by David Lipsky
Of course, if you date on post, pretty soon you start thinking about kissing on post, sex on post, and eventually the night will come when the regulations don’t seem so binding and it makes sense to give it a shot. “People have sex all over the place,” Angie says. “They just sneak, like everything else.” In Laura Worthing’s old company “there were two cows and two yuks. They were in the same room, actually. And one couple was having sex, and one was havin’ oral sex. They had loud music on—you need to be quiet. Well, it was late at night, and the officer in charge heard noises coming from that room. And he just went through the door, snapped on the light, and uh-oh. Two of ’em got kicked out, two of ’em left for six months and then came back.”
Angie Robinson is half black, half Hispanic, both parents Air Force reservists. Her fiancé is Army, West Point class of ’94 (“so he’s in the business”); she met him one summer in Spain, a high school junior ducking questions about her age. Dating him senior year—she lived twenty minutes west of Washington, D.C.—Angie learned what to expect as a West Point female. Her boyfriend and his pals could be pretty funny about it. Angie met one guy’s cadet girlfriend. “She kept talking about West Point, she was really excited about this Spirit Dinner, she was like, ‘We got all dressed up, it was the 1950s, it was fun.’ And I was thinking, ‘Is this girl for real? Does she not have any sort of cool?’” Angie applied without telling her parents, just to see if she’d get in. Her parents found out, they said, “You got into West Point?” Yes. “The Military Academy?” Yes. Then they said, “You have to go.”
Angie shares a triple with Jessica “Coop” Cooper and Kim Ferguson. The women sidestep the four-thousand-calorie-a-day mess hall diet; their room has a rice cooker, a fridge stocked with tuna fish, fruit, vegetables, cereal. The post dietitian told Angie the solution was smaller portions. Eat a third of what they serve you—a tablespoon of rice, for example, or a chicken leg. “I said, ‘I can’t live off a chicken leg,’” Angie remembers.
Post Night
There are two days when Order of Merit—class rank—becomes most important at West Point: in September, when firsties pick their branches of service, and then six months later, when they pick their posts. At 1920 on a foggy, wind-cut Thursday night, the Academy feels deserted: empty walkways, sodium lights, sleeping buildings. A minute later, the mess hall doors kick open and the paths teem with firsties. They pour out doors in BDUs—the camouflage battle dress uniform—slapping each other’s butt, pounding each other’s shoulders and wishing each other luck. They shout, “This time next year, I could be in Bosnia!” and grin at the unbelievableness of it, eyes taking in the grounds: from here to Bosnia.
The branches assemble at different auditoriums, so the Goodfellas are in separate locations. John Mini is with the Armor guys, learning about Fort Knox, which is tank central. Brian Supko is at Aviation—the plum branch, helicopter skills are marketable. Supko grew up playing sports and bunking at round-the-world military bases with his Marine colonel father. (One day, he opened up the paper in high school and there was his father, pointing his weapon down into an Iraqi hatch, screaming. “And you go, ‘Hey, that’s my dad,’ you know? ‘That’s the guy I argue with if I don’t get my allowance.’”) Long before the Toronto Blue Jays made a grab for him, the old surfwear company Gotcha saw the twelve-year-old Brian Supko riding the waves at California’s Camp Pendleton and offered him a sponsorship. “My friends were saying, ‘Hey, you can stay with us and surf.’ And my dad said, ‘No way, get in the car, we’re going to Korea.’” So it must seem to Suppy like one more high-quality outfit is bidding for his services, issuing the uniform, laying down the rules and codes.
Infantry is meeting in Washington Hall’s fifth-floor auditorium; 186 men, 186 BDUs, 186 first choices, 186 people on edge. There are three glory posts (Italy, Hawaii and Germany). There are some other cool posts (Fort Carson, Colorado; Fort Lewis, Washington). Then there are huah posts: Fort Bragg, Fort Drum, Fort Benning, Fort Campbell. Below that are posts people don’t want for a variety of reasons: Korea (a hardship tour), Fort Hood (middle of nowhere), Fort Polk, Louisiana (because it’s Fort Polk, Louisiana; Polk has only one slot). Harley Whitten is here; he’ll be married when his service begins, so he wants a fun place where he and his wife can start their lives. He’s hoping to snag one of the five spots in Germany. First Captain Rob Shaw is sitting near the front, his heart and jaw set on Fort Bragg. Bryan “Soup” Campbell from H-4 is in the middle of the room. Soup has wanted to be an officer since elementary school; Top Gun, Desert Storm—every couple of years there was something new to make the idea stick. “I’d have come here if I’d had to pay for it,” he tells me. He wanted to become a Navy SEAL, but he’s red-green colorblind, and red and green are just the colors the Navy likes people to see. He wants Fort Campbell. And Goodfella Iggy Ignacio is here, right in the front row, hoping for Fort Drum; Fort Drum is a light-infantry unit with a high op tempo—they deploy all the time. Iggy wants to get down to it.
