by James Salter
There are women wearing jump insignia, women who have fired mortars and driven tanks. There is a whiff of China about them, the deep socialist states. They have made astonishing achievements at West Point. Still, they will always be a minority, perhaps 15 percent in an overwhelmingly male school. “I think they perceive us as a separate class,” one of them says. “There’s the class of ’80 and there’s the female class.”
“I’m not women’s lib or anything, that’s not my ideological foundation,” Andrea Hollen says, “but this is a last battleground. I have a keen appreciation of the issues separating men and women.”
“Most of you are still carrying a grudge,” a man observes.
“That’s true,” they agree.
The bitterness passes and there seems to come a strange affection, born who knows where but slowly effacing the scars. The women’s class rings are smaller than the men’s. They usually wear them on the right hand. The men wear theirs on the left, the hand nearest the heart.
One last barrier remains: women are not allowed to choose combat arms, the branches that would put them in the front lines. For some this is a final ambition. They know they are tough, intelligent, and physically qualified. They not only have no hesitation about being given command in combat units, they desire it.
Lillian Pfluke, the top woman in her class physically, is slight, with pale blue eyes and brown hair. She can do seven pull-ups and run two miles in combat boots in just over thirteen minutes. She wanted infantry. “I knew I could do it, but they won’t let me try.”
Captain of the women’s lacrosse team, Pfluke wears no makeup and is marrying a lieutenant from the class of ’79. “I think I’m very confident, aggressive, and very physical,” she says. “I work well with people. I think I’ll be a good leader.”
One thing that may be happening is that men are feeling less inhibited about their career choices. It used to be otherwise. “Guys are going noncombat arms now—you’d never see that before,” a lieutenant colonel says. “The women made that possible.”
There is not as much spit and polish as there used to be. There are fewer formations and parades, and breakfast, except for plebes, is optional. There has been a ruthless pruning of outmoded traditions, but what lies at the heart remains untouched.
“They still come here for the same reasons they did thirty or forty years ago,” says the director of admissions, Colonel Manley Rogers. “Education is still number one.”
A free education at a world-renowned school, the promise of glamour, an Army career. The profile of those admitted is markedly more conservative than at other colleges. West Point gets the achievers, the solid performers, the practical youths. Eighty percent call themselves middle-of-the-road or conservative in their outlook. Half were varsity captains in high school. Almost a third are born-again Christians.
MacArthur, who was raised in the Army, had difficulty getting an appointment. So did Grant. But the system today is more open. There are still only small numbers of blacks, nothing near the 10 percent target. The main difficulty is poor academic preparation, and the attrition rate of blacks is higher than average. Minority applicants are selected out of order of merit to try to fill quotas, but despite this they are not available.
This year the first captain, highest ranking and most visible man in the corps, is black. He is Vincent Brooks, the tall, confident son of a brigadier general and the successor to such former first captains as Pershing, MacArthur, Wainwright, and Westmoreland.
West Point is still known as the Factory. It stamps out a certain kind of man, proud, competent, not given to nice distinctions. On Trophy Point the cannon goes off at six in the morning. The sky over the eastern hills is barely streaked. Lights are on in the barracks. Shadowy figures hurry on the way to the huge dining hall. The first formation will be at 0715, bells ringing, plebes calling the minutes in the hallways. In four separate areas the corps will begin to form.
The first year is the hardest. The list of things a plebe must know is endless: the menu, Schofield’s definition, the heads of academic departments, coaches and team captains, Worth’s Battalion Orders. (But an officer on duty knows no one—to be partial is to dishonor both himself and the object of his ill-advised favor . . .) The pace is intense. Gone are the days when cadets studied by flashlight after taps with blankets over their heads. Now they jog in the dark with reflecting plastic collars around their necks. Late at night the lighted windows look like endless blocks of city flats.
No horse, no mustache, no woman was the ancient proscription. Essentially it still applies. Cadets live mostly in two-man rooms, the walls pastel color, two chairs, two desks, two beds neatly made, two closets, two footlockers, one stereo. Nothing on the walls and the door must be fully open during all visits between cadets of the opposite sex. No television, that’s in the company dayroom. Nautilus exercise machines in the basement. Only first classmen may have cars. The New York Times is delivered to each room daily. On Saturday night in Eisenhower Hall there are hordes of cadets all in their identical blazers, gray trousers, white shirts. On Sunday the chaplain proclaims, “Strengthen, we pray, the instructors, the staff, the students, that we may be inspired to grow, that we may do more than follow the regulations . . .”
“Cadets are very nice people,” Dr. Francine Hall, a visiting professor of psychology, says, “but a lot of them are very immature socially.”
Captain Teresa Rhone, a clinical psychologist, agrees. “They’re not as far advanced in getting along with other people. There aren’t enough chances for it—they’re in such structured situations all the time.”
“I don’t see them as comfortable with emotions.” Dr. Hall says. “They’re certainly not comfortable with women. The only roles in which most of them have seen women are as mother and dates—they come up here and it’s very unreal, they have to walk on the guy’s arm and so forth. I don’t see the social development of the males as moving along.”
