Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  Keirsey crossed the sand to a scene from World War One: his soldiers dug into foxholes, anxious faces squinting in the wind, ponchos shielding their automatic weapons. As Keirsey tells cadets this story, his voice drops, it gathers the weight of a conversion experience. Except it’s what he’s always believed—it was more like the revelation of a father’s advice proved entirely true. “We’re in just the shittiest of conditions,” Keirsey says. “Everybody’s got their goggles on, bandanas across the nose to keep out the sand. I walk back to where one of my sergeants is dug deep in the red moonscape. Smith, twenty-year-old kid—this is not a Rambo kid, this is your average thoughtful human. ‘Hey, Sergeant Smith.’ He takes the goggles off. In desperate situations, you want to see people eyeball to eyeball. You look at him and you say, ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do when we wake up tomorrow. We’re gonna pile in the truck. And the French tanks are going to take us to where the resistance is. And then, when they find it, they’re gonna move away from it. And we’re gonna move forward without any support and clear out every last Iraqi. That’s our mission—how do you feel about it?’”

  Keirsey pauses like a motorist, easing his foot off the gas, so cadets can feel all of it: sand, excitement, the sense of being on the verge of the assault. The cadets stare up. “This is the defining moment of officer-ship,” he tells them. “It’s what I love so much about the American soldier. Because you expect to hear, ‘Bullshit, sir—this is all fouled up.’ Smith looks at me. You can see the crust around his eyes where the goggles sat. He thinks it over. ‘Huah, sir,’ he says. ‘I’m going to need to get some more grenades.’” The cadets applaud, roar Hooop!

  “It’s moments like that,” Keirsey tells them, cadets straight in their seats, “that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. What a thing that is, to go forward with that kind of loyalty and courage. Because if you make the call and say, ‘I want you to get down in that trench, I want you to move out under that artillery fire,’ Sergeant Smith is going to do it. Not only that: he’ll bust down the back of the truck, and he’ll be bringing more grenades. Makes you want to be worthy of him, because you don’t ever want to spend that loyalty unwisely. That’s what makes this profession noble, the look in the eyes of troops that’ll do anything for you. This is what we do.”

  G-Day was all images, what Marines in Vietnam called the eye-fucking of war. Keirsey crossed the desert in a Humvee at the head of what amounted to a technology parade; this is what Americans can do. Tanks and armored personnel carriers taking the dunes like boats riding swells, howitzers letting loose, even the sky confettied with helicopters. “You’re finally out of the foxhole after thirty days,” Keirsey says, “so it’s exhilarating. As you’re driving north, you’re watching the MLRS battalions—multiple launch rocket systems, carting along six-packs of giant missiles, they’re shooting all the time. You feel like singing.” Down in their bunkers, the Iraqi defense plan turned out to be to surrender as soon as possible. Head down, arms in the air, Infantry called it the Iraqi salute. Hank spun around a dune and saw a sea of boots, backs, heads—Iraqis lying face-down in the sand. He had to thread the Humvee between them, shouting encouraging words out the door. “Looking good! Get some. Don’t worry about it!” Hank’s chemical officer belched, leaned out his own door and started throwing up, from tension and relief. “Good God, man,” Hank said, “the first enemy we encounter and you’re blowing your lunch around. How are we going to impress them?” The chemical officer wiped his lips, apologized and vomited again. American troops bumped by in their porcupined trucks, cheering.

  All Roads Have Wires

  Donald begins packing with one week left to go in Buffalo. He’s become a good enough read of people at West Point to see that Loryn is sinking into emotional fatigue. “It was getting intense, scary,” he says. “She was confused on the inside—she was hurtin’.”

  2330 used to mean taps; now it’s the start of another workday, punching in for a long stretch of hours on the telephone. What worries Loryn is Donald not being around; Donald knows they can get past that, he explains how the Army schedule isn’t as harsh as it appears—while, at the back of his mind, he’s struggling to forget everything that lieutenant once told him at Ranger, about how he hardly even saw women anymore. He gives Loryn the soldier promises. “I was desperate by this point,” Donald says. “I started telling her all the good stuff. ‘Do you know how much time I get off, all the holidays, do you know how often I can come back to Buffalo? This is worth it to me.’” At another restaurant, they sit down in the waiting area, and never get off the bench. “Loryn,” he says, “I know how you feel, I know I’ve got to go into the Army, but that doesn’t have to be forever. How do you feel about it? There’s no reason not to try this.”

  They spend the last night back at Checkers. Like a good officer, Donald has performed reconnaissance and prepped the area. There’s a bouquet of roses waiting for Loryn, along with a letter explaining that he loves her and how much he wants to continue. If she doesn’t feel the same things, OK, they can end as friends. “I said that’s the whole point of life. There’s one bottom line, either you’re in something one hundred percent, or you’re out.” Loryn answers in the form of a kiss; she drinks, cries, tells him how he should become a writer but she’s ready to date a soldier. Donald drives off to Alabama the next morning.

