Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  The Two Covenants

  West Point days are so efficient they even include the night. Each class gets its banquet (one thousand cadets blinking as a Medal of Honor recipient explains, “You have to be in awe that the parents of this land have taken their most prized possession, their sons and daughters, and turned them over to you”). And each company holds what’s called a Dining-in: 125 cadets occupy a private dining hall, propose toasts, eat off Academy china. Tonight, George Rash and Company G-4 (“the Fighting Guppies”) are dining in a room that’s bright with flags. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Chura of the Department of Military Instruction delivers the address. “It may sound arrogant and egotistical, but it’s the damn truth: if you are not a superior being relative to your soldiers, then they are not going to die for you. When I say ‘superior being,’ I mean you’ve got to have it on the wall. Because I’m telling you, you haven’t experienced anything yet. You have not experienced combat, you have not experienced people who are cold, tired, hungry—people who are scared out of their wits. And when that happens, they will look to you: ‘Lieutenant, do something.’ So do not forget, you must be that superior being.”

  Plebe George Rash isn’t feeling very much like a superior being right now; he doesn’t even know whether he’ll be here next month. A couple of weeks ago, he flunked his second Army Physical Fitness Test. One more failure and he’s separated—out of West Point. Most of the G-4 cadets treat him like he’s gone already, a temporary cadet, a ghost at the Academy. Unit cohesion is the term for the brotherhood West Point life produces—each time George reaches for it, somebody aims a kick.

  Rash and his roommate, Kevin Hadley (the two plebes basically hate each other), are sitting with yearlings Adrian Cannady and Arthur Johnson. “Please pass the butter and salt,” George says. “Yo, man,” Hadley says, “you’re gonna rot your arteries.” The table snickers: Rot your arteries! “Probably,” George says morosely.

  As with every other aspect of life at West Point, Dining-ins are full of tradition. Cadets are “called out,” forced to admit private indiscretions. Then they either drink a special punch (it includes water from the G-4 guppy fishbowl) or accept punishment. When cadets choose the punch, Cannady can’t believe it: “That’s nasty. That’s just ignorance. There’s been things floating dead in that tank all year.” Two firstie roommates opt for punishment; their sentence is to croon “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” to each other. (“That’s punishment for us,” one cadet calls.) After a bar, the whole company joins in, shoes stamping for the beat, and the swirl of unit cohesion is so strong, you can feel yourself linking with everyone in the room, the differences being sanded away; you’re getting bonded.

  “I’m just glad I chose West Point over the Naval Academy,” George says.

  “Why?” his table mates snort. “Why’s that, Rash?”

  Once George Rash flunked his second APFT, his problems became the company’s problem. Captain Jim DeMoss, G-4’s TAC, has taken a hands-off approach, to let this be a developmental opportunity. “The cadets are in charge,” he says. George needs to hit 15:54 on the two-mile run; his actual time was 16:48, and the odds against him look pretty long. DeMoss is not so sure the cadets are helping Rash. “I’m skeptical,” the captain says with a shrug. “I would hope they’re really involved. But sometimes I have to brace myself for things not working out as idealistically as I want them to.” Ryan Nelson, a sturdy, sleepy-eyed firstie, is company commander of G-4. Nelson grew up on a dairy farm in Ivanhoe, Minnesota—“the Storybook Town,” population 751; the streets have English-saga names like Norman and Saxon. Nelson was a farm kid. High school came sandwiched between chores: milking cows, feeding cows, weaning calves. “My mom likes to give me crap,” he says. “She says, ‘West Point is a vacation for you. I bet you hate coming home because you have to work.’” I ask why so many cadets seem to come from towns like Ivanhoe—Nelson’s high school was so tiny he played both sides at football, offense and defense. “In a small town, one thing you see is people who go off to the Army, and they become kind of your role models,” he says. “It’s the small-town-hero-type thing. And then people kind of see the Army as an opportunity to get out of a small town, you know?”

  When George Rash failed the APFT, Nelson decided to assign him the best cadet trainers possible. Yuk Steve Lagan is one of the highest-ranked cadets militarily in his company—he could help with George’s military bearing. And cow (junior) Jake Bergman is the number one cadet in G-4 physically—get him involved and you get his roommate, Trent Powell, two for the price of one. “I gave them Rash as a special project,” Nelson says. “To see what they could do.”

