Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  There are a number of acceptable answers to the question “What brought you to West Point?” The one response you should never give is “mom and dad.” The idea is that your parents’ ambitions will never be enough fuel for the rigors and sacrifices of four years at the Military Academy. Yet Rob came to West Point because of his dad, in perhaps the one allowable context. Robert Shaw Sr.’s medical problems—which had kept the family on the hop—stem from injuries sustained in Vietnam. Before the war he was a high school All-American with athletic scholarships to Dartmouth and Harvard. When the war began he enlisted. A couple of months into his tour, his platoon was on patrol, and broke for lunch. “My dad just called it ‘a bad day,’” Shaw says. All of a sudden they’re in an ambush; mortars raining everywhere, slugs, North Vietnamese pouring from the trees. His father’s platoon leader lost it—hid in a ditch, wouldn’t act, wouldn’t touch the radio, wouldn’t command.

  “My dad got torn up pretty good,” Rob says. “They put him on the chopper not thinking he was going to make it, he was that blown up.” The medic who rescued him was killed by a shot through the head; the helicopter that airlifted him to a field hospital was so riddled, it never flew again. For years, Rob’s father walked with a cane; there’s still shrapnel around his spine. Rob never found out what happened to the lieutenant who was his father’s platoon leader. “But judging from discussions with my dad,” Rob says carefully, “I don’t think he’s alive anymore, because most of his unit was killed. So I guess for me, I look at my father and say, ‘I’m going to be the lieutenant that takes care of that Private Shaw in the future.’ I want him and my troops to get home because I did the right thing all the way through.”

  A week into the second term, I follow Shaw and the senior class to a mandatory presentation on Bosnia in the flag-draped auditorium of Thayer Hall. The firsties enter wearing their dress uniforms, in large groups; one thing you notice after a few hours at West Point is that cadets are almost never alone. They find familiar seats (“Front left, baby, front left—I haven’t changed my spot in four years”) and toss their gloves into their hats; uncapped, the auditorium becomes a bumpy sea of very short haircuts. The presentation has been arranged because there are only 125 days until graduation (a bit of the Knowledge that plebes are expected to recite on command), and as Shaw says, “The Army is becoming real for us. When you’re new the goal is so far off, you don’t even think about it.” Lieutenants just returned from Bosnia—young officers with only a couple of years on these cadets—step to the microphone and give quick briefings. Throughout the hour, officers walk the rows, looking for sleeping cadets. They shake them by the shoulder, whisper in their ears and lead them to the back of the auditorium, where they have to watch standing up.

  Lieutenant John Byrom, class of ’95, grins throughout his presentation. “I was in the southern part of Bosnia—mountains, beautiful area,” he says. “I had a great time. An example: You’re a lieutenant, suddenly you get a call over your radio: ‘We need help, sir. We got eight Serbs with AK-47s pointed at us telling us to drop our weapons. What do you want us to do?’ Well, that has some strategic implications right there.” The firsties shout huah. “It’s tough. It’s fun, too. I’m jealous of you all. You get to go out and be platoon leaders.”

  Dave Stephens, a stocky twenty-four-year-old lieutenant, takes the lectern. “Everybody awake?” Huah. “How many of you guys going Infantry?” Huah. “Two years ago, I was going through pretty much the same thing as you guys, which was, ‘What do the next couple of years have in store for me?’ Well, Bosnia. And I can guarantee you, a lot of you guys will be going to Bosnia too.” He tells them about Hill 562. “All kinds of missions—you name it, we did it. We ran that hill.” He ends not on a note of excitement but on the non-rousing note of safety. Force protection. “I don’t know what it’s worth to you,” he says, “but a lot of stuff over there to me wasn’t worth losing a soldier. So you just gotta remember, in any kind of confrontation, your number one thing is to get all these guys back home. Unless you want to explain to their parents, it was worth it to you.” When the presentations are over, the firstie class snaps up from its seats as a unit, holds at attention. The captain at the lectern says, “Dismissed,” and the cadets leave together; another night they’ve been assured that their work is important, challenging, of selfless value to their country.

