by David Lipsky
I am currently going through a second course of training at a military academy I will leave nameless. I was on a practice course for a land-navigation test, something that I am not very proficient in. I had become hopelessly lost when a member of my class came out of the woods. There aren’t that many decent-looking females at my school, and it is very difficult for any of them to make fatigues look good, but she was hot as hell . . . She stripped off her uniform, and she was gorgeous, with an athletic build that had been well-hidden. Before I knew it, she had pushed me back on the dirt floor . . . We didn’t have much time. The hour of our exercise was almost up. Once we didn’t show up, the Humvee would come to look for us . . . As soon as we stepped outside the shack, we were greeted by cheers and applause. The rest of our navigation companions had been standing just outside all the time. They kept our secret—but never let us hear the end of it.—K. H., New York
(When the issue appears, higher mounts a brief, unsuccessful hunt for the letter’s author, and K. H.’s father offers a recommendation. “Please don’t do that again,” he says. “That’s not a real, uh, respectable periodical.”)
Female Buckner lore mostly amounts to warnings: Buckner is sex education run on the immersion principle—a believe-it-or-not experience. Whatever sex distinctions have limped through plebe year get plowed under by Buckner. “Once you’re there with them for seven weeks, guys no longer see you as a girl,” explains cadet Christine Ray, a hardy, practical-minded Christian from Texas. “I don’t think anybody’s ever ready for it,” says Christine’s roommate, Erica Watson, a Chicago yuk who speaks with the confident clip of the serious student. “Before, you don’t realize what guys are like for real. They go beyond treating you like a sister and you become like another guy in the squad. Men always put on—what’s the word?—airs when they’re interested in you dating-wise or they’re around you as your friend. All those polite fronts go right out the window. They just get gross.”
The field environment—life pressed down to the essentials, sun, dirt, rifle—gives some male cadets the vapors. All talk becomes sex talk. A girl pulls out a paperback, sits under a tree, the guys come bobbing over like bees, itching to dispute something literary: “Do the characters give blowjobs?” “Is that a romance novel, or are there guys getting off in it?” Male cadets can’t wrap their minds around it: if women are as physically tough as we are, maybe they’re just as sexually tough too. Late afternoon, girls racked out on bunks at the bays’ female end. A male cadet strips down, drops his boxers, marches over to demonstrate his especially courageous and intimate piercing. “Everybody started screaming,” Erica explains. “I wasn’t going to look—I really didn’t know the guy all that well. That actually didn’t make me want to know him much better.”
The summer climaxes with a transportation event: one thousand yuks complete the slow jog to West Point in formation. Chrissi is already slipping into the grouchy yuk persona. “I asked my dad, ‘Am I ever gonna like to see West Point again?’ ’Cause I loved it so much before I came—I didn’t have the right to love it as much as I did. But I was excited to see the gates that time—no more Buckner, thank God.” The yuks are now team leaders; each one receives the name of a plebe they’re supposed to instruct. At West Point, everything is dual purpose, like equipment on the space shuttle. Yuks will get this appetizer-sized taste of leadership, plebes have a chance to download bottom-floor management skills while they’re still fresh on the yuks’ tongues. (For the rest of the semester, Chrissi is stuck with Buckner—because that’s her plebe’s name, Private Buckner. “Of all things,” she sighs.)
The G-4 Fighting Guppies have acquired a new TAC, Captain John Vermeesch. In the last days of Jim DeMoss, TACing reached a kind of martial Zen: DeMoss wanted to see if you could live to standard on your own. Vermeesch runs things differently; he doesn’t mind dirtying his hands up and pushing a little. The company braces itself. G-4 cadets receive copies of his Leadership Philosophy in their e-mail, “the things that make Captain Vermeesch tick.” They read like Successories on steroids: “You’re here to make mistakes. Long as you make them at a hundred miles an hour, go as hard as you can and don’t make them twice, you’re good to go.” “My basic philosophy is that development occurs around a crisis.” The new TAC’s most mistake-making, crisis-prone cadets are probably going to be Kevin Hadley’s two old roommates: George Rash and the one cadet with an even more unlikely name, Huck Finn.