  The plan is to link up with Suppy in Virginia and convoy from there. The landscape washes past him—smokestacks, forests, signs for drive-thru and towns—and it’s all wallpaper, background for Loryn. Every so often he stops to wipe the bug apocalypse off his windshield. He knows he’s crossed South when religious broadcasters crowd the sports talk off the radio. Donald can see this is going to be one of those relationships that eat into a military salary. First hotel he stops at, they’re on the phone together—two beds strung by a wire—until four in the morning.

  In Virginia, Suppy waves to Donald from a parking lot. They split a Ryder truck and set out on the last leg. They pass presidential birthplaces, old Indian trails, battlefields. Chickamauga in Tennessee, site of one of the last big Confederate victories in the war. In Alabama the gas pumps are the old slope-shouldered, nondigital type, and girls in flowered dresses sit on cement steps talking on the cell phone. Church signboards: The Lord Gives Strength. One Man Practicing Sportsmanship Is Better Than 50 Men Preaching It. Then they’re past towns where men wear chunky belt buckles with open shirts, cars start looking new again, drivers wear aviator sunglasses and have high-and-tights, and they’re back in the military world, another Army colony. Officers stride the sidewalks with the pilot’s look of having a business relationship with gravity. In Enterprise, home of Fort Rucker, the houses have signs saying Welcome West Point Class of ’99.

  Right before flight school, there’s the kind of military foul-up that spins Herzog’s mind back into doubt. Donald had played too much music, sat too close to the amps at too many Allman Brothers concerts with Mark Matty. His hearing isn’t strong enough to fly helicopters, where catching instructions or a rotor spinning funny can make a life-or-death difference. “I thought it was God’s way of telling me I should have gone into the Infantry,” Donald says. But a week later, Donald is cleared. He receives his first pilot instruction. Helicopters sometimes crack up on high-tension lines, blades tangled by the telephone wires that always follow a road. It becomes a flight school slogan, something for the West Point grads to tell each other in the hallway. “Remember—all roads have wires.”

  Loryn is supposed to make her first visit in the middle of September. A few days before, she tells Donald about a party at her beach house. The party was attended by her friend Rich. “I wasn’t worried, because there wasn’t anything in her voice to make me worry,” Whitey says. Then she calls again. Rich just told Loryn he has plans, and they involve Loryn and the act of kicking it to the next level. “What’d you say?” Whitey asks, mouth going dry. “I don’t want to be more than friends,” Loryn replies. The edge Rich has over Whitey is o
ne he can’t compete with, the key civilian advantage of proximity. A day later, Loryn calls again. Rich just came by the house to say he’s in love with her.

  Beat Navy

  During three seasons, nature stays in uniform at West Point. In winter, trees are white over gray, snow in the branches. Spring and summer, when cadets crowd the walkways in their own white-over-gray uniforms, trees move to green over gray. But fall is casual-dress Friday, no discipline, trees reporting in whatever colors they see fit. That’s one sign that it’s football season.

  West Point plays the beefy Division I game. This means they don’t waste time on four-eyed squads like Yale or Columbia. Since 1998 the Academy has been a member of Conference USA, which ensures that nearly every fall Saturday West Point gets clobbered by some big-thighed, ground-thumper team like Tulane or East Carolina. But it also guarantees TV exposure, which helps attract more sports-loving candidates. And none of these games, deep down, mean squat to anyone. What matters a little is beating Air Force. (Air Force, at nearly fifty years old, is the upstart new kid at the service academy table, on the lookout to spark rivalries.) And what matters the most, deep down, is beating Navy.

  The two academies have mixed it up since 1890, an annual military super bowl. In their first meeting, Navy scored by faking a punt, which Army protested as being ungentlemanly. Emotions have remained high ever since. The two most common words around post are Beat Navy. Bleachers and tunnels say it, milk cartons and candy bar wrappers say it; rooftops say it, for the benefit of cadets in the clouds. (In a zoologically perfect world, birds would call it from the trees.) Every December, right before they head out for the Navy game, the Black Knights—West Point’s team—pad the Washington Hall steps, jittery as horses, and Keirsey delivers the big speech. He stands alone in the center of the stairs, asks four thousand cadets to picture fellow troops following the game at obscure postings around the world. For a finish, he leads the corps in a cheer adapted from the film Conan. “What is the good?” To crush Navy! they yell. “What else?” To see them driven before you! “And?” To hear the lamentations of their small barnyard animals!

