Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  None of that meant squat to the Rangers. First couple of weeks he was there, none of the Rangers would talk to him; the enlisted guys wouldn’t even salute. Like many male cadets, Whitey is a dipper—a tobacco chewer. (His third-year roommate taught a bunch of guys to dip, and in May there were awards. Top honor: Grand Master Dipper. Whitey got Rookie of the Year.) One afternoon, Whitey gave an operations briefing, forty minutes with a mouthful of dip, and something told him not to spit. “I only did one time,” Whitey says. “I gutted the rest, which is swallowing it.” A sergeant—a burly thirty-year-old, a Ranger—pulled Whitey aside and told him everyone was impressed; they thought he’d be spitting every thirty seconds. “You’re one of the We now,” the sergeant said. His last morning, Whitey ran the Ranger obstacle course, and when he finished the enlisted guys were waiting with an official Ranger poster. They’d covered it with signatures and messages, like a kid’s yearbook: “Gain Weight,” “Go in the Infantry,” and “We’ll See You in the Ranger Battalion.”

  So when he got back to West Point, Whitey gave his measurements for the uniform to the Academy tailor. He’d decided to be an Infantry mud crawler with his roommate, Rob “Harley” Whitten, and his buddy Antonio “Iggy” Ignacio. “That’s when the stress just started building,” Whitey says. One July night his Ranger platoon leader—a twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant, hard-core—had taken him to a bar in Columbus, Georgia, the low-roofed town outside Ranger headquarters. When they were very drunk, the PL announced, “After the Rangers, I’m done.” Army life had left him feeling cut off from everything that wasn’t Army. “I don’t remember the last time I was out on a date—I don’t even know how to act in front of a girl anymore,” the lieutenant said. “I’m so burnt, I just want to get out.” Whitey kept thinking about it. “I was choosing what to do with my life,” he says. Infantry meant sticking with the military for a career. With his high rank, he knew he’d qualify for a slot in Aviation. And Aviation—piloting helicopters—is a skill you can sell outside the military. You could even fly helicopters for the FBI.

  And then the whole notion of service began to work on Whitey like a guilty conscience. He couldn’t shake the idea that Aviation was a sellout move. For weeks, wherever he went, he felt two futures dragging over his head like a pair of clouds: he could be loyal to everything he’d always wanted or to all the things he might want. The weekend before branch selection, he got drunk at an Army football game, stumbled into a Porta-Potty—not one of religion’s glory spots—and started praying. Basically, he asked God to pick the branch for him. “I was looking up at the sky, I was like, ‘Someone, please, someone reach down and tell me what to do. How much do I sacrifice if I choose Infantry, and how much do I do for myself if I choose Aviation?’” Twelve hours left, he ended up drunk in Iggy’s room. “Igs, this is it,” Whitey said. “I’m doing it. I’m going Infantry.”

  “You sure?” Iggy asked. “I’m not sure you’re sure.”

  But Whitey was the number thirteen-ranked military cadet, a man who’d never wanted anything except to serve his country in uniform. “This is why I’m here,” Whitey said. “I may not like all of it, but I can do it, and I can do it good.” Iggy nodded, said he supported him. The next morning, Whitey sat down at his computer, dialed up the branch selection Web site. Clock ticking, ten minutes to go. He kept trying to make himself type the word Infantry.

  The Aura

  West Point, the United States Military Academy, is a formation of chapels, playing fields, cannons and buildings on the banks of the Hudson River, fifty miles north of the first tow-York City. The Academy has a single mission: take civilians, produce officers. You enter the Academy through a Military Police checkpoint and pass rows of stately granite buildings until you’re on a green hill above the river. On a clear spring day, you can look across to the rolling treetops of the Hudson Valley, or upriver where powerboats leave creases on the water, and feel that God himself has issued you a uniform and notebook and sent you to one of the most crisply beautiful places on earth to study the practice of war.