  Private Rash’s Problem

  George Rash, a plebe in Company G-4, has been having just a terrible time. Rash, the son of two Army sergeants, grew up in Centerville, Georgia. (“It’s not even on the map,” he says.) He came to West Point because he’d heard that “the military is a great way to go”: guaranteed job, guaranteed housing, guaranteed medical—a no-brainer. George is a hard-luck cadet; even his name is a hard-luck name. When he passes upperclassmen, they’ll sneer it out: Rash! Rash! At presentations, when the call goes out for volunteers, other plebes will nominate George, just for the pleasure of hearing adults say his unlikely name. He’s had problems with what’s called military bearing: talks too much, looks around too much (between classrooms and barracks, plebes are not supposed to look around or talk at all), doesn’t maintain a good uniform appearance. He hasn’t done so well on the physical side, either, because he injured his knee in a fall at Captain D’s, a southern fried-fish chain; that’s the kind of luck Rash has.

  Rash’s West Point difficulties started right off with Beast Barracks. Beast features road marching—eight miles, ten miles, fifteen miles—and George’s feet did not love the boot. “The shoes were too narrow, and I didn’t get to change the socks often enough,” he says. George came down with trench foot: clammy skin, blisters on top of blisters. “It was ugly,” he says with satisfaction. “The doctors had never seen blisters that bad.” I ask if this will always be a marching problem. “I hope not,” George answers. “But probably.”

  Rash had straight A’s in high school, 1400 on his SATs; he’s obviously a bright kid. He wears glasses, and his skin is covered with the kind of pimples a face sometimes grows out of sheer embarrassment. His expression is a perplexed, willed blankness; he’s ready to be liked. Things have turned awful, but if he ignores them—who knows?—maybe they’ll go back to being good again. None of this is helped by George’s being Jewish in a school full of practicing Christians. Every Sunday morning, the post bustles with scrubbed people headed for church, like a small town. (The Academy even has an official prayer: “. . . Strengthen and increase our admiration for honest dealing and clean thinking . . . Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life . . .”) Some of the more devout kids keep trying to convert George, explaining how Judaism is the wrong religion, that Christ is the only path to salvation. “Basically, a lot of ’em say Jesus is really the best way to go,” George shrugs.

  But Rash’s fundamental problem lies elsewhere. West Point operates on a kind of fanatical male efficiency—the efficiency of timetables, faster computers, a road atlas that leads you to the shortcuts. (You imagine one reason for all the acronyms of military life is that somewhere deep in the Pentagon, manpower analysis has revealed how much troop time is saved through abbreviations on a year-by-year basis.) Upon arrival at West Point, cadets are issued a thick book called The United States Corps of Cadets Standard Operating Procedures. The USCC SOP contains black-and-white photos of the most efficient way desktops, closets, sinks, shelves, uniforms and dressers can be organized; cadets are graded on how well they match it. Even punishments are efficient. Make an error at West Point and your punishment will be something like raking leaves or painting walls; you are corrected, but the correction has maintenance byproducts for the Academy. Plebes deliver laundry and sweep halls; it teaches them to follow orders, and efficiently keeps uniforms circulating and the grounds looking neat. The idea of military dialogue is to hold the word count to a minimum. (At Beast Barracks, plebes are issued their four boiled-down official responses: “Yes sir,” “No sir,” “Sir, I do not understand,” and “No excuse, sir.”) T
he idea of a uniform is to make dressing automatic.

  In this world, George is inefficient; he can’t tell what information is more important than other information. “His problems are brain-fart-type things,” a yuk tells me. “He’s just one of those plebes upperclassmen like to nail.” George has been corrected, yelled at, told to write thousand-word essays on the value of respect, locked up at attention for forty-five minutes at a time. Even the taunts against him are wonderfully efficient—just his unbelievable name: Rash! Rash!

  On a damp, warm day in January, George’s problems come to a head. He failed the Army Physical Fitness Test last November; today he gets his second shot. The remedial APFT will be administered by a huah young Infantry captain named Jim DeMoss. DeMoss is the TAC officer for Rash’s company, the G-4 Fighting Guppies. A thirty-two-year-old Academy graduate, he served with distinction in Operation Just Cause in Panama and in Desert Storm in the Gulf: medals, citations, stories. As a TAC, DeMoss is a combination role model, counselor and disciplinarian for the 125 cadets in G-4.

