouldn’t be here. She didn’t seem to try, didn’t put out, didn’t care about the squad.”
On the last day of the summer, just before the plebes marched back from an encampment to formally join the corps, newsmen descended to interview almost all the women but only two of the men. This caused more hard feelings. And upperclassmen were saying that these newcomers had destroyed the corps by bringing in women.
Those who survived Beast Barracks found that the hostility persisted through the school year.
“Good morning, sir,” a woman would say.
“It was a good morning till you got here, bi
tch.”
The men would march behind them in ranks, muttering, “Oink, oink.” Things like that.
Andrea Hollen, graduating with a Rhodes scholarship, recalls: “I stood there saying to myself, I will not cry. I will not cry.”
At the same time that they were being berated by upperclassmen and told they were worthless, some of the women plebes began receiving letters from them. Something more powerful than male autarchy and rules against fraternization was at work. There were women in barracks. There were cadets with beautiful, boyish hair, like that of a shipmate on a cruise. It was an appeal that touched fantasies—on a clear autumn morning or in the winter dusk the image of a tender cheek beneath a military cap, the trace of a smile, the womanly figure in rough clothes, these brought together the affection for a comrade in arms and the aching dreams that dwelled in barracks rooms, allowing one, in a single embrace, to possess a woman, a brother, the corps.
Conservative cosmetics may be worn but not false eyelashes or excessive mascara. Dating or the establishing of any emotional relationship between upperclassmen and plebe women is forbidden. Still, “Ninety-five percent of the women were fraternizing when we were plebes,” one of them estimates, “and they’re doing it now.”
“Before I came here,” Becky Blyth says, “my father told me how blacks were treated in his time and I expected something like that, but I also expected a higher level of accepting change.”
She is tense, dark-haired, beautiful, the daughter of a West Pointer. One brother graduated in ’77, another is a year behind her, and a third is applying for entrance. She had always wanted to be in the Army. Her voice is low and she speaks in swift, articulate bursts.
“I’m not the same person emotionally,” she admits. “I used to be very mellow. Now I tend to get upset at things. I guess I’m trying to wean myself off this bitter trip. One thing was the rumors, the talk. Someone would start a story and it would go around. When I was a plebe, they began telling about a football weekend and I was in this hotel going from room to room. An upperclassman called me in and said I was a disgrace to the corps and a lot of other stuff. I asked if I could make a statement. He said yes. “I wasn’t at that football game,” I said.