  In January, Rash typed Steve Lagan an e-mail: “If I don’t pass in 30 days, I’m out of here, and Captain DeMoss has said that he will recommend separation. Without someone telling me to get ready on a daily basis, I’ll probably forget and put it off till it’s too late. I definitely am willing to put out the effort on this.” Steve Lagan—born and raised in Noble, Oklahoma—is one of West Point’s many hard-core Christians. He has Christian cartoon characters on his computer screen-saver (from a show called Veggie Tales, where animated carrots and tomatoes offer religious instruction), and he has an In Touch magazine on his desk (the back-cover ad asks, “Have you ever met people who believed those stories from the Bible were really true?”); when I curse, he winces. His non–West Point e-mail address begins “Mygodreigns.” But his determination to help Rash is pure West Point. “If he doesn’t pass, it’ll be a bad representation of me,” Steve says. “I don’t want to have to say, ‘My plebe got kicked out because I couldn’t keep him in shape.’”

  Walk into Jake Bergman and Trent Powell’s room, you’ll probably find them sitting around with their shirts off, reading bodybuilding encyclopedias and taking nutritional supplements. (They don’t eat the West Point food—too many calories; they eat fruit and protein bars, drink powdered breakfast mix. They refer to the two Schwarzenegger lifting books as “the two covenants.”) Bergman—a smart, massive kid from Diamond Bar, California—tells me there’s no slang term like musclehead for the serious lifter community at West Point, but that’s what he and Powell are: muscleheads. One thing they dislike about military life is how much it cuts into their lifting time. They keep five-pound jars of whey protein stowed under their desks, bottles of Ripped Fuel, a muscle enhancer called Phosphagen HP and Androstene (slugger Mark McGwire’s choice) on their shelves. There’s a video collection of all of Schwarzenegger’s films and a poster of Schwarzenegger from Commando on the back of the door. Generally, door posters are supposed to be military in nature, but Schwarzenegger is holding a grenade and wearing face paint, so he squeaks by. Bergman is the planning guy, Lagan the hands-on guy. It’s Bergman’s job to work up the training schedule for Rash—he receives daily updates—and Lagan’s job to put it in practice.

  So every morning, Rash reports to Lagan’s room before dawn to do uniform drills and go over Knowledge. Three times a week, Lagan brings Rash down to the track. Other days, he sits Rash on the bike machine. “We only have a month,” Lagan says, “so we have to crank this into high gear real fast.” By the end of week one, Rash has clipped twenty seconds off his run time. Lagan figures that if he can cut another twenty seconds each week, Rash stands a chance of staying at West Point. And under pressure, Rash is hardening: “I won’t fail,” he says.

  One Nickel at a Time

  At 0520, the post has a powdery silence, a handful of sweatsuited cadets jogging through puddles. Erik “Ox” Oksenvaag, a half Taiwanese, half Norwegian cow, is leading his plebes to Arvin Gym for some early-morning physical training. Ox is five foot nine, dark-eyed, strong-jawed, hair high-and-tight. For 0520 PT, plebe Chrissi Cicerelle is entirely presentable: French manicure, gold ring, gold watch, diamond studs in her ears. Cicerelle and Ox work through sit-ups, pull-ups, push-ups, leg lifts; there’s a lot of intercadet contact. Resistance drill: Ox lays his head between Cicerelle’s ankles, grips her socks; Cicerelle stands ab
ove him and Ox swings his ankles to her chest level, where Cicerelle pushes them back. They strain and grunt (Ox: Ungh! Cicerelle: Oh!) together in this faintly sexual way. But success in a coed military environment means ignoring the fact that you are in the coed military environment. (“You know how you get these born-again Christians?” Oksenvaag says. “Here you get born-again virgins.”) When Ox kicks Cicerelle in the breasts, he apologizes, and she says, “Yeah, right, you’re making me a soldier,” and Ox offers to compensate by letting her kick him in the nuts.

