Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  Whitey takes a tug of beer. “This one guy, he ripped me so many times my team leader had to confront him. He hammered me.” Branch Night of that year—in November, when seniors learn how they’ll serve—the plebes had to write the firsties congratulation cards. Whitey asked to make this guy one: “‘Congratulations on going Armor, I respect what you’re doing. Cadet Herzog.’

  “When they came back from drinking all night—and that night’s wild—me and some plebes were cutting through the bathrooms. And that guy’s in there pissing, he goes, ‘Halt.’ We all halt. He goes, ‘Everybody leave but Herzog.’ They left. OK. We don’t do this anymore—it’s called blood-branching, a bonding thing. But he gets in the stall, hands over his head. He goes, ‘All right, you’ve been waiting for this all semester. Give me your best shot.’ And he puts the Armor pin in his T-shirt, no pin backings. And I just go—boom!—I hit him right there as hard as I could. Then he had me pull the pin out. Blood everywhere. But then he took me in his room and gave me a cigar. We smoked cigars together and talked.”

  In that guy’s eyes, Whitey had passed a test. “That’s why I love plebe year,” Whitey says. “That’s why I’ve stuck it out for four years. I accomplished something. For me it was huge.” And knowing you could take it—take the punch—helped with everything after plebe year. “I’ll tell you, it helped with the Rangers,” Whitey says. “I mean, four days before our first mission, briefing rooms, planning, sleeping three hours a night, everything. Then we get up, I’m wearing body armor, which is heavy as shit. Long airplane flight to the objective, get on a helicopter for an hour—which is loud as shit. Fly there, run around, fight. That just wears you out. But I knew from plebe year that I could handle it. I knew I could handle stress, I could handle a little insanity for a little while. So what happens to these plebes when the bullets start flying? I’ve got two plebes on my mess hall table. You know, they’re pretty good, they’re disciplined, they’re quiet, they sit there. But I say something—‘How many days till I graduate?’—if I say it even a little stern, they go, ‘Oh-oh-oh.’”

  Goofballs and Gomers

  Kevin Hadley, George Rash’s roommate, did not have a difficult time in Beast Barracks. “It was tiring,” the slim eighteen-year-old says. But Kevin grew up in rural Westfield, Indiana, putting in the hours at his dad’s veterinary practice. “That’s hard work. Lot of people board their dogs there. Feed ’em, spray down their poop, walk ’em, pick up their poop, lot of poop—it’s all about poop.” A few weeks into Beast training, a friend of Hadley’s from back home dropped out. “He was kind of a preppy dude, a golf player. Well, I knew he wasn’t gonna make it—he was too sensitive. I don’t jell with sensitive people. When I heard that, I just laughed. I was like, ‘This justifies this place, if he can’t make it.’”

  Companies G-4 and H-4 are located next door to each other, in tall buildings called divisions. (The majority of the companies live on long hallways in MacArthur and Bradley barracks.) Cadets live two to a room like college students; what makes division rooms unique is the floor-to-ceiling pasteboard partition between the beds, which cadets call a spank wall. No matter where George and Kevin sit in their room, there seems to be a spank wall between them; they just don’t like each other. “We both know what buttons to push,” George says, “and we don’t mind pushing ’em.”

  While George, wearing headphones, watches The X-Files on his computer, Kevin explains what brought him to West Point. “I was thinking guns and glory.” Today’s cadets are the children of the Reagan buildup, the lift-weights-and-kick-Soviet-butt movies like Rambo, Rocky IV, Red Dawn and, especially, Top Gun. Kevin’s dream was to be a fighter pilot—which meant the Air Force Academy—but his bad eyesight meant the Military Academy. He plans to go Infantry. “I wanna do cool stuff and take advantage of my opportunities here,” Kevin says. He looks darkly at George. “What insults me is that you come here expecting a certain standard. It’s nothing that nobody else dudn’t say. And when other people are goofballs or Gomers, it pisses me off. It insults me when people who can’t do fifty push-ups wear the same uniform as I do. Or anybody that makes excuses or honor violations and can’t meet the piddly standards that we have around here. If you can’t, fine—I’m sure you’ll be fantastic at another college. It sounds all huah, but it comes down to you’re gonna be leading men someday.”