Best Summer of Their Lives II
Because the Goodfellas aren’t going to be together anymore—they’re lighting out for different posts, Suppy and Whitey to study flight in Alabama, John Mini to master tanks at Knox, Iggy to face the Infantry music at Fort Benning—they book a ten-day West Coast farewell tour. They open with a couple of dates at the Ignacios’. It’s no secret that Iggy’s family isn’t rolling in money: their house is the squat, fortified type you see in South Central message movies: bars across the windows, grate for a screen door. (Their back yard stops at the retaining wall of the San Diego Freeway; sleeping on couches, the Goodfellas can pinpoint the exact start of rush hour by the moment when every glass object in the place begins to tinkle.) But it’s a sweet, relaxing time. Mr. Ignacio shows off the trophy shelf built right above his bed. “I call this my family’s wealth,” Mr. Ignacio says; plaques commemorating his sons’ achievements, tiny buffed-up angels hoisting baseball bats and rifles. Mrs. Ignacio serves Filipino rations, sticky and delicious—candied pork, vinegar chicken, bananas in rice. Then the Goodfellas play some San Diego appearances at the Supko household. Leave gives them the bracing sensation of flying under radar. Dining at some harborfront eatery amid seagulls and yachts, they smile from the undercover kick: the civilians could never guess they’re watching four young butter bars at the starting gate of their Army careers.
The military operates a sideline: it’s also the nation’s best underground economy. Once you’re in, you can shop at private stores (PXs with unbeatable discounts), visit special hospitals, and, if you’re willing to hang around the airfield, fly a private airline, in the passenger cabin of a C-141. The Goodfellas hop a flight to Hawaii. It’s only when they’re over water, when they finally leave the lower 48, that Whitey feels the cords snap and shakes the stomach-clenching idea that he’s missing formation at West Point.
Graduation wouldn’t be graduation without a flameout story. This year, Chad Jones, president of the class of ’99, a spotlight cadet, took the hit. Cadets have a special separation etiquette. You only say two things—the way vets mention a dead GI and his last battle—the cadet’s name plus the infraction that nailed him. “She got into some trouble” means alcohol and a car, a packed night. “Bad trouble” indicates drugs. “Well, he did a stupid thing” spells sex or honor. Chad Jones did a stupid thing. In April, grading his term paper, one of Jones’s professors spotted some hand-me-down footnotes. The honor process went up and running fast. It was the last weeks of school, and nobody believed they’d kick out the class president.
Floating in the Pacific (salt on their lips, clouds driving overhead), the Goodfellas look for the moral—their class president, separated on honor—but maybe there isn’t one. Nobody is sure how West Point values will handle on real-world roads—how do you remember the honor code when there’s no Adamczyk around and you’re trying to make rent?—and here’s an example of a breakdown at the Academy gates. In the airport, the Goodfellas face another uncertainty, one that’s dogged them since June. How do men say goodbye to each other? They shift grips on their bags uncomfortably, thinking it over. Finally, they go with the hardy standard. Right hands meet for the shake, left hands tighten into a sideways fist, to thump the other guy on the back. Affectionate but tough, love plus a little backbone of expectations. Iggy’s voice, husky in Whitey’s ear: “You know, brother—I’ll see you when I see you.”
Back in Buffalo, love clotheslines Whitey. He’s held back with girls for four years, now he wants to share everything he’s got and everything he’s going to ha
ve, what other word is there for that than love? He finds he’s got no use for the old cadet relationship deferment—“‘I agree, it would be outstanding to fall in love, but unfortunately I have to report for taps.’ Not anymore. Just being with Loryn is such a wonderful feeling—I mean, the minute I’m away from her, my next thought is when I’ll see her again.”
Loryn did some New York runway work for Calvin Klein, and it amazes Whitey to see a girl this professionally attractive imitate voices from after-school cartoons. She calls him Donald, formal and elegant, as if, being a grad, he now outranks having a y at the end of his name (unlike Whitey, Iggy, Suppy, or even John Mini). They chart their similarities: music, former relationships, how their parents even divorced when they were nearly the same age. He takes her to every restaurant he can think of, his favorites, anybody’s. His West Point stories impress her, and his family connections pay off. They can saw through steaks, kill two salads, split dessert and a bottle of wine, pay a fifteen-dollar check, because the owners know Donald’s brother-in-law is hockey star Mike Peca.