  If George can’t pass, he’ll get one more shot. If he fails again, he’ll be booted from the Academy. The Army is about meeting standards—clear, nonnegotiable benchmarks of expectation and performance—and that’s the beauty of it, as opposed to the civilian world, where invisible standards shiver and evaporate as you approach them. Cadets must complete at least forty-two push-ups in two minutes; they must complete at least fifty-three sit-ups in two minutes; they must be able to run two miles in less than 15:54. DeMoss right now is the stonefaced representative of those standards, but it’s clear he wants to see his cadets pass. When I first meet DeMoss, I can hardly bear to be in a room with him; he has short hair, an athletic build, and a kind of piercing stare. After I’ve known him a while, I understand that the stare is a type of social optimism. He’s looking into your eyes and hoping he’ll find some portion of the drive and ethic he has in his; after a while, all you can do is look up and meet his expression, come what may. The G-4 physical development sergeant, a kid named Jim Edgar, is here with Captain DeMoss as the timekeeper. The cadets meet in Gillis Field House, down by the Hudson, and loosen up—roll necks, shake out ankles. Three plebes: Rob Anders (muscular, cocky, compact), who failed his November APFT through “a comedy of errors” he’d rather not talk about; Rash; and a tall, midwestern, small-eyed, corn-fed kid named Patrick Schafer. Rash paces the floor mats nervously. Schafer moves with grudging deliberation, like an old dog that doesn’t like any of the places it’s allowed to sit.

  Push-ups come first. Anders lays down sixty-six fluid push-ups. Schafer finishes with a breathless forty-seven. DeMoss crouches beside the cadets as they work, checking the time and calling the count, giving gruff encouragement in his soft Texas accent. “. . . Twenty-three . . . twenty-four—come on, now. Twenty-five . . . twenty-six—good work, keep it goin’.” Rash tops out at fifty-six, and when he stands he has a farmer’s tan: red neck, red ears, red arms.

  “Next is the sit-up,” DeMoss says. “Minimum is fifty-three. Feet up to twelve inches apart, shoulder blades do not have to touch the ground.” Anders settles into position first, Rash holding his sneakers. “Five . . . six—good pace now,” DeMoss tells him. “Fourteen . . . fifteen—pick it up.” Anders bounces to his feet after seventy sit-ups; his embarrassment has now diminished by two-thirds. Schafer starts slowly, rocking back and forth; DeMoss has to remind him to lace his fingers behind his head. At twenty-two, he’s flagging. “Keep goin’!” DeMoss tells him. “Thirty, thirty-one—let’s go—thirty-two, thirty-three—come on now, don’t raise your butt—thirty-four—come on, let’s go. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight—how much time we got left?” Jim Edgar says, “Thirty seconds.” The plebe’s motions are becoming agony. “Thirty-nine, forty—let’s go, pump them!” “Everything you got!” Anders calls. “Forty-one, forty-two, time.” And just like that, Schafer has failed his remedial APFT.

  But he still has to hold Rash’s sneakers. With a cool, dead look in his eye Schafer kneels on the mat as Rash removes his glasses. After ninety seconds, Rash has forty-nine sit-ups and is grunting with an awful defecatory look. He finishes at sixty-one. “Good work,” DeMoss says.

  They walk outdoors into light rain, cross a slim parking lot. “OK, men,” DeMoss says. “Two-mile run. No matter how you did in there, you’re gonna give it all on this event. Schafer, you with me? Huah.” The two-mile course covers a thin gray crumble of a road between the Hudson River and the West Point sewage treatment facility, which today is giving off its pungent reminder that all men are corporeal and fallible; many cadets are convinced the course skirts the sewage plant for just this purpose. “Fifteen fifty-four is our time,” says DeMoss. “You can run in any uniform you want, and you can shed gear along the way if you don’t want to carry it. Any questions? Huah. On your marks, get set, go.” And the three cadets go trotting off down the road. After a few minutes, the three dots spread themselves out; a shorter, hard-charging dot pulling ahead, a tall dot in the middle and, in the back, a dot with glasses. Anders comes back at 13:40, barely winded. He picks up his sweatshirt and heads off to barracks. At 14:30 DeMoss jogs a little ways down the road to give some encouragement. Schafer is just in view; Rash is still a speck in the distance. DeMoss runs alongside Schafer. “Come on—you want this—pick it up now.” Schafer finishes with a 15:49. With an incredible encouragement barrage from DeMoss, Rash comes in at 16:48, nearly a minute behind the standard. He staggers a few steps past the finish and collapses on the grass.

