Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  Each of the thirty-two West Point companies has a separate chain of command with posts the cadets fill: honor representative, military development officer. The companies also include a respect-for-others officer, to promote racial and sexual awareness, and a community service officer, who encourages cadets to dust their hands off and get involved. “They do wonderful things,” says Colonel Barney Forsythe, vice dean for education. Serve in soup kitchens, bang together A-frames with Habitat for Humanity, design Web sites for women’s shelters. In the spring, cadets are “huggers” at the Special Olympics—they wait for athletes at the tape with an embrace. Which raises a question: I ask Forsythe if this ever interferes with the Army’s traditional role of applying coercive violence. He talks for a moment about “broad spectrums” and “operational requirements.” Then he says, “It’s really tough. I won’t speak for the Army, I’ll speak for myself in this regard. I don’t know that we’ve fully sorted all this out yet. How to, on the one hand, prepare people for the violence of combat, yet equip those same people for the midrange peacekeeping operation and the humanitarian maneuver. Helping cadets not only to learn the sort of traditional warrior spirit—physical courage, obedience to orders in the heat of battle—but also to develop a genuine respect for other people and their welfare is a huge challenge.” These are elements of what some cadets call the “Nice-Guy Army.”

  The largest changes involve plebes. “In 1968,” Colonel Adamczyk says, “when I came to West Point, society lived on the myth of West Point toughness: the physical harassment, the verbal denigration, the deprivation.” Hazing—even after CLDS—had always been unofficially tolerated at West Point. A firstie could grab a plebe for shower detail: put him in a poncho, yell, lock him up at attention against a wall, make him recite Knowledge for hours until he passed out. Plebes would sweat so much inside the poncho it looked like someone had showered there. A plebe who kept making Knowledge mistakes might be ordered to a firstie room for hanging out or swimming detail. Every cadet has a wall locker, a closet with two doors that swing out. For hanging out, a plebe would dangle by his pits between the closet doors. For swimming detail, the plebe would lie across the tops of the doors and make swimming motions for however long—minutes, half hours—the upperclassman felt was deserved. (As a plebe, Rob Shaw was forced to wear a female’s uniform and had chicken nuggets dumped on his head.) The administration itself engaged in a kind of haze; whatever privileges you’d managed to win as an eighteen-year-old, you surrendered instantly. (Going to the Military Academy was like being sent away to a military academy.) No music, no telephone, no opportunity to go off post; TV was a glowing, distant memory. As late as 1995, plebe year was so frightening that new cadets would pee in their own sinks rather than risk the walk to the bathroom, where upperclassmen were probably ready and waiting with some kind of haze.

  In 1997, Commandant General John Abizaid arrived and began enforcing the no-haze policy. As of 1998, if you hazed a plebe with even violent yelling, you’d be reprimanded; if it happened repeatedly, you’d be expelled. (The USCC SOP: “Cadets found to have committed hazing [are] subject to separation and/or court-martial.”) The model now is to correct plebes in a firm, polite voice. Plebes no longer have to ping—a kind of racewalk—between barracks or wear knee socks pulled all the way up, which made them both eyesores to the landscape and unmistakable as targets. Plebes can listen to music through their computers the first semester they arrive at West Point; plebes are given walking privileges outside the reservation; plebes have phones in their rooms; plebes have TV cards in their computers, which take major channels plus CNN.

  Hard-line graduates e-mail the superintendent complaining the place is soft, will turn out soft officers. In the world of abbreviations that is West Point, the old graduates have developed a shorthand expression for what’s wrong. They say, “The corps has”—which is short for “The corps has gone to hell. “Adamczyk doesn’t have much patience for corps-has: “No class—although they will always tell you—has a tougher plebe year than any other class.” But there’s even some corps-has among cadets. “When I was a plebe, we stuck in our rooms out of fear,” Whitey Herzog tells me. “Now the plebes are staying in their rooms, but they’re watching TV. They’re watching Friends.”