  When you look into Academy history, you keep bumping into America’s history, as if the same story is being told two different ways. Just before his death in 1799, George Washington wrote Alexander Hamilton, “The establishment of a military academy [has] ever been considered by me to be an object of the highest national importance.” Three years later, classes were in session by the banks of the Hudson. In its early decades, West Point trained officers to be engineers—men who squinted at rivers, cleared forests and laid the first bridges and roadways for America. Most officers you see in old-time photographs—wide hats, sweeping mustaches—were graduates: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant. The Civil War was an armed West Point reunion, old friends catching up by firing at each other. Out west, graduates like George Custer chased Indians. In World War I, General “Black Jack” Pershing (class of ’86) exported West Point standards of bearing to Europe. (One French general wrote home, “Why, these Americans even die in neat rows.”) World War II shaped up as a big overseas alumni project, with Generals Eisenhower (class of ’15), Patton (’09), Bradley (’15), and MacArthur (’03) as leading class officers. General William Westmoreland (class of ’36) commanded all U.S. forces in Vietnam. General Norman Schwarzkopf (class of ’56) commanded all U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf. When officers like Schwarzkopf talk about the Academy, they don’t say “West Point,” they say “this national treasure we call West Point.”

  But with the Cold War one decade in the past, the Academy’s history has ceased to be a useful guide for its future. (The military misses the old Soviet threat the way rich families miss the simple, pressing clarity of being poor.) What the military fears now is called the culture gap. By the final months of the Second World War, one in ten Americans was serving in uniform; that number today is closer to one in three hundred. When the draft ended in 1975, civilian culture and military culture shook hands, exchanged phone numbers, and started to lose track of each other; military theorists worry that most Americans have no firsthand knowledge of how their Army lives or what their Army does.

  In its campaign against the culture gap, the Academy has retained a glossy New York public relations firm. It has also participated in a Discovery Channel documentary about service academies and allowed a TV crew—the same team responsible for Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman—to film a pilot called West Point at West Point, in hopes it would do for the Academy what the successful series Pensacola: Wings of Gold has done for Navy flight school. (I have watched the pilot, which turns cadet life into sixty-minute story lines: hazing, binge drinking and the love that flowers between the ranks.) For the same reason, West Point invited Rolling Stone to the Academy; as a reporter I was granted unprecedented access to training, personnel, barracks and cadets. In all, I spent four years on post, to find out what kind of men and women would subject themselves to the intense discipline of West Point, and to discover what it means to attend the Academy during the most trying time in its history.

  A West Point entering class is literally a high school all-star team. The median grade point average is 3.5; 14 percent are Eagle Scouts, 20 percent are class presidents, 60 percent are varsity team captains. Candidates are flagged from a long way off, like aircraft approaching on radar. The Department of Admissions boasts of having the most sophisticated database in the country: drop a line to West Point in the sixth grade and you’ll receive correspondence from admissions every six months until you hit high school, when the rate doubles. More than 50,000 juniors open Academy files; from there, admissions becomes an endurance contest that produces 12,000 applicants, 6,000 physical fitness exams and 4,000 official nominations (from senators, congressmen, the vice president or the president); at the end, 1,200 cadets are left standing. (Even medical histories are fair game: if you have flat feet, asthma, diabetes or any experience with Ritalin or antidepressant drugs, chances are you’re out of the running.) The staff spends a careful forty hours with each file
. Cadets receive an education that’s famously valued at $250,000, and earn $600 in Army pay a month. Each year brings an unforeseen problem. In 1998, when Saving Private Ryan was sparking its resurgence of bystander patriotism at multiplexes around the country, the effect on West Point was very different. “We had a number of people call in and close their files after seeing the movie,” says Colonel Michael Jones, director of admissions. “They couldn’t make the leap that we don’t fight those types of wars anymore.”

  Plebes spend their first summer at Cadet Basic Training—Beast Barracks—where they get soldierized. Five weeks of all the things you’ve seen in movies: sudden-death haircuts, buckle-shining, wall-jumping, scrambling cadets looking perplexed. Plebes report with underwear and a toothbrush; everything else is Army issue. After surviving Beast (the drop rate is about 10 percent), they enter a world where students don’t even have the same names they do everyplace else. Sophomores are yearlings or yuks, juniors are cows, seniors are firsties. They join one of the Academy’s thirty-two companies, in which every aspect of their lives is overseen by an adult officer called a TAC. (Each company is assigned a letter, number and name: there are the A-1 Apaches, the E-4 Elvis Lives!) They pledge to follow an honor code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.” And their development—as they say at West Point—begins.