Marriage ideas bubble above Donald’s head like thoughts in a comic strip. He’s on one of those good-luck streaks where everything seems to brighten together: he’s an Academy grad, he’s in love, and now the Buffalo Sabres are even in the Stanley Cup playoffs. He takes Loryn to HSBC Arena instead of his buddy Mark. “That was wrong.” Donald grins. “I fucked up. I almost don’t feel bad because I was fuckin’ in love and that blinds you. I’m convinced I’ll be able to look at Mark when I marry her and say, ‘See, it was OK I took her.’ I mean, Mark Matty is one of the greatest Buffalo Sabres fans I’ve ever known.” Three weeks before flight school, he can’t hold back anymore; over menus at Applebee’s, he tells Loryn how in love he is. Loryn closes her menu and says if he weren’t headed for Alabama, she wouldn’t have a doubt in her mind. And a thought ghosts through Whitey’s mind, the kind you stamp out like a fire: here’s a woman who would be worth getting out of the Army for.
Seeing the Elephant
DMI, the Department of Military Instruction, offers courses in public speaking, but to cadets the best training is watching Keirsey. The summer is over, everyone’s back on post—Buckner stories, plebe stories and leave stories ping-pong over the mess hall tables—and Keirsey returns to his job of firing up the corps. Everything about him is soldierly—arms, legs, shoulders, eyes, even his atoms seem more tightly packed than the civilian kind. When he speaks, cadets hear yelps and gunfire, drum music quickening, he’s a man who carries his own soundtrack.
Infantry’s insignia is two crossed rifles. Since everybody knows how risky the duty is, the cadet nickname is “idiot sticks.” Keirsey has passed his whole life under the sticks. He was raised at the Infantry’s home, Fort Benning. In the 1860s, his great-grandfather migrated to the Indian territories, married a half-Chickasaw woman named Mattie Collins, settled down to a small spread along the Texas border. Because the trains paused at his ranch to collect water and postal bags, the town entered maps as Keirsey, Oklahoma. His grandfather ranched and worked law enforcement. In Keirsey’s office, there’s a picture of Jim Dan Keirsey on horseback, wearing his sheriff’s star, squinting down a dusty main street. In 1929 he trailed a bank robber into a house; there was a quick exchange of shots, and deputies rushed in to find both men dead.
Six years later, Keirsey’s father turned sixteen, packed his bags, misled a recruiter about his age and enlisted with the Thunderbirds, the Oklahoma Forty-fifth Infantry. In the run-up to World War II, Jim Dan Keirsey got promoted to lieutenant. He led landings at Sicily and Salerno; mini-Normandys—overcast skies, GIs shouting in the water, Italians sniping down from cliffs. By the time his battalion splashed across the Rhine, Jim had risen to second-in-command. He was acting battalion commander while his men cleared out Nuremberg Stadium, where Hitler had staged his largest, most ornate rallies, as if the whole world could be conquered though sheer force of choreography. Stepping outside, removing his helmet in the dusty German air, he must have felt as if he’d chased the worst criminal in history back into his house, and now he was walking out alive. He taught Infantry tactics at Benning during Korea; in the sixties he shipped for Vietnam. He received three Silver Stars for valor, and told his son, “They were handing them out with the rations.”
So in the way other families stick with plumbing or police work, Hank Keirsey followed his dad into the family business. From his father he learned the essentials of command, a list of never and always. Never lead from the rear. Always be bold. A leader is responsible for everything his subordinate does and does not do. Hank applied to West Point because it seemed the surest path to a life like Jim Dan’s in the military. The last silenced cadet was a member of Hank’s plebe company. In the Old Corps, there was no honor code wiggle room; get found, you left. Occasionally, a cadet discovered some loophole to curl up in and stayed on anyway. That’s where silencing came in. Standing at his first formation, Keirsey understood just how rocky West Point could get, the firsties pointing out a glum, thin-necked kid who had cheated on an exam: “Plebes, we’ve got Pelogi here. Don’t distribute his mail, never deliver his laundry. Don’t sit next to him or talk to him, don’t even look at him. Pretend as if he doesn’t exist. He is an asshole, he is a lyin sumbitch, he is a scumbag? During firstie year, Hank made the sixteen-hour car trip from Georgia to Highland Falls with his blond girlfriend, Kathy Hanson, whose own dad had retired a colonel after Vietnam. Hank branched Infantry and headed back to Benning for Ranger school. He trained and patrolled to exhaustion and right on past it, until he couldn’t tell whether he was marching or dreaming, past the big sweeping pines that rose like skyscrapers from a city where people were allowed to sleep. He married Kathy at his first post, Fort Bragg. Bragg is home to the Eighty-second Airborne, the one Army division so huah it gets mental capital letters: The Division.