And in the back of the room TACs and officers are moving with light, vicarious excitement. Lieutenant Colonel Hank Keirsey (chief of military training) is hunkered in the upper rows. Keirsey is a beloved huah figure on post: bearish, round-voiced, barrel-chested. “Twenty-three years ago,” he says, squinting at the cadets, “I did this same thing in the same room.” Captain DeMoss shipped for Bragg after West Point. He’s showing a postcard of the fort to H-4’s company commander, John Pandich, who hopes to make the same choice. The TACs and officers want to see huah choices, cadets as motivated by service as they were. Jim DeMoss rubs his hands together and says, “Gotta be a mud crawler.” On the wall is the Infantry slogan, the bravery and sturdiness of all West Point training in two words: “Follow me.”
Brigade Tactical Officer Colonel Joseph Adamczyk stands, makes a quick too-much-celebrating-leads-to-tomfoolery speech: “I will remind you, there is nothing worth getting in trouble over between now and graduation—you’ve got too much to lose. So, please.” Then Captain Mark Borowski, the young Infantry branch representative, goes over the rules of selection. On the wall behind him are the names of eighteen Infantry posts. A row of Iron Mikes—paper likenesses of infantrymen—is lined up beside them. Each time a cadet picks a post, one Iron Mike comes down; when there are no more Iron Mikes, that post is closed. “Once the last word comes out of your mouth,” Borowski says, “sit down, you’ve made your choice. Everybody get my message about spelling-bee rules?” The auditorium does a big laughing huah. The TACs and officers go into deep nodding when Borowski announces, “I know there’s a lot of stress out there. But there’s not an officer in this Academy—at least no officer worth anything—that wouldn’t trade any job that they have to go be a platoon leader. You’re going out there to be with Joe”—GI Joe—“and a lot of you don’t realize how precious and what an honor and a privilege it is to be asked to lead American soldiers. So you should not leave here with any head hung low. You have got a lot to look forward to.” Huah! Hoop-hoop!
And the first cadet—“Powell, Matthew”—is called. He stands and says, “Italy.” The cadets shout, Awww! Huah! One of the officers in back mutters, “Startin’ early.”
And after four cadets, just like that, the post is gone. Borowski announces, “Italy is closed,” and the last Iron Mike comes down. Outstanding! Huah! The cadets rumble, nod, lick their lips. Then they start going after Hawaii. One kid takes Campbell and gets some relieved chuckling: Pretty cool! All right! Each time someone takes Bragg, Jim DeMoss nods deeply, says “Huah.” Each time a cadet takes Germany, Harley Whitten mutters, “Come on—stop picking that one.” There are three Germanys left, two Germanys. The cadets high-five each other, hug, do a raise-the-roof. The cadets get rowdier with each pick; the room bursts with good fellowship. “Whitten, Robert.” Harley stands, takes Germany, and does a big end-zone, stir-the-pot dance while the cadets cheer. “Germany,” Borowski announces, the Iron Mike coming down, “is now closed.” Huah! John Pandich gets Bragg, sits down
to a flurry of backslapping, flicks open a cell phone. “I got it, Mom. Bragg. I’ll call you later. I will call you back later.”
The Iron Mikes start peeling away from Hawaii, Bragg and Carson. Below them wait Fort Hood, Fort Riley, Fort Sill and Polk, all their Iron Mikes in a row. The cadets eye Polk, wince. Whitten grabs a cell phone. “Hey, Michelle?” His fiancée. “We got Germany. Good stuff.” Kris Karafa of G-4 pockets the last Hawaii, Borowski says, “Hawaii is closed,” the room goes berserk. Jim DeMoss says “Huah!” A lot of the tension scatters; no more cool posts, the anxiety of one sweet place maybe waiting for you is gone.