  But however bumpy Hadley’s roommate situation gets, it still represents an upgrade over last semester. After Beast, Kevin found himself shoehorned into a cramped triple with plebes Josh Rizzo and Reid “Huck” Finn—athletes. Rizzo is a bantam-sized second baseman from Flatbush whom the company has nicknamed “Johnny Brooklyn.” Finn is a beefy football player from Baton Rouge. After a while, the athletes became two different accents speaking the same kind of bad: up all hours, swearing, passing around the dip can. “It was a challenge,” Kevin says, “’cause I’m a very Christian guy, and they were always dippin’. And when you think of dipping, do you picture someone who probably goes to parties and gets drunk, or a guy who wants a relationship with God?” Finn was one of those wild-flying kids who make a mission out of obeying as few rules as possible; he could get into West Point trouble even when he wasn’t at West Point. In the airport after Thanksgiving break, a suitcase in each fist, Finn pulled on his hat for the scuttle from baggage claim to taxi stand. A firstie spied his uniform and reminded Finn of the rule prohibiting indoor headgear. Finn looked him over, asked who he was. “I’m a cadet,” the firstie replied. Huck deployed his sure hand for West Point courtesy: “Well, listen, cadet—we ain’t at fuckin’ West Point right now.” Finn got written up for the hat, plus a bonus for not shaving and for general belligerence. (In the room, Finn had a simple explanation for Rizzo: “The guy was a douchebag.”) Whatever else you might say about Rash, as least Hadley knows he’s trying.

  Plebe Jasmine Rose—dusky-skinned, pretty, half black and half Panamanian—lives two floors down from Hadley and Rash; like the other G-4 plebes, she’s been following Rash’s problems. She came because her dad was a career enlisted soldier (one of only about 7 percent of West Pointers whose parents are). She liked the look of the military lifestyle, and her father told her that if she wanted to do it, go as an officer. “He said in the enlisted ranks you take a lot of crap from everybody else,” Jasmine says. “Being an officer, it’s a lot better—you get better pay, and life’s easier.” Jasmine and her roommate, Maria Auer, quiz each other every morning on news headlines. Another part of plebe Knowledge is being a walking CNN kiosk. Upperclassmen can ask for news updates at any time. (Plebes used to have to read the New York Times, but now they read the Web version. West Point efficiency: [a] cheaper, [b] drills students in technical skills necessary for the coming information battlefield.) On Jasmine’s door is a copy of the Washington Mess Hall menu, every meal for a month. It might be disheartening to know what you’ll be eating four weeks in advance, but plebes must also be capable of telling upperclassmen what they will be served every day.

  For Jasmine, the rough stuff is not plebe life but academics, especially math and chemistry. Strange things keep you going at the Academy. Last fall, two G-4 plebes dropped out within weeks of each other: cadets Sanford and Nett. “They were doing great in classes, didn’t seem like they were being bothered too much by upperclassmen.” One day Jasmine came back from class and Nett was dressed in civilian clothes. That was that. Another afternoon in English class, Sanford asked Jasmine exactly what kind of paperwork he’d need to get signed for quitting; he said he was just wondering. Couple weeks later, Sanford was walking the barracks in civilian clothes. Thinking about it makes Jasmine release a little giddy laugh. “They drop out, I’m still here, and I’m managing. In a way, it kinda made me feel, ‘Hey, I’m doing good.’”

  While we’re talking, Rash’s head appears in the door. Jasmine’s roommate spots George and shouts quickly, “Bye, Rash!” Rash blinks. “I’ve gotta go down to the study room,” he says. “Can’t upstairs in my room. Hadley’s too loud
.” “OK—see ya!” “See you,” Rash says with disappointment and walks slowly downstairs. “He comes here all the time,” Jasmine says. “Like, we don’t really bother him that much, so he’s always over here. Everybody else makes fun of him.”

  Girls to Men

  Upstairs in Arvin Gym, in a warm room that smells of female sweat and floor mats, Section II of CQC is going through its morning training. Female cadets don’t take boxing (though the plan is to integrate most of their physical training with the male cadets’ soon). What they take instead is called Close Quarters Combat. Thirty plebe females work in two-woman teams, wearing Army sweats and orange mouth guards. The instructors shout reminders like, “It’s not enough to injure your opponent—you have to incapacitate them!”