Then the routine of Army life, climbing the ranks, waiting to deploy—that double sensation you have on an airport people mover, rolling along without getting anywhere. The Keirseys had two boys, J.D.—another Jim Dan—and Kent. In 1989, Hank’s unit rehearsed the parachute drop into Panama; then, at the last minute, there was a duty changeover. “That was a heartbreak to me,” Keirsey says, gruffly laughing. “Somebody else jumped in on my mission.” When Civil War soldiers finished their first action, they wrote letters home about “seeing the elephant.” The elephant was the big smashing animal you never got a look at in town. In 1990, Keirsey got his look at the elephant. His unit—325th Infantry, Fort Bragg—deployed to Desert Shield, for the war people in the Army call “Saudi.”
You always imagine deserts in terms of heat. But it was February; temperatures slipped into the forties by moonrise. The shamal blew constantly—a fine wind that whipped the tops off dunes, sticking them to everything else. You’d run a finger inside your ear and come out with a grainy hunk of Saudi. Keirsey felt the dazzle in the stomach of setting foot on ground where no one he knew had ever stood. Because Saudi was the first conflict after most of the world started shopping at the same stores, there were surreal touches of home. “What was the Iraqi assault vehicle of choice?” Keirsey asks cadets. “Chevy Suburban.” When the trucks pulled in, you had to squelch the thought that you were being attacked by an after-school soccer team. Or you’d get assigned to guard some gleaming new Saudi air defense base, and drop your bedroll beside the summer-vacation smell of an Olympic-sized pool. Or you’d clear a deserted Iraqi bunker: no enemy, only rows of beautiful consumer goods—TVs, a motorcycle—it was like visiting the prize warehouse of a game show. Then you’d hear a whine, draw your pistol, and two healthy Labrador puppies would tumble from behind a curtain. At West Point, Keirsey would stress these details—Chevrolet, dogs, Harley, pool—to reassure cadets that the elephant was not so different from town as they thought, the elephant looked like home.
A moment comes when any hard job gives like a jammed door. It’s that flash Keirsey likes to paint for cadets. His came on G-Day—Ground Day—eve, t
he night before the big Infantry assault. CNN was padding out the news cycle with horror stories about the Iraqi defense. Expert commentators pulled out maps, worked the pointers; the Iraqi plans, they said, were designed to chew up Infantry. First, coalition troops would encounter Iraqi trench lines, lightly defended, with built-in valves carrying gasoline. Step inside, Iraqis would flood the trench, set the petrol on fire. Survive that, you’d have to cross two hundred yards of densely seeded minefield. Whoever was left would face Iraqis firing from triangular forts, under constant artillery bombardment, maybe or maybe not employing a nerve agent.
Keirsey had his men prep what they could. They porcupined their trucks: tearing out seats, ripping off canvas, piling sandbags two layers deep on the floor to absorb shrapnel from the mines. (“That would muffle the blast a bit,” Keirsey explains, “so the shrapnel runs a little slower through your leg.”) Then the soldiers would aim their rifles over the truck slats in every direction, like spines on a porcupine. Keirsey’s regiment got attached to a French armored division, which was good news—the tanks would divert some of the heat from his troops. Keirsey marched up Dead Camel Road (two roads led in and out of camp, both with circumstantial nicknames, and a dead camel had been decomposing on this one for a while; the other route, named for a barking dog, was called Barking Dog Lane) to coordinate with the French. The French colonel outlined his battle plan. The American troops would race across the desert for forty-five kilometers behind the French. “Then,” the French colonel explained, “we will encounter the Iraqi resistance. When we find them, we will back our tanks up and move around them. And you will go into trenches and root out the Iraqis.” Hank wasn’t sure he’d understood properly. “Well,” he said slowly, “you guys have the tanks. Don’t you think you ought to stick around, maybe give us some fire support?” The colonel shook his head. “Oh, no no. They will shoot rockets at us. This could cause damage to our tanks. No, we will move away while you clear out the Iraqis.”