Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  “We were gonna patrol one night. Two in the morning, we looked up and there’s Keirsey marching out of the damn woods with his face all camoed up.” “We all went to his house one time and he found a way to fire us up about clearing deadfall off of his lawn. Honest to God—I was genuinely excited about doing yardwork.”

  And Keirsey could recover the words you needed. Iggy Ignacio spent cow year as a first sergeant: rolling the halls, tightening screws and hammering down the standard. Word came down about a big meeting. Juniors only, to chew over the direction of the Academy, likes and dislikes. Instead, higher was laying out changes for next year. It snapped something in Iggy: the meeting was about making things easier. “It was about being weak on the plebes and shit,” Iggy remembers. “That wasn’t the way we came up, and when I got back to my room I felt disgusted. I felt like I’d had this idea, that West Point was going to be the hardest fucking thing in my life. And it was hard, yeah—but it wasn’t what I expected.”

  So Iggy got methodical. He took the gray West Point pin out of his cap and removed the insignia from his collar. He put strips of dark hundred-mile-an-hour tape over the West Point patch—the helmet and sword—on his shoulder. He left U.S. Army showing because the Army didn’t have anything to do with it; Iggy saw West Point and the Army as separate entities. “And I kept my name showing because I was proud of my name.” That afternoon there was a boot-and-shoe layout—polishing and edge-dressing. A firstie spotted Iggy opening his door in this muzzled, amnesiac uniform and turned him in. So Friday morning, Iggy had to report to the TAC, Major Rice. They stared at each other across the desk for a long moment. Major Rice was Armor, quiet and thin-lipped. “Iggy,” Major Rice said, “I should break you.”

  Instead, Rice told Iggy to report to his office again Monday morning. He said, “I am going to send you to see someone.” So there went Iggy’s weekend: frets, guesses, rolling over to try to find the worry-free side of the pillow. Maybe he’d have to sit down with Adamczyk or the supe. Maybe he’d have to explain his motivations to a military psychiatrist at CPD, which stands for the Center for Personal Development, but which—because cadets believe that having a psychiatric anything on your record leaves a cloud over your career—everyone calls the Center for Personal Destruction. When Iggy reports Monday morning to Major Rice’s office, the TAC stands and asks, “Ignacio, do you know who Lieutenant Colonel Keirsey is?”

  Iggy crossed the post, emotions bubbling. “Inside I was like, ‘What? This isn’t any fucking punishment.’” And Iggy stands in Keirsey’s office, surrounded by the souvenirs of a successful Army career: slogans, coins, old company guidons, Iraqi trophies, objects that comprise a tangible military résumé. Looking at the lieutenant colonel, Iggy knows why he denatured his uniform. Iggy tells him he feels sick, he doesn’t believe he’s earning this. And Keirsey tells him about the warrior spirit, that he has to believe in higher, they’re squared away. Iggy says, “We’re making weaker soldiers.” Keirsey says, “Guys like us, they keep us around, ’cause when the real shit happens they know they’re gonna need us. That’s when they pull us out. And then they put us down again. You should never feel sorry for yourself. If you ever have any issues or problems, you come to me.” And then Iggy starts crying.

  A couple months later, at the Infantry bash, Keirsey put his cigar down for a few seconds. Iggy pocketed it, sealed it in a Ziploc bag and saved it for two years, till he’d graduated and posted and the cigar was just some dried tobacco-colored chips in the back of a drawer.

  Butter Bars

  One night in the middle of March—windows cracked, spring feathering the breezes—Whitey Herzog got an idea. He counted out eighty Post-its with his roommate Harley Whitten and pasted them up in the shape of a calendar on the back of their door. Every night at taps they’d peel off a day. At first, this creation was pretty dismal to look at—each yellow square represented weather, duties, hurdles. But suddenly Whitey was unpeeling the last Post-it, and Harley was saying “Now the angels sing,” and it was Grad Week.