  Cadets are developed, tested and ranked in three areas: academic, military and physical. These fuse into the most important development area: character. “Every person,” explains Colonel Kerry Pierce, director of Policy, Planning and Analysis, “and every program and every experience must contribute to character.” Like many adults at West Point, Pierce speaks with a kind of grave, armed courtesy—the voice of someone who knows he’s better adapted for the world’s challenges than you are but doesn’t want to press the point. West Point is a full-immersion experience, what the administration calls a “twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week military environment.” Cadets don’t get summer vacations. Until firstie year, they are required to be in uniform at all times. (A plebe hitting the bathroom for a small-hours pee must slip on Army-issue sweats before stepping into a barracks hallway.) The process of character-building is designed to be exhausting, and when it’s not exhausting, to be irritating. A student at West Point is assigned five hours of homework each night, but a cadet’s daily schedule allows for no more than three hours of study time. Then there is what’s known as Plebe Knowledge: cadets are required to memorize pages of regulations, attack strategies, terrain, weapons, mottos and traditions. They also master greetings: within days of arrival, a plebe has to know the names of the 125 cadets in his or her company—no mean feat when all 4,000 cadets on post are dressed and barbered the same.

  Each of the three West Point programs offers a clear way to win and a clear way to lose. Fail more than two academic courses and you’re out of West Point. The military program includes field training like live-fire exercises and jumping out of airplanes. (At West Point, military life is presented as a certain kind of courageous fun: it’s fun to ride in helicopters and train on tanks; it’s especially fun to “blow stuff up.” When I tell a lieutenant colonel at the Department of Military Instruction that I think something is “cool,” he gently corrects me. “It’s fun,” he says.) Fail military tasks and you’re out of West Point.

  In the physical program, cadets take the Army Physical Fitness Test twice a year. Deputy Director Lieutenant Colonel Brian Morgan—who has the light step and honorably squashed features of a middleweight boxer—explains the process. Fail once, you get another chance in sixty days; fail twice, you get a second retest after thirty days; fail three times, pack your bags. Cadets are also measured for weight and body fat; let yourself go, and you’re out of West Point. All male plebes take boxing, where the main idea is not learning how to punch but learning how to be punched—discovering you can take a hit and keep going. “It’s one of the best things for fear management there is,” Morgan says, pacing the boxing room, below posters with brawny slogans like “Champions never take the easy way out—pay the price” and “Fatigue makes cowards of men.”

  The three separate rankings produce a single class rank. And unlike a college, where the stomach-in-your-mouth feeling of checking grades comes only two or three times a year, cadet rankings change every few days; you’re always being evaluated. “We develop them across these programs and across the board,” Colonel Pierce says, “because as officers that’s what they’ve got to be: physically, mentally, emotionally and ethically ready to do the job.” When you’re finished, when you’ve absorbed the Academy’s lessons, you leave West Point with a new culture-gap role: domestic ambassador. “There’s a growing difference between the values of the military and society, and there always will be,” Pierce says. “That’s just the bottom line. So that’s the dual responsibility: it’s up to the officers to explain the Army to society.”

  Most people spend their teens and early twenties trying on moral codes, wearing them around the store, seeing which ones fit. Part of the adventure of being an American is discovering what your values are and finding ways to put them into practice. Cadets arrive at West Point and are given a ready-made identity—and told it is perhaps the most valuable identity of all. This takes place at a time when every shift and dilemma that’s hit the United States during half a century is crowding into West Point at once; what West Point is shivering through is a decade of aftershock. Gender, identity, community, globalism, multiculturalism, professionalism, pluralism, information technology, TV, political correctness, wellness, progress of various kinds—all in the same delayed reaction. The Academy is absorbing what it needs. The cadets are doing their best to stay on top of it, even as they try to unlearn and relearn the lessons of their adolescence, and remake themselves as the people the Army requires them to be.