  Behind them, cows Jake Bergman and Trent Powell are playing a pickup game of basketball. They’ve managed to work it so they’re playing skins: they lurch around the court with their perfectly cut chests looking buff. In his second week of training, I learn, George Rash has shaved another twenty seconds from his run time. Helping Rash is like working an unfamiliar muscle group for Bergman, since Jake has mixed feelings about the Academy. “This place—to be blunt—like, sucks,” Jake says. Powell jokes, “It’s a $250,000 education shoved up your ass a nickel at a time.”

  They make a strong case for not being huah. “There’s rules for everything,” Jake says. For how wide dorm windows can be opened, for book bags (all black, no visible logo). “Even when it’s not in the rule book, it’s still a rule. Like there’s a policy, we’re not allowed to chew gum in class. No one knows why. It’s college, but it’s like high school.” Jake was recruited to play football. West Point flew him in on a visit, toured him around the weight room, took him to a bar; the one military thing he saw was some plebe getting hazed in the post office, and Bergman thought it was pretty funny. “I laughed. I didn’t know that was going to be me.” Jake wanted USC. “But I didn’t really have a lot of choice. Thirty-two grand a year, my parents said they wouldn’t pay for it, you know?”

  Trent Powell grew up outside Houston, part-timing at his dad’s truck stop, the Triple-T, named for the three kids: Trent, Toby, Timothy. Trent hosed down cattle trailers, scrubbed beer trucks, clinked through the smell of hops. He and his parents had a deal: they’d pay for a private high school if he got a college scholarship. Trent wanted Academy life. “There’s the glamour portion as a young kid—you know, being in uniform, having some wild, crazy time.” He laughs. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.” Trent and Jake lift two hours a day; their mornings are spent planning when they can get into the weight room. “You can make fun of it,” Jake says, “but the gym is like our social function. It’s the thing we have that we can get away from this place. Everyone says we’re addicted to it. I’m definitely in the best shape of my life.”

  The Army Bergman and Powell are being developed for is, as of 1999, an organization in transition. No one seems sure what the mission is—troops have been used to put out forest fires and manage hurricane relief—and this worries them. They don’t know whom they’ll fight, can’t guess where politicians might send them. The Cold War would have been easier. “We don’t know who our enemy is,” Jake says. “We don’t know what we’re going to be doing. It’s just so vague. The scary thing is, we still train with doctrine from like ten years ago. And we’re goin’ to be fighting through cities—it’s no more like warfare with big huge divisions where there’s huge tanks.” This problem is being raised throughout the Washington defense establishment. A Pentagon administrator asks me, “What do you think we’re socializing them for up there? War-fighting. Everything is geared to war-fighting. When they leave, what do they do? Peacekeeping. When was the last time anyone did war-fighting? But they spend four years . . . in their mind, that’s what the Army is.” The official shows me studies: cadets exhibit negative attitudes toward peacekeeping and global missions.

  Jake Bergman isn’t interested in Kosovo. “We want to deal with something legitimate. We don’t feel like baby-sitting. I mean, we should get trained in, like, negotiation skills and things like that. But we don’t get any of that stuff.”

  Last year, for a class in the Behavioral Sciences and Leadership Department (BSL motto: “Building strong leaders”), Jake did a study. “It was about how to keep people from dropping out of the Army,” he says. “What the major problems were, why people aren’t staying in.” The model is supposed to be a twenty-year Army career, with retirement at half-pay. “West Point attrition is huge,” Powell explains. Jake wasn’t surprised by the numbers he got. “You’re probably surprised,” he says. “’Cause you probably come here thinking all these guys all want to serve twenty years. But to tell you the truth, we sit and live it every day, so I wasn’t surprised. Very few people you meet now want to stay twenty years. Like, you look at the statistics from the class of ’95,’96, and that’s what the trend is—getting out as fast as they can.”

