Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  After an hour of shots and beers, Whitey slides off his chair, approaches a sergeant with a pro wrestler’s build who’s been silently drinking at the end of the bar. In a platoon, sergeants run the troops along with the lieutenants. Whitey wants advice, comes back grinning. “I told him I was with the Rangers this summer,” Whitey says. “He goes, ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ He goes, ‘Just be yourself when you get to your unit. Don’t be a ring thumper. Be your fuckin’ self.’ It was cool.” Whitey gulps more beer. “I don’t want to talk to this sergeant and have him say, ‘Yeah, you went through West Point, you’re gonna be my good lieutenant.’ I want the sergeant to tell me, ‘No, man, fuck it, you gotta be real, relate to the people, gotta be open-minded, and if you can do that, then you can lead my soldiers.’ They’re not my soldiers, they’re his. He’s a highranking sergeant. He’s an old sergeant—you know? He’s kinda old—I mean, look at ‘im. That motherfucker, dude, I’d trust him in combat. That’s the kind of guy that lieutenants look for, right there. Incredible fucking sergeant.”

  A kid named Justin Gordon, who’s posting Fort Sill, Oklahoma, jokes, “All my dreams were shattered tonight.” He’s Field Artillery: “Cannons—anything that fires from far away. It means people won’t shoot at me if they fight the war.” Whitey grabs cadet Rob Bohr. “I will never—c’mere. I will never let you down. Put down that fucking beer. I will never let you down, brother. I will never let you down.” Another cadet lurches back from the bathroom. “They were playing that song ‘Thank You’ in the pisser, and I was looking up, saying, ‘Thank you for this beautiful life, man. Thanks.’”

  They toast to Military Intelligence, Infantry, Aviation. Harley Whitten proposes a toast to battle. “What do you say? We’re gonna start a war, drum up a little business.”

  “We’re gonna defend the United States,” Bohr says.

  Whitey lifts his glass. “Here’s to hearing the lamentations of the women and children of our enemies, dude.”

  “We protect the oppressed!”

  “We’ll go into Bosnia and we’ll clean things up!”

  “We’re gonna clean up the whole damned world!”

  “And we’re gonna make it perfect. And it’s gonna be like The Wizard of Oz. Ha-ha-ha!”

  “I’ll wear my clogs!”

  “Dude, you need more beer.”

  “Airborne!”

  “I do need more beer.”

  Whitey’s Burden

  When he sat down at his computer last August, Whitey Herzog picked Aviation instead of Infantry. He knew what he was doing—deciding against the military for a career. “I was like, ‘This is the rest of my life,’” Whitey remembers. There were ten minutes left. “And I just couldn’t press Infantry. The answer was always there, it was just a matter of facing it.” He laughs. “When it’s ten minutes before the deadline, you face it.” Whitey will spend the next six years as a helicopter pilot; he’ll train with Brian Supko at Fort Rucker, Alabama. When those years are up, the plan is goodbye to the Army.

  When he speaks about his decision, Whitey sometimes dips into the unease he must have felt in August, when he prayed for God to give him some signal in the Porta-Potty. “You know, there’s only a few things that are important to me in life, and one of them’s service to the military. I’m dead serious about that one hundred percent of the time.” Whitey had been so sure about Infantry, he’d been measured for the uniform. “I was going to go Infantry and go with the Rangers. Always wanted to do that, had my heart set on it. I never failed any major goal in my life. And I had to accept that: Can I go with Aviation and still serve as much as I want to?”

  A few days before post selection, the Infantry uniform arrived anyway. Whitey opened the box, looked at the gear for a long time. Blue is the Infantry color—blue-striped cap, blue suspenders. After a week, it began to seem like unclaimed luggage at the airport, a suit made for somebody who was never showing up. He sent the uniform back. “I’m never going to know if I made the right decision,” he says. “Yeah, the contract says ‘Hey, I’m good to go,’ but that’s no way to live life. You know—selfless service. That’s why I hurt.” He smiles. “No regrets.”