  The Theory and Practice of Huah

  First Captain Rob Shaw is twenty-five years old: tall, modest, blond, square-jawed, the kind of cadet West Point adults—higher, as they’re called in Academy lingo—can look at and say, “Ah, the admissions process is working like a top.” For cadets like Shaw, the Army functions as a kind of secular religion. There’s a word you hear a lot at West Point: huah. (It’s the word Al Pacino rode to an Oscar as the retired Infantry colonel in Scent of a Woman.) Huah is an all-purpose expression. Want to describe a cadet who’s very gung-ho, you call them huah. Understand instructions, say huah. Agree with what another cadet just said, murmur huah. Impressed by someone else’s accomplishment, a soft, reflective huah. Rob Shaw is huah.

  Shaw’s military rank is number one, twelve places ahead of Whitey Herzog. As a screen saver on his desktop computer, Shaw keeps a rotating sequence of Successories, the inspirational corporate slogans you see advertised in airline magazines. When I’m in his office, Rob’s Successory shows a pretty noble-looking eagle above the words Duty—a Call Heard by the Brave. Shaw speaks in clipped, dialogue-sized versions of Successories. Moving with an athlete’s physical economy—you almost never see clumsiness at the Academy—he tours me around his office in brigade headquarters, shows me the plaque of all the former West Point first captains, signatures in wood, reaching back deep into the 1800s. “You look up and you see Robert E. Lee, William Westmoreland, Douglas MacArthur—General MacArthur went on to do great things, as you know. Those are some big shoes to fill. To be selected to lead people of this caliber, it’s just very humbling.”

  Shaw’s childhood was the classic moving-around story. His father had health problems, and the relocations followed his treatment. After high school in Raleigh, North Carolina—“My grades were horrible; I liked to have too much fun”—Shaw ended up at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It was another classic story: everybody was going to college, and even though Rob had always wanted the Army, he got on the same train. First year there, Rob pledged a fraternity, drank, blew off classes. “I partied entirely too hard,” he says. He dropped out, got a job folding T-shirts at the Gap. Then he
enlisted in the Army. “My mother wasn’t too thrilled,” he says. “She shed some tears over it. She kept saying, ‘Why don’t you go back to school? We’ll pay for school.’” But Rob loved the Infantry, and after two years his platoon leader recommended him as a prior-service candidate to West Point.

  At Fort Bragg, for the first time in his life, Rob felt completely at home. His voice turns evangelical when he talks about it. “The Army just clicked for me,” he says. “I liked the demands, I liked the schedule, I liked the way I was treated. Some people will tell you you get treated like a child in the Army. But more often I see you’re told to do something, and if you fail to do it, you’re held to a standard. You’re treated as a man.” Rob had cut through the tangle of civilian life onto the clear, broad plains of the military. “Just stand in the middle of Fort Bragg in the middle of the day—there’s such a sense of urgency. Airplanes are flying over. Everybody’s camoed up, going out to train. Artillery rounds are being shot on the range; the windows rattle. At my college fraternity, we called each other brothers and did rituals, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool.’ But at Bragg I realized what real brotherhood was like—kind of a fire that melds people together. You’re doing tough, challenging, dangerous things, for a good reason. It’s just an awesome feeling.” Rob doesn’t like to imagine the Rob Shaw who would have stuck with the out-of-uniform world. “One of my friends from high school, she works for IBM. She’s making money, but she doesn’t get any fire from it. She’s not personally motivated to work other than to pay rent and these sorts of things.”

  One weekend at Fort Bragg, Rob’s dad came to pick him up. They drove off post, passed the long, heavy rows of aircraft at Pope Air Force Base. “And my dad just turned to me and said, ‘You feel like you’re a part of something big and good, don’t you?’ I was like, ‘Absolutely.’ And that’s exactly what I was feeling: part of something that is big and powerful and inherently good—and I believe the Army is inherently good. You’re not chasing money or anything like that. I think it’s a noble profession. That’s why they call it the service. I literally would wake up in the morning—and I still feel this way, not as much because I’m not in the field Army—but when you see U.S. Army, it’s a good feeling. It’s a good feeling to be part of that organization.”