  Like many cadets, Bergman and Powell both enrolled at the Academy thinking they’d go career. “You’re not sure now?” I ask. “No, no, no,” Powell says. “It sounded like fun,” Bergman says. “You do career, wow, you’re forty-three when you’re done. On paper it sounds great. You can start a whole new career. You’re forty-three years old. You’re young! And the West Point ring opens doors for you.” For that same report, Jake did a survey of adult officers. The results fell in line: salary concerns, family stress, deployments. “You don’t get paid enough,” Trent says. “My dad’s friend is CEO of a Fortune 500 company,” Bergman says. “He’s like, ‘There’s so much market for West Point graduates.’ The pension plan’s great, but I mean, God, these companies, they can do better than that now. Seriously, you could probably make three times as much money within five years.”

  And there’s the problem of being twenty-three, twenty-four years old on military bases, away from girls. “Y’know,” Powell jokes, “I’m at the peak of my testosterone level right now. I feel like my stock is going down every day I get older.” Military deployments will take guys to places like the Balkans or Korea. “That’s prime time for meeting your spouse or somebody,” he says. “You’re in one of those places, who are you gonna meet? And if you do meet a woman, who’s to say what she’s going to do when you’re spending nine months in Kosovo? How is she going to have a career when you’re changing posts every three years?” “Not many girls want to be with a guy that, like, at any moment’s notice is going to be in Haiti for six months,” Bergman says. “How much would that suck if you picked up and left? Girls nowadays, they don’t want to have to play with that.” This surprises me, after the many official presentations about responsibility and selfless service. “A lot more people here than you’d think, think like us,” Powell says.

  Chicken Legs

  Female cadets arrived at West Point in 1976, one more milestone for the bicentennial year; 119 enrolled, 61 graduated. Retired West Point superintendent General William Westmoreland extended some best wishes for their success: “Maybe you could find one woman in 10,000 who could lead in combat,” he said. “But she would be a freak, and we are not running the Military Academy for freaks.” Female plebes saluted upperclassmen with the traditional “Good morning, sir,” and the upperclassmen would respond, “It was a good morning till you bitches got here.” Female rooms were vandalized: a bunch of rowdy guys busting in, throwing the eggs, working the shaving cream canister, masturbating into the underwear. “I don’t know how those women did it or why they did it,” says Laura Worthing, an H-4 firstie on brigade staff (a big West Point honor). “I wouldn’t have been the first female to come to West Point, no way. Coming here scared me, I didn’t know how I would be accepted. But I was like, ‘OK, there’s a lot more women now, the men are getting over it.’”

  Laura grew up in Inman, Kansas: straight A’s, all-state athlete, valedictorian. She was recruited for the basketball team. “The kind of guys that come to male-dominated schools are a little different,” she says. “Maybe they’re not into girls as much—they have a different mentality about females, that’s for sure.” A West Point cadet toured her high school on a public relations trip—handsome, straight-backed. All day long the Inman girls walked the halls saying
, “Oh, look at that.” “So at first,” Laura says, “I figured all the guys would be cute. They’re not all cute. It’s weird. There’s some guys that will hit on any female cadet; then there’s guys that will not even talk to girls. Can’t stand ’em, ignore ’em, won’t interact with ’em.” After four years, Laura has learned which male cadets to avoid: “The ones with the high-and-tight haircuts that are all military, you don’t want to speak to them.”

  These cadets, the females agree, have never accepted that West Point is only 85 percent male—they want the other percentage points back. “There are guys who say West Point would be so much more fun if there weren’t women,” H-4 firstie Angie Robinson explains. “They could curse, run around naked and spit everywhere, and no one would care.” (“To be honest,” Harley Whitten tells me later, “that’s part of the reason I went Infantry. Won’t be around women and won’t have to think through everything I’m gonna say. Can let a ‘fuck,’ ‘shit,’ or ‘damn’ slip out.”)

  Chrissi Cicerelle’s friends smirked when she got her acceptance letter. “Eight guys to every girl,” they said, “you’re not gonna have a problem getting a date.” Cicerelle laughs: “But you know, get real, because girl cadets don’t count. People say, ‘You got a date this weekend?’ They go, ‘Yes sir, but she’s a female cadet, so she dudn’t count.’” “No guys like female cadets,” Angie says. “They say we’re fat, we’re ugly, masculine, nasty. Well, it’s strange, because everyone hates female cadets, but a bunch of them are engaged to female cadets, so someone likes female cadets.”