  During Grad Week old grads ramble the barracks, searching out their cadet selves, creaky hands reaching for everything—sinks, closets, bunks. Parents remember the cadets as children, seeds they planted four years before in the wholesome ground of the Academy. And firsties—rushing party to party, goodbye to goodbye—size up each other’s features, hunting for the future officer inside the cadet. The Firstie Club is full of hollering and beer accidents, a rush-hour party on a subway car, everybody smashed in and chugging toward the same stop. “I can’t believe . . . !” “Time to go to work, baby!” “Yeeeeah.” Every conversation gets abbreviated, goodbyes interrupt goodbyes. “You want to take everybody aside,” Whitey says, “tell ’em how much you care about ’em, how much you’re proud of ’em for finishing, how much you look up to ’em as peers. But there’s not enough time.” Every couple minutes you see guys shoving away chairs, grabbing each other’s arms and just nodding. Survivor grins: they’re graduating West Point.

  Grad Week has liberated Whitey from second thoughts. “Every motivation you thought you lost,” he says, “you didn’t.” The feelings come back to Whitey like lost mail, with his love for the Army inside and intact. “Here I am, this is what I’m for. Good feeling—it’s gonna be tough, but it’s gonna be worth it. Scary feeling too.” He pounds back beers with Iggy and Supko, the Goodfellas firing one another up the next stage. “Graduate from a civilian college,” Supko says, “you’re gonna go out and do well in the world. For us, it’s like, ‘Guess what? You just passed a four-year test. And you’ve got another five-year test right ahead of you.’” “And you fail this one,” Iggy nods, “people could die.”

  Whitey counts down the last hours before commencement with the good, packed-ruck feeling of every duty met, sitting and laughing with Harley Whitten because there’s nothing left to say. Mike Ferlazzo pops by, in the gray squirt of hours between 0200 and 0400, to burn their last cigarettes together. (“That was nice,” Whitey says, “just talking and chilling. I did that for a firstie buddy when I was a yuk.”) Two hours later, the operation Whitey has been waiting for since he first heard the words West Point. A thousand uniforms bob uphill through the morning shadows to graduation. The weather is running a preview of what the sun will be able to accomplish by August, the cadets get sweaty and lightheaded, everybody grousing and chuckling with lack of sleep. Whitey and some buddies sneak into the ice hockey rink and cool off. Then they sit down and watch the supe shake every hand in the class. The hats sail into the air. Then the cadets have a last West Point order to follow: back in his room, Whitey removes the cadet uniform for the final time—the Academy becomes a pile of gray jacket, white belt, white pants—and changes to Army green. In a shady spot under some trees, Major Andrea Thompson raises her right hand and swears in Whitey Herzog as a second lieutenant with the United States Army.

  Whitey’s parents are here—on a temporary armistice—to pin the rank on his shoulders, the two fresh brass lieutenant’s slashes that the Army calls butter bars. Graduation is a family reunion: aunts, uncles, cousins—faces from the Thanksgiving table—turning out to see what Whitey has become. For Whitey that also means friends. Mark Matty was the buddy Whitey was most afraid of losing by going military. Mark was about as unmilitary as you could get; the kind of easy, popular kid who actually looks good smiling in photos, cheeks wide, hair in his eyes. In high school, girls he hardly knew would work up their nerve to call him on the phone. Everybody understood how much Whitey wanted the Army—as freshmen in the cafeteria, Mark bumped trays with Whitey and started singing “I Want to Be an Airborne Ranger.”

  It was the kind of best-friendship that opens up a side door in your life. Whitey was busy doing high school carpentry (tests, homework), building a ladder out of grades. Mark never gave college a second thought. “We’d go hang out all day in Delaware Park,” Whitey remembers. “It was great, it was something I never experienced before. These people were just there because they wanted to have a
good life, and they didn’t give a damn about your college or your future.” Mark taught Whitey music: when they were sophomores, Mark cued up a CD in Whitey’s basement. “I want you to hear a song,” he said solemnly. “This is Jimi Hendrix.” Now Mark is here, applauding the bar-pinning, offering Whitey his first salute.

  Graduation over, the post clears out fast, cadets headed off for a last detail of family life. Mark helps Whitey stuff his big Oldsmobile with boxes and clothing. The car quits an hour north of West Point. Mark and Whitey wait out the repairs at a trucker bar, watching hockey on the trucker bar TV. During commercials, Mark slaps the counter and announces, “Hey, this is a new lieutenant, a butter bar—I think that deserves a free beer.”