  Meet the Goodfellas

  Late January at West Point is known as Gloom Period. Gray weather, gray walkways, gray uniforms, sky pressing down. Because it’s Gloom Period, it’s a good time to get the hell off post and do something fun, so Whitey Herzog calls his three best friends and arranges to drive to a bar in nearby Tarrytown, New York; there’ll be drinking, there’ll be music, there’ll be girls. Brian Supko—captain of the corps’ baseball team and once drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays—is seeing a girl at Marymount College; she’ll bring friends to the bar.

  As they say in the joint, no one makes it through alone. Whitey runs with a crew—together they’re known as the Goodfellas. “We all pretty much had the same calling to be here,” Whitey explains. “Didn’t come for grades or sports. And it’s funny, whenever we get together, there’s never a night where for forty-five minutes we don’t start talking about what we’d do in battle. We talk about war, how much it matters to us. Some people think maybe it’s not cool to always talk about combat and shit, but I’ll tell you what, the Goodfellas, we do. We joke about it—that sounds kind of sick—but we believe it, and someday that’s going to be put to the test.”

  One night—before they were called the Goodfellas—they rented the video: they saw guys working their way through an organization, soldiering, watching out for each other, learning a code. They said, “Hey, that’s us.” All firsties wear West Point rings (in the old days, graduates were called ring thumpers, because they would knock their rings against desks so other West Pointers would notice), and the Goodfellas had their crew name inscribed on the inside rim. When Whitey wrote the inscription on the order form, the woman looked up. “Oh, so you’re one of the Goodfellas?”

  It’s Yearling Winter Weekend at West Point, and General Norman Schwarzkopf is speaking at the Saturday yearling banquet, so Whitey arranges for the Goodfellas to head out after that. There’s also going to be a concert, which Whitey doesn’t plan to attend. Friday lunch, an announcement is made in the dining hall: “Attention all cadets: the uniform for the Dave Matthews concert is dress gray with blazer option. Civilian clothes are not allowed in performance at Eisenhower Hall. Please continue eating.”

  The West Point landscape is structured to remind cadets how important their mission is—so that any place the eye touches down, in some idle moment, there is the potential for character-building. Statues of honored graduates dot the campus (Patton, MacArthur), and the library is hung with pictures of Academy heroes (J.E.B. Stuart, Eisenhower, more Patton), as if to continually advertise the West Point experience to people who have in fact already decided to attend West Point. On the outsides of buildings are plaques commemorating the feats of West Point grads in battle, which cadets stop to read. “‘Albert Leopold Miller, 1 July 1898, for bravery and coolness’—wow, shit, check this—‘after being shot through the head.’” General Schwarzkopf’s visit serves the same purpose—the fact that this man has traveled here, stepped out from the TV news programs to eat, talk and share the airspace with the yearling class.

  Before the banquet, the yearling classes of G-4 and H-4 meet for a reception. West Point is a continual dress rehearsal for life in the military, so when cadets gather at an official social, the objective is not so much for them to have a good time as it is to learn how to comport themselves at Army functions. Once a year, the TACs of each company invite their firsties to dinner: cadets learn how to RSVP to an invitation, how to make conversation in a superior’s living room, how to write the thank-you note. Jim DeMoss, the G-4 TAC, is here. So is Captain Andrea Thompson, the TAC of Whitey’s company, the H-4 Hogs. The cadets are in the full dress uniform, with its many buttons and its big Frankenstein bolts at the neck. Captain DeMoss’s wife hands o
ut drinks. A frisky Oklahoman, Mrs. DeMoss tells me that when she and Jim were first married, “we made a rule—Jim couldn’t talk in acronyms.”

  DeMoss and Thompson have quite different leadership philosophies. Jim DeMoss grew up in a military household, graduated from West Point in 1988. To be invited back as a TAC is a great plum and a career advancer. “I mean, I’ve been fortunate enough that everything, all the stars have lined up for me,” he says humbly. Almost everything Jim DeMoss says is humble in this way, and could be printed in a phrase book for Army life, and this is the mark of Army success. Not that you learn to cleverly mimic the official Army philosophy, but that you absorb it so thoroughly that when you speak from the heart, what comes out is the official Army philosophy.