Many of his classmates have marital problems, a captain and West Pointer says. “Their wives complain that they don’t talk to them. The fact is, they’re taught not to admit weakness or communicate doubt or insecurity, and that’s what their wives want to hear.”
“One should not be weak, one should not show weakness,” Captain Rhone says. “We see about one cadet a year who’s breaking down, maybe one suicide attempt in a year and a half. These kids are so well-adjusted that I believe those who can’t handle the stress and the problems self-select out.”
“They don’t have time for intellectual development,” Dr. Hall notes. “They don’t have time to read. The norms of what you do or what you don’t do are very fixed. If you’re seen lying around reading a lot—it’s not the thing to do.”
“There’s peer pressure,” Robin Fennessy says. “You lose cool points. You don’t wear your calculator on your belt. You don’t run to class no matter how late you are. You don’t wear socks with slippers. You don’t date cadets.”
As a college, West Point is unquestionably demanding. It requires more courses than Harvard—mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, economics, law, all are in the core curriculum. Classes are small and the once-sacred formula of a cadet reciting in every subject every day has been abandoned. The singular and narrow aspect, however, is that the faculty is almost entirely military, and of these, 56 percent are West Point graduates on a tour of duty. It is not a school where one finds famous names. This pertains to other things as well.
“You don’t get so many geniuses or near-geniuses,” a visiting professor of history says, “but on the other hand you don’t get the very poor students.”
Not the sort of place to look for a great tight end. For a long time Army did not recruit football players: they walked in. That changed with Earl Blaik in the 1940s. Even so, Blaik had to count on outconditioning and outcoaching other schools, but the level of competition has risen.
“We can’t d
o it anymore,” a member of the athletic staff says. “Once we could utilize our two hours a day better. Now, when the other team goes on six hours a week of weight work, we don’t know where to look for it. And the kids we’re looking for—‘Do I have to cut my hair that short?’ they want to know.”
Further, any football player must serve five years in the Army after graduation. The present coach, a veteran named Lou Saban, is reported to have said when confronted by the high scores necessary for entrance that at Miami he had linemen who outweighed their SATs.
If Army cannot get the big, fast men that make the game, it cannot play big schools. And if it can’t do this, apart from not earning the money to support other athletic programs that should be publicly funded to begin with, a great morale factor will be lost. Just as Pittsburgh, Notre Dame, and USC bask in the glory of their teams, so Army wants to have a football team to identify with, and enlisted men in tank barracks in Germany and radar operators in Alaska want to think of it as their own. It is a problem that concerns the highest levels. The chief of staff went up to West Point last winter with the question: what could be done to help the football program? Without violating the principles the school has staked its reputation on, the answer seems to be, not much.
But what about Navy, they ask? Navy seems to do well. Annapolis is a different school and operates in a different way. It is more pragmatic, more sensible, more accommodating. No one has ever said that it fails to turn out excellent officers, but it is not West Point.
West Point is a religion without a god. Its saints and martyrs are found in the statuary around the plain. It does not create, it preserves. With its beautiful stone walls, its large property, its trees, it fills the role of a great family seat and its graduates are sons. Somewhere is the inheritance that, though they will never receive it, protects them.
Duty, honor, country. On Friday night at the Thayer Hotel near the main gate the visiting teams are billeted. Young men from other schools, casually dressed, sit around downstairs. Compared to cadets they seem like inferior beings, slack, of questionable background and motives.
Across the river the lights in the house of Red Reeder, the old, one-legged colonel who wrote a series of boys’ books about West Point heroes and now lives in retirement close to his beloved school, shine in the dusk.
Life
May 1980
Almost Pure Joy
There was Braudel which I’d never gotten around to reading. And Middlemarch. A senior editor at Viking long ago had told me that he reread Middlemarch every year. I could at least do it once. And Parade’s End. The Great War and Modern Memory, plus three or four issues of The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, which weighed almost nothing. All this and more was spread on the bed when Kay wandered in.
“Are you going to have room for any clothes?” she asked innocently.
“These are just some possibilities. I haven’t decided on anything.”
“There are bookstores in Paris, you know.”
“I don’t like to take chances,” I said.
We were going over for ten weeks: the two of us, the dog, and Bill, a close friend. All going together. We’d been many times to France, and so had the dog, but Bill, though an art dealer and a prodigiously read man, had never been there. He loved Paris as much as anyone did—he had just never seen it. That was going to be remedied.
In the end I got everything into two bags and Kay had two of her own. In a carry-on bag I also had a bottle of 1976 Château Latour, “the most consistent great wine in Bordeaux and probably the world,” to quote Hugh Johnson, for a special occasion. Château Latour 1976, then nine years old, was probably available in France, but as I said, so as not to take chances . . .
We had planned the trip for a long time and had even taken a brief earlier trip as a kind of reconnaissance. We had rented an apartment in the 16th arrondissement, the silk-stocking district of Paris, on a street called Belles Feuilles—beautiful leaves—just off Avenue Victor Hugo and not far from a brasserie called the Stella, which turned out to be the canteen of the 16th, filled on Sunday evening with chic couples back from the country, the women in mink coats and blue jeans.