  In thirty days, Rash and Schafer will get one last crack at the APFT; if Schafer can’t improve on sit-ups or Rash can’t pass his run, they’ll be out. Schafer needs to add only eleven sit-ups, but Rash has to shave a full fifty-four seconds off his time. He nods “Yes sir” as DeMoss states this to him, but his face clouds over. Walking to barracks, Rash explains his determination to pass: “If you’re kicked out, it better be over something significant that you don’t have a hand in.”

  Plebes tend to stick together, to help each other with duties and school work, with the shoe-shining and room-straightening and moral support you need to survive at the scrappy bottom of the military food chain. But in the coming weeks, the G-4 plebes start avoiding Rash, freezing him out, acting like he’s already half gone from the Academy. “Nobody’s helping him,” plebe Jasmine Rose says. “It’s kind of bad in a way. He has to cut off so much running time—the plebes aren’t helping him because they don’t think he’s going to make it.”

  The Changes

  Ten years ago—before CLDS, the Cadet Leader Development System—leadership training at West Point was simple: once you stopped being a plebe, your assignment was to make new plebes miserable. It was three on one, the upper classes competing for the command experience of getting plebes to quit. (The old attrition rate was around 40 percent; it stands at 20 percent today.)

  That’s all gone now. As of 1998, the cadets have ranks: plebes are privates, yearlings are corporals, cows are sergeants, firsties are officers. They have the responsibilities that those ranks carry in Army life. This is part of a system of changes at West Point so global that inside Academy walls they’re referred to simply as The Changes.

  In a society like West Point, information is a closed ecosystem, circulating like weather: it travels upward through chains of command, accumulates, pauses, and then rains down as orders. So when a cadet flunks an academic course—or gets into honor trouble or, like George, fails an APFT—the data work their way from company cadets to their TAC and finally to the Brigade Tactical Department, the eye in the sky, which watches everything. “The cadets think we’re just a big spy network staying up twenty-five hours a day,” explains Colonel Joseph Adamczyk, the brigade tactical officer. Adamczyk, in his forties, has the stringy, whittled, cheerful look of a man who just parachuted behind enemy lines to attend a surprise party. Cadets call him Skeletor—after the needling villain of the cartoon He-Man—because he’s the Academy disciplinarian. Walk the post in scuffed s
hoes, in a wrinkled or otherwise unserviceable uniform, with sideburns below ear tips, and Adamczyk will appear beside you to ask why you aren’t meeting the standard. His reasoning is militarily sound: If you can’t keep the amateur military hardware of West Point mission-capable, how will you make out with a helicopter, or a tank? Adamczyk tells me the following joke: “West Point represents two hundred years of tradition unhampered by progress.” He graduated with the class of ’72—when being in the Army meant being in the Army in Vietnam—and understands the need for The Changes. “Society has certainly evolved,” he says, “and West Point has evolved.”

  The smaller changes are atmospheric, as if the Academy has been receiving transmissions from Oprah. Cadets now take courses in stress reduction, eating disorders, nutrition and what’s called wellness. Plebes learn the Wellness Wheel. “It’s a circle with spokes coming out from the center,” explains Colonel Maureen LeBoeuf, whose official title as director of physical education is Master of the Sword. “The spokes are emotional, physical, spiritual, intellectual, career, social. If it’s not balanced, the wheel won’t roll.” Tobacco—that Army mainstay—is now frowned upon; alcohol—the serviceman’s rowdy old pal—has become the kind of guest who’s not really welcome in the house. (A poster called “Risky Business” is required decoration for cadet rooms. The poster begins, “The decision to drink is RISKY BUSINESS.”) Even racy photographs have made their way into an annex to the USCC SOP: “Cadets need to refrain from displaying or viewing sexually explicit materials that could be offensive to others . . . the decorum expected of a society of ladies and gentlemen dictates . . .” (I follow Colonel Adamczyk on a barracks inspection, during which he lifts a framed snapshot and turns to the cadet. “We’ve got a picture here of a young lady celebrating what is obviously some sort of a birthday party—one-point-five-liter bottle of wine up to her lips. I’m not too sure she would be too flattered to know that various and sundry folks were lookin’ at it.”)