  In many ways, Jim DeMoss stands for West Point as it’s always been. His office in the Forty-seventh Division is spartan; every decoration has Army significance. Coins from his old regiments, Army insignia, Army photographs, Army slogans. I ask him about the medal—the Bronze Star with Valor—he received for work in Desert Storm, and he shrugs it off: “Definitely I got it because I was in the position of responsibility. It’s like everything else—mostly because of my soldiers. I was in the right place at the right time.” When he does academic counseling (kids failing courses), he sends cadets off with Army-style motivation: “Now get out there and kick some English butt.”

  Andrea Thompson, thirty-two, grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and has the hard, flinty beauty of the plains states. In many ways, her command style is an expression of the new, more culturally fluent West Point. You get the impression that Jim DeMoss spreads himself over G-4 and says, “I am the standard, do the right thing”; Thompson seems to say, “Don’t look at me, be yourselves, and surprise me by that being the right thing.” She graduated from the University of South Dakota on an ROTC scholarship and planned to spend only a few years in the Army. She’s now past the ten-year mark. “The people and the lifestyle appealed to me,” she says with the soldier’s basic mix of romance and pragmatism. “I love the team concept. And what other job do you know of where you’re going to depend on people to your left and your right to save your life?”

  Captain Thompson keeps a GI Joe lunch box on her desk; she’s got a Slinky on her cabinet and a Gumby doll on her filing chest. Symbolism: “So my cadets know you always have to be flexible.” Walk into her office in the afternoon and you’ll hear her playing Liz Phair or Hole’s Celebrity Skin through the crappy boom box she bought at the PX store. “She’s cool as shit,” Whitey says of his TAC. “She’s straight up; there’s no gimmick. I think she’s a real person. She likes to party and have a good time and that helps, because she understands a lot.”

  Many male cadets are here with dates. The dates look like astronauts’ wives; there seems to be a uniform standard of prettiness for cadet girlfriends. The dresses the girls wear mostly follow the promdress model: crossing straps, flounces, corsages. Some expose shoulder tattoos. Cadets aren’t allowed to get tattooed while at West Point (nor is anyone allowed to wear a tongue stud, though if you stare in people’s mouths while they talk, you’ll occasionally see a flash of illicit steel). But their dates are, and when I attend similar banquets for cows and firsties I see more tattoos, more piercings, as their dates continue their voyage into civilian life.

  The Goodfellas hook up about an hour later. Whitey rolls by in a big four-door Olds; Brian Supko parks next to him in a snappy BMW. (Firsties are the only cadets allowed to keep cars—POVs, personally owned vehicles—on post, and there are a lot of cars. At the end of junior year, West Point offers each cadet what’s called a Cow Loan: $18,000, at an incredibly low interest rate. Half tends to go for a car and the West Point ring, the rest gets invested.) The Goodfellas load into two vehicles, stop at the all-night grocery to grab a few packs of condoms (“It’s gonna be a party-fest,” Whitey explains; they’ve signed out for the night and booked rooms at the Best Western), then make the half-hour drive south.

  The Goodfellas operate like an interpersonal squad. Supko, a handsome preppy kid from San Diego, father a Marine colonel, is the face guy. “Brian’s the player in the crew,” Whitey explains. (Supko says, “I don’t know how it got started, but like the joke around school is that my major is women.”) John Mini, a shallow-chested, deep-voiced cadet from Redding, California—near the Oregon desert, where he and his dad shooed kids doing Satan-worshiping stuff off the lawn—is the brains. He was a chess prodigy at age thirteen, walked into the Junior Nationals on an impulse and walked out undefeated two weeks later with the championship. He’s branching Armor. Twenty years from now, the other Goodfellas are sure they’ll turn on CNN and see General John Mini giving a briefing; he has that quiet, reasonable presence.

  Antonio Ignacio—Iggy—is the Goodfellas’ enforcer, a burly, thick-voiced Filipino. His dad was a Philippine marine, brought the family to America in 1983 for the better life. Sixteen years later, his son is graduating from West Point. Iggy is going Infantry and is hard-core on military discipline; one night, he took a cigarette, put it out against his forearm, turned to the Goodfellas and said, “This is for if I ever let you down.” He and Whitey call each other pare, a Filipino word that more or less means “best buds.” He turns a few cigarettes upside down in each pack, so when the Goodfellas draw one, they might get lucky; when he wants to change the subject or doesn’t want to answer a question, he says, “’Cause the sky is blue, and God loves the Infantry.” Whitey is the Goodfellas’ squad leader, the NCO, the guy who stirs the drink.