  Whitey’s Buffalo base of operations is an Irish pub called Checkers: Irish flag, Killian’s, dartboard, framed newspaper headlines embarrassing to the British. His first night in town, Whitey heads over; first time in a while, he’s not thinking about meeting girls, he’s thinking about time with friends, one long breather before flight school. And there’s Loryn Winter. The impressions pile up fast: ankles, throat, dark hair, perfume, eyes, fingers poking Diet Coke slush with a straw. Loryn is twenty-four, a local girl without the local-girl accent. Just as Whitey’s love for the military carried him out of Buffalo, Loryn is the sort of girl whose good looks amount to travel plans. Her face is too polished, her clothes too snappy to be stranded so far north of the nation’s party. The timing couldn’t be worse: Whitey will report to Fort Rucker, Alabama, in seven weeks. He calls Mark when he gets home, hands jittery on the phone. “I think I just fell in love,” he says.

  PART TWO

  The Second Year

  Best Summer of Their Lives

  WEST POINT CADETS call their post the fishbowl. Everybody stares at everybody. Four thousand cadets in the corps, TACs keeping an eye on the cadets, higher scrutinizing TACs, Congress overseeing higher and, every so often, the American public rapping the glass, checking up on whether the fish are getting along. But right there at the center, cadets stare at cadets, because it’s the post’s most entertaining diversion. And since everyone ends up treading in the same bootprints anyway, it’s educational. Chrissi Cicerelle, from Whitey’s old company, H-4, stood at attention on the Plain and watched the firstie class shrink in the distance. “It felt kinda eerie,” Chrissi says. “You’re so used to having them around. Then the rest of us marched back to barracks, and that’s when it hit us: Whoa—they’re really gone.”

  Next morning, the plebes collect luggage, grab bus seats—West Point relies on converted school buses, and it’s a leveling treat at Academy functions to watch graduates who’ve gone off and become captains of industry boost their diamond-clad wives up a student-sized staircase—rumble the seven miles to Camp Buckner and sign out for leave. The three-week vacation will be their longest since they showed up for Beast. Back home, cadets approach the most mundane fixtures like carnival rides. A bed turns into a Sleep-a-Whirl. The refrigerator becomes the Masticator. (It’s waiting for you—twenty cubic feet of calories.) A hike down the sidewalk unwinds as outlandishly as Civilians of the Caribbean: a senior citizen, a skate punk, two black-eyed Goths, a gay couple, a fat kid or just some bushy-haired yokel—so much arrayed human variety, your own home street feels Animatronic.

  And wherever cadets go, West Point tracks behind them like a gunpowder trail. Slip into the wrong environment—a bong at a party, underage six-packs from the 7-Eleven, even just four kids shaving costs by splitting a motel single—it throws a spark, ignites an honor investigation at the end of the summer. Chrissi Cicerelle flies home to Orlando. Sitting above the clouds, Chrissi realizes she’s got everything she wants. She’s found a boyfriend—Mark Thompson, a G-4 plebe who was Reid “Huck” Finn’s Beast roommate. From the outside, they make an odd pair. Cadets still rag Cicerelle about whether a trigger guard will splinter her manicure. Mark Thompson is super-huah: lanky and tall, Infantry ideal; when he’s not talking, his mouth seals into a slashed wince, as if he’s so filled with ambition it hurts. (Chrissi has always planned to marry in the trade. “I have a lot more respect for cadet guys. We’re choosing the same lifestyle.”)

  And this being West Point, the relationship is fast-tracking, off to a dragster start. “He says all the things a girl wants to hear,” Chrissi explains. “Like, very few guys are not afraid to talk about marriage and commitment and the future. And he has no problem with it. So that’s real attractive to me. He said ‘I love you’ after three weeks. I’m like, ‘Well, he has to mean it, who talks like this?’”

  George Rash spends leave packing up his parents for their relocation from Georgia to Yuma, Arizona. He’s glad to strike Centerville off his map. “Weather sucks, a lot of bugs, I’m allergic to half the plants in the state.” Three weeks later, the class is back on post, the cadets clamp on the green and gray, and Camp Buckner gets its step-off.

  West Point training operates on the Army developmental model: Crawl, Walk, Run. (When it comes to character-building, the formula sprouts mystical wings: Be, Know, Do.) Every summer trains something new. Beast is the crawl phase, a six-week cram course in soldiering. By the time they reach Buckner—Cadet Field Training—cadets are walking, picking up advanced soldier skills. Cow and firstie summers spell the run phase. Cows stick around West Point to administer training at Beast and Buckner, firsties take their skills out on the road, testing them with real Army units.