Bragg and Alaska start closing up—Shaw grabs a Bragg. Captain DeMoss comes and sits behind the last row of cadets, slapping shoulders, massaging necks. A cadet named Bryan Moore pulls Bragg and later says, “DeMoss was so happy I thought he was gonna tackle me.” Soup Campbell picks Fort Lewis, comes back to where Harley is sitting, looking a little stunned. “That’s a load off,” he says. “I didn’t know Fort Campbell was gonna go that fast. I was fucking sweating.” Harley tells him Lewis is a good post. Soup asks where Harley would have gone if he hadn’t pulled Germany. “You know, I have no clue. I was one of those guys who didn’t have a second choice. Not Fort Drum and not Korea. You just don’t want to be that guy who gets Polk.” Huge cheers when Korea closes. (No chance of a hardship tour now.) Cadet Stone, who takes it, slaps a hundred hands. Although dipping is prohibited outside barracks, Harley passes Soup his tin of Kodiak; Soup takes a big pinch. “This is Infantry,” Harley says, “we’re supposed to be dipping.” Iggy’s name is called, he rises. The cadets shout, Iggy! Woo-hoo! Igs! Iggy gets Drum. Bragg closes. Alaska comes down. “The last frontier,” Captain Borowski says, “is now closed.” Then a cadet Gonzales stands up. He looks around, straightens, says “Fort Polk.” And the auditorium goes insane, cadets stomping their feet, whistling, banging their hands. Huah! Yeah! Hoop-hoop! Polk! Gonzales! “He’ll be laughing at you,” Captain Borowski says, “when he’s collecting jump pay and you’re not.” “Huah,” Jim DeMoss says.
When it ends—the last ten Iron Mikes are Fort Hood; each cadet who stands, pretends to think it over, says “Hood,” gets a laugh—there’s huge applause, backslapping, hugging. The last bit of mystery about their West Point careers has been resolved: these 186 men know where they’re going to serve the next three years. In a sense, because they can see their future, West Point has just become the past. You can feel the cohesion in the room, the cheerful envy and relaxed competitiveness and affection and comradeship, all the emotions men are genetically schooled for. They feel like an army. Lieutenant Colonel Keirsey paces to the front of the room, stands on a chair. “OK, at ease,” Keirsey says. Huah! Huah! Hoop! Hoop! “There are soldiers out there, kids looking for leadership. They’ll go the last mile, they’ll run as hard as they can. They’re hard, and you’ll be just as fired up.” The room goes absolutely silent; the cadets blink at Keirsey. “So don’t worry about it if you didn’t get exactly the right post. Because we don’t know what division will go to the frontier of freedom here. But I can guarantee you this: this class will move out, will go into the ranks of the Army. And somewhere, in some disputed barricade along the frontier, you will meet your destiny. And you will stack this nation’s enemies like cordwood.”
The biggest cheer of the night. “Stack ’em like cordwood!” one cadet yells. “Something to drink on, baby!” they shout.
The huah glamour of post selection—the deep emotion of men meeting their fates together—becomes complicated when you understand a primary concern at West Point. It’s called five-and-fly. The bargain that cadets make to train at the Academy is very simple. Come to West Point, and we’ll pay for everything. (Since you’ll be in uniform, we’ll also toss in $7,200 a year in salary.) But you will lead men and women for five years in the Army. And the weight of our history, and the values of honor and selfless service we teach, could persuade you to give us your career. (The Academy’s recruitment poster runs, “At West Point, much of the history we teach was made by people we taught.”) But since the mid-1980s, an increasing number of graduates have been hitting that five-year mark and leaving the Army—they’re five-and-flying. Each time Captain DeMoss hears a cadet pick Bragg or Benning or Drum, he hears something else: a cadet who loves the Army the way the TAC does. A cadet who picks Italy loves travel; a cadet who picks Fort Drum, in the chilly upper reaches of New York State, loves the Infantry. In the class of 1970, only 12.2 percent of West Point graduates left the Army when their five was up; these were cadets who saw the tail end of Vietnam. For the class of 1993, that figure nearly tripled, to 32.4 percent. (In 1993, when the class of ’88’s five-year term was up, that number was close to 50 percent.)