  Dr. Ray Wood, director of combatives, explains that women have to be schooled to respond to problems aggressively. “The violence propensity differs greatly between the genders. Men are more socialized to violence—men will fight over a bar stool.” The instructors yell directives like, “You’re digging your fingers into the arm to find those nerves. Then—groin slap!” The women practice dislodging an attacker who grabs from behind: take the hands, concentrate on the fingers, bend them till they snap. “Now, I’m continuing to worry the joint,” the instructor says, “because what happens when I do that?” “Shock!” the class yells cheerfully. (“Can you imagine how nasty gouging someone’s eyes out would be?” one cadet asks another after this tactic is recommended.) There is something moving about the training, watching women do away with the advantage men have over them physically.

  H-4 cadet Chrissi Cicerelle is here, an attractive, short-haired nineteen-year-old. Like many West Point females, she’s basically a tight muscle package. She’s working with cadet Alexia Anderson, a slim black girl who’s been her friend since Beast. Anderson kicks, grabs; Cicerelle blocks, rolls. When they practice their maneuvers, it looks less like combat training than like a form of confrontational ballet. Cicerelle elbows Anderson too hard at the back of the head, then gives her a quick fake kiss on the hair. When the class ends, the cadets march out of the gym chanting their CQC motto: Tear it out! Make it hurt! “Every section has to come up with an aggressive motto,” Dr. Woods tells me. “Politically correct and not obscene, yet in keeping with the general tenor of the corps.”

  CQC is, in a nutshell, a model of the new West Point, where military life is upbeat, cheerful, a series of neat tests and rewarded sacrifices, and Cicerelle herself could be a poster girl for The Changes. She is known to H-4 as Princess or Ms. Priss. “I just totally don’t fit into the whole military-woman thing,” she laughs. “I still get teased all the time. Like we’ll do gas mask drill, and the sophomores will be like, ‘Oh, sorry, don’t want to mess up your hair.’ I’ll wear perfume, they’ll be, ‘Cicerelle—you’re a soldier.’ I just say, ‘Get real, dude. I’m still a girl.’”

  Cicerelle loved everything about Beast Barracks. “I marched seventy-five miles, I threw a grenade, I qualified on a rifle. It seems so cool and surreal—to think I did all that is just, wow.” The only thing she didn’t like was sleeping outdoors. “It was disgusting,” she says. “I had to sleep in a dirty uniform—I was like, ’Eww, this is gross.’ I wanted a hot shower, I wanted clean clothes, but no.” The next time she slept outside, Cicerelle solved the problem by packing Wet Wipes and Chapstick.

  Cicerelle grew up peeking at her father’s West Point uniform, attending West Point football games. Her family is military on both sides going two generations back. Her grandfather was a colonel; her father, after graduating West Point, branched Armor, hurt his back, then ended up a Finance Ranger for six years. “My dad tried to get back in after he left and wasn’t able to,” Cicerelle says. “He really regrets it.”

  She sometimes compares herself to GI Jane. She’s incredibly neat and diligent—her drawers and closets matched the photos in the USCC SOP long before she came—and she can do sixty push-ups and seventy sit-ups. While we’re talking, she stops suddenly and salutes. It’s five o’clock. A cannon has been fired, and retreat is playing on the bugle—this happens every day when West Point’s flag is taken down. All across North Area, cadets are frozen in place, saluting. Then Cicerelle snaps out of it and picks up the conversation without missing a beat. She says that Academy life “is a trip. It cracks me up. You’re slap-happy—the stupidest things become funny because you’re under so much stress.”