  Whitey grew up hoping to be an officer; he wanted to do something for the country. “Nowadays most people don’t think of the military for that. But that’s what I thought I’d be good at. I love the freedoms of our country. I love the fact that my friends can go do whatever they want, even little shit—I wanted to preserve that.” Whitey has always loved music (at West Point, first thing he’ll do back from class is turn on the CD, raise his hands and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, James Marshall Hendrix”). He even chooses women on a musical scale. “The Dead’s too far one way, Tupac’s too far the other. The kind of girl you’d find at an Allman Brothers concert, with a nice pair of jeans on.” His high school friends—beer drinkers, Deadheads—are mostly kids who didn’t even go to college: one works in a restaurant, another’s a bike messenger. Whitey was afraid he’d lose them over West Point. “That was my big worry—you know, the Army isn’t for them.” After Beast training, families are allowed a weekend visit; Whitey walked out of the barracks hungry for a friendly face. Two of his high school buddies stepped from behind a tree—long hair, beards, tie-dye. The other families were craning their necks, people with cameras and kids. What were guys like this doing at West Point? “But I didn’t give a crap about that,” Whitey says. “They supported me, they were proud of me. They thought it was cool.”

  A cadet uniform is like an old-fashioned steamer trunk: look at the stamps, they tell you where it’s been. Over his left pocket, Whitey wears the wreath that means he’s kept a 3.0 academically, physically and militarily. (This puts Whitey in the top 15 percent of his class.) He wears Airborne wings, the National Defense Service ribbon, a military-skills badge and the Army Achievement Medal, for Special Operations training missions with the Third Ranger Battalion. Cow summer, West Point sent Whitey to Mexico with three other cadets for some cultural ambassadorship. They toured Mexican army units, colonels got them drunk, generals fed them on yachts. “When we visited their military academy, the entire corps put on a show for us. And I ain’t shit, man—I’m some kid from Buffalo who loved to have his beers every day after high school with his buddies. And here we were, their whole school did a parade for us. The cadet that escorted me had tears in his eyes. He’s like, ‘This is my honor.’ I said, ‘I admire the discipline, it’s my honor too.’ He’s like, ‘No, it’s my honor,’ and he took off his academy symbol, gave it to me. I gave him mine.” Whitey knows everything about the Army—units, divisions, weapons—the way some kids know sports teams. Mention a battle, he knows how it was won; mention a movie, he’ll tell you how the Army makes sure Hollywood always gets one uniform detail wrong, so no foreign power with a costume director can wreak havoc. He knows it because it’s what he’s always wanted.

  A week after post selection, the Goodfellas—minus Supko, who has an away game with the baseball team—hit a local bar to celebrate. They have about 110 days till graduation. The Goodfella Whitey is closest to is probably not Suppy, who’ll live with him at Aviation next year, or John Mini, who’s smart in a lot of the same ways Whitey is smart. It’s Iggy. For both men, the military is the thing they care about, a rescue from disorder.

  Iggy’s father grew up poor in the Philippines, lost both parents, swept buses for a quarter, had one pencil in school; he wrote very lightly to make the lead last. His dad joined the Philippine Marines and learned the fellowship stuff; his father’s Marine Corps comrades are the men Iggy calls “uncle,” a Filipino sign of respect. “I saw the brotherhood that my father had,” Iggy says. His voice is raspy, sharp. “The civilian world is so different, you know? Maybe it’s ignorance that I say that, ’cause what can I say about the civilian world? But the military, the thing I saw most was, you couldn’t find as good friends, or you wouldn’t become good friends so fast. You go through all the same shit, and it’s not just you.” Iggy’s mother came from
a tiny Filipino town, did poorly in school; it was years before anyone realized she needed glasses. In 1983, Iggy’s dad brought the family to California—no future for children in the Philippines. Iggy had to repeat the first grade because he didn’t speak English. In elementary school his mother would help him study. “That made me real proud,” he says. “Then after a while I started getting into accelerated courses and she couldn’t help me anymore. But even when she didn’t understand, she’d still sit with me, try to do it.”