Away from the avenue, in the opposite direction, was Avenue Foch, immensely wide and bordered with embassies and houses with iron-fenced gardens.
A friend in Paris had looked at the apartment for us—we had taken it sight unseen—and given it an okay. It turned out to have a terrace and, on the first floor, a German shepherd that broke out in terrific barking whenever we passed with Sumo, our dog.
Sumo was a Welsh corgi, nine years old at the time, intelligent, imperturbable, and slightly lame, although he could run like a hare when necessary. “Oh! Le pauvre petit!” the French women would cry upon seeing him limping along, some of their sympathy spilling over onto me. There were not many corgis in Paris, a city otherwise rich in dogs, so there were also frequent questions as to Sumo’s origin. My dog vocabulary gradually grew stronger.
On the way down to the wide green borders of Avenue Foch, past the hospital, Belles Feuilles ran into Avenue Bugeaud, the street on which Louise de Vilmorin lived with her American husband and their three children before the war. Aristocratic, literary, and a famous beauty, she was one of the goddesses of her generation. The apartment building she lived in is still there, of course—that is the way Paris is constructed—and the small tabac near the corner is there as well. Louise de Vilmorin, restless and bored, told her husband she was going down to the tabac to get some cigarettes but in fact met her lover there, with whom she departed, comme ça, as they say, becoming divorced, later marrying a Hungarian count, and eventually winding up after the war as André Malraux’s mistress and close friend. One can get an idea of her appeal from a photograph in Vogue, and her style from the brief but irresistible novel, Madame De, one of several she wrote.
Walking down to Avenue Foch, I would look up to imagine the windows of Louise de Vilmorin’s apartment where her husband sat with the newspaper as she left and where, legend has it, she could look back up and see him reading.
When we arrived in Paris we went immediately to lunch, for me oysters and white wine. Then we walked or napped, I don’t remember, but when we reached Bill’s hotel that evening, on Rue de Longchamp, and opened the shutters, there, almost at the end of the street it seemed and blazing with light was the Eiffel Tower. It was like some unbelievable fireworks display except that it went on and on. A more dazzling welcome to the city would be hard to imagine.
We rented a car. There was an argument about that—the rental agency had confirmed a small car, but when we arrived all they had was the large touring size which they offered at no reduction in price, accompanied by helpless shrugs. We drove to Switzerland, had some adventures, then back through Germany along the Rhine. The dog went with us, of course, and most of the luggage. A few days after returning to Paris we went out to Versailles for a picnic. Bill, naturally, had never seen it.
The day was sunny and warm. We parked in the huge, cobbled courtyard, strolled at length through the famous gardens, and finished with one of the tours of the great palace itself. In the Hall of Mirrors, Kay began to feel a little funny and a few minutes later, in the gilded theater, said she thought we should be getting back to Paris.
I perhaps have forgotten to mention that she was pregnant, eight and three-quarters months. Despite the most heartfelt advice (You need support, you need family around) and pleas (Oh, please, please don’t have that baby in Paris) and after long, lazy discussions and a final, snap decision, we had come to Paris for the delivery. Why, you may very well ask. Put it down as a romantic idea. We had taken some practical steps, visited the American Hospital in Neuilly, just outside of Paris, and made arrangements with a French obstetrician there. The American Hospital is an old and in some ways elegant institution where English is spoken, generally, and rich people, seeking comfort and dignity until the last, so
metimes go to die. Among the many patrons commemorated on bronze tablets is the name Macomber, which I assume Hemingway took for use in his celebrated story.
French medicine is, in some quarters, looked upon as slightly primitive, though in my experience it has proved to be more than satisfactory. In the provinces doctors often have no receptionists, the gorgons whose purpose seems to be to make life difficult for the patient, and answer the phone and make out bills themselves. For a slight, fixed amount in France they will make house calls, and although they approach every diagnosis by way of palpating the liver, in a country of excellent food and plentiful wine, perhaps this is not misguided.
We drove into Paris in the early evening, the lovely twilight hour known as cinq à sept. No city is more beautiful at day’s end. Bill went on to his apartment, which he rented from one of the Nabokovs, on Rue Oberkampf. He had met a Swedish girl a few days before and regained his feet, so to speak. On Belles Feuilles, we nervously timed the contractions. We had been instructed not to come to the hospital until they were three minutes apart.
At nine o’clock we went, past Porte Maillot and out the boulevard. Paris was infinite and alight. The diners everywhere were being served their entrees, the sommeliers were opening the wine.
Admission formalities at the hospital were the briefest. We went upstairs to the obstetrical section. There was only one other woman, Lebanese, I believe, there as a patient.
For an hour or so in the quiet of the labor room the contractions became stronger and more closely spaced. At about eleven, Dr. Bazin arrived. I had the distinct impression he had come from a dinner party and before that had spent a pleasant afternoon on the golf course. Perhaps it was the plaid trousers. Bazin was a slender, poised man, not given to much conversation. He was a Breton and had some of the stoicism of the breed. In his sketchy English he asked if I would mind stepping out of the room for a few minutes while he conducted an examination.