  She tried to get into the Academy right after high school in Orlando, didn’t make it, burned a year among the sorority girls at the University of Central Florida. Cicerelle pledged Alpha Delta Pi, but she knew she’d never stay. “I figured I’d spend two semesters in regular college, see what I was missing,” she says. “It was just a joke.” No self-discipline, too much partying, girls getting silly-drunk and guys taking advantage. “My heart wasn’t in it—it didn’t feel like I was part of something special.” At West Point, Cicerelle plans to try out for the cheerleading team—the Rabble Rousers—and takes ballroom dancing classes along with Jasmine and Maria. (Fifty years ago, in the non-coed West Point, male cadets danced with each other; now the class is mostly female.) When I ask how it will feel to command a platoon someday, Cicerelle says, “It’ll be awesome. It totally blows my mind.” When I ask how it might feel to be under fire in combat, she thinks for a second. “Sometimes I’m in phases where I’m like, ‘Shoot or be shot. Hey, I’m a trooper.’ And then sometimes I think that would really—it would break my heart. But the whole point behind the Army is to prevent situations like that. The U.S. is like a big brother to everybody; making sure everybody’s being treated equally, that there’s civil rights.”

  You don’t have to be at West Point very long to realize the secret: Cicerelle and her fellow cadets are happier than students almost anywhere else. It’s not just that everyone looks incredibly fit. They seem mentally fit, mentally scrubbed; I’ve never seen less-depressed kids. It turns out that dressing like everyone else, sharing identical experiences, and being told you’re on a mission of importance to the whole country does wonders for the teenage soul.

  “There’s all these pressures we don’t have to worry about,” an H-4 cow named Erik Oksenvaag explains to me. “In a sense, life here is easy. People are proud to be at West Point—it’s a major accomplishment. And everything is very structured for you. You just show up at this time, in this uniform, real simple. I have friends back home who are just starting to graduate, and they have no clue what they want to do—you know, they’re gonna take a year off to decide. They say they envy me. I know what’s coming up, I have an idea where I’m gonna go and for how long. I have a lot of choices already made for me, and I kinda like that.”

  West Point is almost entirely without irony. During football season there are “spirit missions” (steal the Navy goat). There are “spirit dinners” with theme dress codes (Cowboy Night, Fifties Night, Geek Night). You hear cadets talk about “honor,” “character,” “achieving excellence,” “selfless service,” “principles,” “developing yourself,” and “leadership” without a flicker of a smirk. The four-year program is called the Cadet Leader Development System—what could be less ironic than that? This makes sense: irony is the comic presentation of doubt, and there’s not much doubt at West Point. Doubt would be, “We have a System (are we sure it works?) where we take Cadets and Develop them (are we doing it the right way?) into Leaders (do people really need leaders, or should things be more egalitarian?).”

  About the twentieth time I heard the Academy described as a “leadership laboratory,” I realized that nobody at West Point was worried about sounding original or being entertaining, which are basically aesthetic notions, and I understood the immense freedom this gave them. When I heard another administrator’s speech about values, how being a leader “means having the moral courage to do what’s right,” I thought how reassuring this must be for cadets, since every other educational institution has basically concluded that “what’s right” doesn’t exist, beyon
d the grim brute rule of not teasing anyone else.

  Cadets entering West Point step into an irony-free zone, a place where sarcasm has been fought to a standstill. And an irony-free zone turns out to be an immense relief for human beings: a relief not to have to worry about sounding foolish or whether somebody’s statement has a subtext; a relief to accept the apparent meaning and move on. “It’s just an incredible release,” John Mini tells me one night. “To be able to talk about what actually matters to you in life—how you feel about important things—and be supported. You’re not worried about projecting the right image. I would never have done that in high school, it wouldn’t have seemed appropriate. Why would you bring out that kind of personal stuff? Here we have such a close bond—we’re all in the same profession and might have our lives depend on each other. It’s a total release.”

  When a cadet dies at West Point (illness, accident) the corps holds a Taps Vigil. At 2330, four thousand cadets stand at attention on the Plain outside Washington Hall. Taps is played, and a bagpipe gives “Amazing Grace.” Then the cadets turn back to barracks, but if you wait long enough, you’ll see a small group in the dark, the cadet’s friends. They stay on the Plain a while longer and mourn.

  Cadets complain all the time at West Point—plebes complain about recognition and upperclassmen; cows complain about not having their own cars, yearlings complain about off-post privileges, firsties (and cows, yearlings and plebes) complain about Colonel Adamczyk—but I came to see West Point as the happiest complaining place on earth.