  At West Point, there are shadow versions of everything, and for the cadets each year has its particular crawl-walk-run flavor. Plebe year is enthusiasm; you’re thrilled to be invited, you’re hoping they’ll let you stay. Yuk year is the bitterness year; nothing’s changed—yearlings don’t secure many additional privileges—except you’ve got another class on the bottom. (A typical yuk conversation starter: “Do I sound like just another bitter yuk to you?”) Cow year is the crossroads: you’re solidifying your cadet personality, choosing your cadet path, either huah or cynical. And firstie year is graduation: cadet time getting short, West Point sliding toward the rear-view mirror, you’re hoping they’ll let you leave.

  Buckner is the first taste of bitterness. Its Old Corps nicknames have the Southeast Asia ring of debacle: Buck-nam, the ’Ner. Eight weeks of midnight patrols, 0500 wake-ups, dirt, heat and bugs. (Cadets swab their BDUs with DEET, an insecticide so powerful that one dependable Buckner pastime is watching bugs crawl up your sleeve and die.) Cadets bunk in long metal shacks—bays—that look like tin igloos. They train constantly—weapon systems, runs, riding a pulley one hundred feet in the air over Lake Popolopen on the Slide for Life. The official joke phrase for Buckner is “the best summer of our lives. “You’re in the brush, trying to get your damn rifle clean, some guy asks how it’s going, you pop off, “Best summer of my life.”

  George Rash is now a yuk, spending the summer mastering camouflage, hand signals, the quiet arts. But there’s no camouflaging George. His BDU proclaims his giveaway name, the word no one ever reads and thinks, “Boldness—recklessness—audacity.” (George’s younger brother had his name legally changed to his mother’s maiden one, Salinger. Not because Rash brings to mind skin irritations. Because his parents, amazingly, gave him the full name Richard Rash. George can’t understand the decision. “He just doesn’t like Rash,” George says, shaking his head, “despite the fact that it’s an old name with a lot of history.”) George has been dreading Buckner for months. It’s a rematch with his two chief West Point opponents: foot march and the run. After a couple of foot-march miles, the terrain between his feet and his shins lights up like a fire zone, muscle cramps slugging it out with blisters, until finally George sits down. Next time out, cramps across the stomach, continents of sweat mapping his BDU, and George is a heat casualty. Other cadets sneer by, Rash! Rash! By July, George reaches the conclusion the post has been waiting for: these are not his skills, not his people. He puts in his request for the paperwork, makes the telephone call to his parents, tells them he’s had enough; he’s resignin
g from West Point.

  But next morning, he’s back in formation, ready for more, head tilted back, glasses catching the clouds. The rumor races around the fishbowl. Rash wanted to drop but his mom and dad told him, “Don’t come home.” The real story is more complex: two retired parents, fixed incomes, they told him there was nothing budgeted for a civilian college. George hung up and walked back to his company.

  Buckner’s traditional lore highlights primal fears and thrills. Colonel Adamczyk can talk about dark nights and rustic settings, upperclassmen dropping arty simulators (a flash and a boom to mimic the fall and commotion of artillery) outside the bays at three in the morning. Keirsey will recall the Recondo week survival training where you killed a rabbit or chicken and cooked it into a stew; cadets chattered all year about which cadet would get selected to bite off the chicken’s head. (In 1980, some general’s kid was offered the honor, and that more or less ended the survival element of the Recondo program.)

  These days Buckner lore is hormone-driven. To a lot of cadets, Buckner is the promised land, a discreet territory where every nighttime tree or boulder provides shelter for the hobby that’s prohibited in the barracks. (Cadets never give up finding ways around the rule, even during the academic year. “Cadet sex is like a gas,” cadet Ryan Southerland explains. “And you know how gas will expand to fill any space? Well, any space that is possible, cadets will try and have sex in it.”) There’s an Academy all-Caucasian rap group—the scariest four words in music—called White Bread; they record an MP3 duet called “Buckner Love.” The male cadet deploys his sweetest line—“Aw, come on, you know I respect you as a soldier”—the female lays down some Donna Summer groans. Another cadet makes a stew out of memories and hankerings, field-tests the results on some squad buddies, submits this contribution to Penthouse Forum. It runs under the title “Babe in the Woods”—and the West Point development experience makes its way into a million plain brown envelopes.