In his Founders Day speech—an annual address to graduates—Superintendent General Daniel Christman listed retention as the first of West Point’s challenges. “It is clear,” the general said, “that USMA graduates are retaining in the Army at a much lower rate than in years past. We are trying to address this issue of ‘commitment.’” The superintendent works in a large wood-paneled office on the fifth floor of Taylor Hall, a room with the U.S. colors, an Academy banner, and Christman’s three-star flag. High on the walls hang photos of former superintendents going back to the early 1900s. When Christman looks at the pictures, he thinks of his responsibilities. “The real challenge is, don’t get it too wrong,” he says, smiling. He keeps a Lion King Pumbaa doll on one of his polished side tables. “I just like Pumbaa,” he says. “You know, when a young kid comes in, it’s an icebreaker.” Upon assuming command in 1997, one of the first things the general did was revise the Academy’s mission statement to emphasize military careers. “That’s why I put the third action verb in place: ‘to educate, train and inspire the corps of cadets for a career as an officer in the United States Army,’” Christman says. “I wanted to make it very, very clear that we are here to produce career Army officers. But we can only do so much.”
Like most people of my era, I have little connection with the military. I grew up with the luxury of a volunteer Army; service was something other people did. So I’ve never felt anything like the military brotherhood that took over Washington Hall 5401 during post selection; it seemed about as admirable a feeling as a country could produce. (Iggy Ignacio keeps a Marine Corps card pinned above his desk: “Civilians can not and will not understand us, because they are not one of us. We’re the corps. We love it, live it and shall die for it. If you’ve never been in it, you shall never understand it.”) It seems that for a good number of cadets, the feeling is just a feeling, the surge in the chest after a movie. The feeling is there, it’s a thrill, it’s gone.
In recent years, when graduates have received the option to leave before five years, they’ve taken it. Field Artillery is a popular branch because cadets believe officers can sometimes fly after only eighteen months. (Jake Bergman and Trent Powell talk about Field Artillery.) Sophomore Mike Ferlazzo’s brother graduated from West Point in 1995. I ask where he’s serving, and Mike chuckles. “He’s not,” Ferlazzo says. “He got lucky. He got out. After three years, he goes, ‘I’ve pretty much accomplished all my goals in the military.’ He wanted to go to law school, saw the opportunity, and he took it.”
Each year, the Academy’s Office of Policy, Planning and Analysis conducts surveys of the incoming class, asking what brought cadets to West Point. The number one answer is “overall reputation.” “Wanting to be an officer” is number two. “Self-development” runs close behind at number three.
When post selection ends, the cadets head for their rooms, place calls to the home front. Then it’s the clubs, Officers’ and Firstie. The Firstie Club is so mobbed, people stand shivering outside, comparing posts. “I can’t believe where I’m fucking going,” a girl tells Whitey Herzog. “Fort Riley.” Inside, the place smells like a tactical strike on a brewery. A cadet pushes his way toward the door: “They’re all out of pitchers. I’m going back to my room to beat off,
so at least I can get some sex.” Cadet Orlando Johnson slaps Whitey’s shoulder. “I’m the little black dude up front who yells ‘Fall in’ every morning,” Orlando tells me. “Hey, write this: ‘From the time Orlando Johnson calls “Fall in” in the morning, his day is constant military development.’ I’m gonna get me a beer.”
The Officers’ Club is pandemonium. Officers, firsties, cows, noise, beer, whiskey. The cows look carefully at the firsties, watching their futures drink in front of them. Shouts chop back and forth like artillery volleys: “Someone should set a policy: do anything wrong, get posted to Drum!” “Fuck you—I posted tonight, and Drum was my first choice!” Whitey and some buddies commandeer two tables near the corner. A female cow named Lynn comes by to wish Whitey well: “You’re the best platoon leader I’ve had since I’ve been at West Point.” Whitey slams back a Heineken and says, “This is why the military is awesome. Because we get to drink beers all night and celebrate where we’re going.”
The cadets theorize about West Point’s drug scene: “There’s three drugs we have here,” Harley Whitten says. “Sleep is a drug. Porn is a drug. And nicotine.” “Masturbation!” “That’s a subset of porn.” “Beer,” cadets shout. “Dip. Motrin.” “Motrin,” Harley laughs. “They issue that stuff here like candy. Because you really start to hurt.” There’s a favorite Internet pornography site for cadets, Persian Kitty’s Adult Links. With classic military efficiency, it’s a broad clearinghouse address that can direct you to whatever specific type of porn you’re after. (The superintendent included a Persian Kitty reference in a speech last year, which made the cadets go wild.) “But there are very bad things on the Web,” cadet Matt Johnston says, pulling an official face. “And it’s a temptation we must avoid because we are future officers. We’re respectable people.”