  The Ignacio family lived in Long Beach, California. “Not a good area. It wasn’t like ghetto style, Boyz N the Hood. But, like, it could get bad.” Some nights, sitting in their house, they’d hear tires screech, gunshots, tires screeching away. Iggy was in a special program at Long Beach Polytechnic High, but those weren’t the kids he hung with. Iggy would be out with the crew, dancing at house parties. “That’s why I loved my high school. You had guys with the brains in a school that was ghetto style, we were all mixed. What I’m saying is, you can put me with the gangsters and I’ll get along. And you can put me with the fuckin’ brainiacs, I’ll get along, too.” The Ignacio family was tight with a Filipino family whose children ran the gangs. “And they would always look at me and my brothers like, ‘Why can’t you jump in with us?’ I’ll tell you straight, it was my parents that saved us.” There was also junior ROTC. Half the kids in Iggy’s program were gang. Another mix: disciplined kids, discipline-problem kids. “We lost some, converted some.” Senior year, Iggy commanded the city’s entire corps. When he got West Point, it was what his father had hoped for when he left the Philippines. “In this country, you can start with nothing and come out fine,” Iggy says. “That’s why it’s so important that I’m here. It’s not just for me—well, I am here for me, but there’s other things involved. I want to take care of my family.” Iggy branched Infantry because he loves the Army; he selected Fort Drum—usually the first unit to see conflict—because he wanted to deploy fast, get out and soldier. “See, that’s what made the crew tight,” Iggy says. “We all believe in the same ideas.”

  At the bar, the Goodfellas do some beer talk about service. John Mini gets drunk, tells his friends the tanks will always be there for them. Iggy says his greatest fear is that he might somehow let them down—“that it’ll be just words,” he says. Whitey says, “If there’s a moment that I don’t want to fail, it’s that moment. Whether it’s for lives, oil, economy—that’s our job. Alls I ask is that one chance.”

  The breakdown among West Point firsties is between the hard-core and the relaxed. It’s as though there are two different trains rolling through West Point; for a while, they’re the same train, and the cadets ride along comfortably, eyeing each other, figuring out who’s who. Then, with firstie year, they hit a juncture and split off. There’s a tension. “Touchy issue,” Whitey says. “A lot of guys here, they’re great guys, but they don’t seem to ever talk about combat and all that; they’re so relaxed, I can’t figure out why they’re here. Just to graduate, get the West Point ring and get out.”

  Sometimes Iggy hears kids talking about leaving early, shipping to graduate school, taking computer science so they can head-start their job search. “I don’t agree with that,” Iggy says. “You want to be a lawyer? Go to Harvard. You want to be a math guy? Go to MIT. You want to be a combat officer, you come here. We’re here to lead. And that’s changing. It’s changing because society’s changing. And you hang around guys who talk negative enough, you’ll catch up on it. It’s like we’re outnumbered, you know what I mean?”

  The $120,000 Rumor

  It’s a cold February day—the sort of afternoon when the river winds are like opening a freezer—and I’m walking with a cadet who chose the Academy over Princeton and Yale, full rides. This choice in itself is a victory for the Academy. I ask how the cadet decided; I expect to hear about the value of service, the honor of leading America’s sons and daughters. “It’s free,” he says. An athletic scholarship brought the cadet to West Point. “I had a bad knee injury coming out of high school. And if something happened where I wasn’t able to play ball again, then I’d probably be in trouble about being able to stay there. They’d take away my scholarship—they can do that. Not to mention, the military paid for the surgery. So that was key. Don’t think that wasn’t going through the back of my mind, either. I’m trying to be smart.”

  This is what cadets say all over post: “It’s free.” “My dad heard it was free here—that was the end of the story.” “They provide you with just about everything—clothing, food, education. It’s free money. I’m like, ‘I’m all over that.’” “Free education. And there’s tons of opportunities coming out of this place.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Joseph LeBoeuf—who resembles a harder-nosed Anthony Perkins—is course director of PL 300, one of two required courses in military leadership. As a man who teaches the art of motivating soldiers to a common purpose, LeBoeuf (class of ’74) has kept an eye on the retention problem. You can see that the subject gives him pain. “This is by no means Academy policy,” he says to me carefully after class one day. “It’s just my perspective.” He starts talking about the class of 1986. Fewer than 30 percent of its officers are on active duty. “Their notion of service today is different than ours was,” he says. “Cadets aren’t committed. I think we have a culture that’s focused on I: ‘What’s in this for me?’ Then we’re trying to convince cadets that the service ethic is as important and relevant as being a lawyer or a doctor. You know, a lot of ’em will talk about their afterlife. We didn’t talk about that when I was a cadet.”