  (Nicknames: since plebes aren’t allowed to address each other by first name, cadets usually end up with a name based on family name or their hobbies. Supko is Suppy, Ignacio is Iggy. Whitey’s roommate is Rob “Harley” Whitten because he practically grew up on a motorcycle. Don Herzog ended up with “Whitey” after Whitey Herzog, the former manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. John Mini’s name functions as a nickname by itself just because it’s so much fun to say: John Mini.)

  After thirty minutes, the Goodfellas pull into the Tarry Inn, an Irish bar Whitey has chosen because of the jukebox. He feeds in five bucks and plots the tunes: Stones, Van Morrison, Allman Brothers, Hendrix, Grateful Dead—the music he’s loved since high school. John Mini and Iggy go to the bar and begin the process of liquoring up. Suppy talks to the women, laying down the conversational smoke until everyone can get comfortable. The Goodfellas make their standard toast, an inversion of the West Point honor code: “If you’re going to lie, lie to save a friend. If you’re going to cheat, cheat for a friend. And if you’re going to drink, get drunk with the Goodfellas.” They do a shot of Jack to their future military careers: “That we may never fuck up on our soldiers.” Then there are drinking games: if a Goodfella is caught holding a beer with his right hand instead of his left, someone will call “Bull moose!” and he has to pound it down; if Iggy, say, feels like pulling a don’t-move, he’ll shout “Don’t move” and Whitey, or whoever, has to stay frozen until Iggy says, “Get the fuck out of there.” At first it feels like dumb frat stuff; then you realize the subtext. These kids are practicing to be soldiers: following orders, being aware of what they’re doing, perfecting the bonds that will determine their careers. There will be a payoff in their future; for frat kids, it’s all about socking away future memories, constructing a past. “The friends I make here, they’re my buddies,” Iggy says. “They’re my family, man. That’s all there is to it.”

  The Goodfellas talk in a kind of cadet slang that serves two purposes: it keeps nonmilitary personnel out, and it locks you in, since who else can you speak to in what’s become your native language? The West Point ring is the GLS, the golden leg spreader, for the effect it has on women. A cadet who’s getting it done has his shit squared away, is a stud; a cadet who isn’t is ate up. A cadet who doesn’t do anything is a slug; a cadet who turns in other cadets to make himself look good is a toolbag. Correcting someone is developing him. Correcting hard is ripping shit. Getting jacked up is being taken out o
f action; racking is napping. And, like most cadets, they speak with a modified southern accent—Army model—in which the gerund ending ing simply doesn’t exist, and words like isn’t or didn’t become idn’t and dudn’t. Even West Point officers speak this way, to suggest some appropriate and basic male discomfort with language, with the world of thoughts instead of deeds, as if words can be made a little more boss by using a knife edge to flick away excess letters.

  What brought the Goodfellas together before they were even the Goodfellas was the hardship of the old plebe system; they were probably the last class to go through hazing, and it’s a system they appreciate and miss.

  “If you’d come our plebe year, you’d have seen sumpin’ different,” Whitey says. “Iggy gets really down about it’cause he cares, he’s hardcore. When he was first sergeant”—a company’s highest-ranking cow—“he’d rip shit, and he’d correct it.” Having their shit ripped made the Goodfellas tight; one of the efficient byproducts of plebe-year stress is what’s called unit cohesion, the bonds that cadets form. In battle, what often drives soldiers isn’t simple courage but a complicated version of crisis loyalty, the desire to not let down their friends. Suppy, Whitey, Iggy and John Mini survived plebe year together. “First couple months, we were scared to leave our rooms,” Whitey says. “We had the stories of guys not going to the bathroom, everything. Pretty quickly, we knew how we had to act out in the hallway, what was expected of us. The thing about it is, if you were squared away and you kept tryin’, the upperclassmen eventually respected you.”