  Every year, LeBoeuf asks cadets to write a short essay discussing their intentions for the future. “And most of ’em say, ‘I’m gonna get out and be a lawyer,’ ‘I’m gonna be a doctor,’ ‘I’m gonna be a racecar driver.’ You know, they don’t talk about professional service for twenty years in the Army; they don’t speak in those terms.” Somewhere along the way, no matter how much they’ve heard about service and character at West Point, what Colonel LeBoeuf diagrams as noise enters the system. Cadets hear the first whispers of the noise in Beast Barracks: article of faith, when you leave the Army, stop by the Association of Graduates, they’ll hook you up with a $120,000-a-year job on Wall Street. And then there are headhunting firms that specialize in finding jobs for West Point grads. “The noise is saying, ‘You come out, we’ll double your salary, we’ll give you this, we’ll give you that.’ The financial stuff”

  For cadets who five-and-fly, the West Point mission statement has a built-in fail-safe, an honorable fallback position. It’s not just a career as an officer in the military. It’s also “a lifetime of selfless service to the nation.” If the training doesn’t take, and graduates leave the Army for whatever reason, there’ll still be some national benefit, some return on investment. Graduates will carry the military’s character lessons into the civilian world, spreading them around. The way this boils down in cadets’ minds is as principled self-fulfillment. The answer non-careerminded firsties give as to how long they’ll stick with the military is always the same: “As long as I’m having fun.” Once it’s not fun, it’s a suit and tie.

  “There’s two sides to that coin,” Harley Whitten tells me. “Because when you go out into society, yes, you’re gonna be an active citizen is what they’re figuring, and hopefully a good one. I’m definitely gonna stay in for those five years. But I don’t feel I owe anything past that—it’s gonna be more, ‘How does this affect me?’ But you’re also here for your own profit. I’d be lying if I didn’t say, ‘Yeah, I’m usin’ the Army for my own benefit.’ I’m havin’ a blast here, y’know? And I’m gonna use my West Point education as much as I can. And hopefully make tons of money in the civilian world—but in an ethical way.”

  The problem is, West Point bills itself as a sharp choice for career-minded kids. If the Academy faces a problem with cadets once they leave, admissions faces the same problem before they even arrive. Over the past twenty years, West Point
has reinvented itself as a “tier-one college,” the kind of school that promises not just a future but a lifestyle. Come to West Point and your degree will put you on a footing with graduates of the Ivy League and the other green planets in that clubby solar system: Stanford, say, or MIT. At the new West Point there’s no more hazing, there are academic majors. The application brochure—it doesn’t downplay the Army environment—opens to half-page quotes reminding prospective students that West Point is not just a military academy, it’s a university: “When I was selecting a college, I wanted one that was very strong academically. I chose West Point”; “I’m impressed by the education I’m getting here. My friends are amazed at the classes I take.”

  An officer who asked not to be identified explains: “Who would we bring in otherwise? Midwestern boys that have low grades but good patriotism? For the reasons that you don’t want people to come here, they’re coming here. And that’s for the prestige of the institution, not for the Army career.”

  The point man for the Academy’s first question—how do we attract the best candidates?—is Colonel Michael Jones, director of admissions. Jones has no illusions about how difficult his job is; the students he wants tend to have plenty of options. “In all the stuff we lay out,” he says, “what we really emphasize is, ‘We’re trying to make you the best lieutenant you can be.’ Now, in getting you there—and this is where we really hook the parents, so to speak—we lay out the great education. We compare ourselves to the Ivies when we talk about how we stack up with Rhodes scholarships. We compare ourselves to the best engineering graduate schools in the country when we talk about the Hertz fellowship. You lay that out. It puts us right there with the Ivies, MIT, other tier-one schools.”