  Huck Finn, from G-4, is up there with his teammates, yelling himself hoarse. First thing Huck or anybody else will tell you: he’s a redneck. (His real name, Reid, didn’t last long, once everybody heard the accent and that he was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.) Second thing he’ll tell you: he came to West Point to play football—fuhball is how he pronounces it. Third thing he’ll tell you: that’s the wrong damn reason to come to West Point, and he plans to rectify his mistake. Huck has made a deal with himself: he only needs to stay until Cow Commitment. Then, if he’s still hating it, he’ll pull up stakes. “No matter how much I hate it, I’ll consider it quitting if I leave before that,” he says. Too many rules, he’s in full-time trouble—for sleeping through class, not shaving, poor attitude—“they throw the book at me.”

  Here’s another thing he wants you to know: his West Point problems are not his parents’ fault. “My daddy taught me right from wrong.” Then he thinks it over. “My mom contributed a lot to that shit too.” Huck’s father is a salesman with John Deere, in the casual southern style. He’ll clap you on the back, start asking where you’re from, how the fishing is thereabouts, the contours of the land, what kind of equipment you use on your spread, suddenly he’s driving away and you’ve bought a new John Deere backhoe. Huck shares some of his dad’s salesman charisma. Plus, he has a big man’s natural authority, which in the physical landscape of the Academy counts as a Harvard diploma. His presence works on fellow cadets like an umbrella in the rain—when he enters the room, they edge a little closer.

  Team spirit brought Huck to West Point. Through the end of his sophomore high school year, he played baseball and basketball; then he quit to concentrate on football and the weight room. (The call goes out early to cadets: Lift!) He was a starting defensive end and tackle, on the sort of no-nonsense team that appears in the USA Today top ten. “And the dream I always had,” he says, “was to get a scholarship to play bigtime college fuhball.” But although Finn is a smart kid, it’s not the type of smart that surfaces on an SAT. Colleges pulled out one by one. Senior year, just before Christmas, he got the bad news from Rice University, and Huck faced a future without fuhball. Twenty minutes later, West Point’s coach was on the phone. “And he even didn’t bullshit around,” Huck says. “He just flat-out said, ‘We want you to play here.’” Three weeks later, the coach walked up his lawn to close the sale in person. Huck didn’t know much about the Academy. “All I knew, my life was gonna change drastically,” he says, “and that it was gonna suck.” One guy in his school—a kid he didn’t like, Bryan Hart—had been living for West Point, and Huck talked it over with him. “You wear a uniform all the time,” Hart said, “and after you graduate there’s a five-year commitment”—which didn’t lay any of Huck’s fears to rest. What clinched it was National Signing Day, the February afternoon when all recruited athletes sign official NCAA letters of intent. Huck couldn’t bear to stand by and watch while his teammates went with Clemson and LSU. He showed up at Beast, long-haired and rowdy, lobbing around all the wrong questions. “Yo—what’s that little rank thing mean, where they wear the diamond thingie?” Mark Thompson was his Beast roommate. “It means you will address him as ‘First Sergeant,’” Mark said.

  Huck’s best friend at the Academy is Josh Rizzo, an Irish-Italian party legend from Brooklyn, who treats West Point with the casualness of a man who knows he’s only a few subway stops from home. Rizzo came up in Flatbush, Police and Fire Department country, where kids dawdle all day long in front of the station house dreaming about the uniform. (Rizzo sees the world through the hard algebra of the squad-car window. People divide into GFDs—good fucking dudes—and dirtbags.) They’ve done the cross-cultural experience swap. Riz led Huck on midnight Brooklyn party crawls; subway, club, forty-ounce, girls mooning over Huck’s accent. Huck invited Rizzo down for a Baton Rouge Christmas, where Rizzo saw his first cows. (“Holy shit, Huck, what the hell is that, is that a bison or something?”) Huck’s friends, family, neighbors—they heard Rizzo’s strange accent and they rednecked it up. They fixed a pot of squirrel stew. “This is real nice eating,” Rizzo said, spitting black kernels into his napkin, “except for all these little squirrel elbows and kneecaps.” “Shotgun pellets!” Huck laughed. “Don’t you know folks hunt ’em?” They had the same West Point attitude. “I was definitely what would be labeled a fall-out plebe,” Huck says. “Someone who doesn’t walk down the hall all scared-looking. I wanted everyone to know I didn’t give a shit.”

  Cadets worry that George Rash is somehow too small to ever fill out the uniform. The worry about Huck is that he’s too large to squeeze in. Big jawbone, size-fifteen shoes, big meaty-palmed emotions. In class, when he’s crouched over his notebook, he looks like an elephant writing with his trunk.

  But he’s just the right size for football. The Army-Navy game makes West Point worth it for Huck. Everything he’s supposed to feel during the rest of the year—heritage, tradition—he gets as one condensed forty-eight-hour surge. The game is staged in Philadelphia, neutral territory, halfway between the academies, in the big decaying home of the NFL Eagles. After the sendoff speech, team buses depart at half past seven. The bus VCR runs fighting-mad movies: The Matrix, Saving Private Ryan. In the afternoon, hotel check-in: players drop bags, grab helmets and head back to Veterans Stadium, to chuck the ball around. “You wanna get used to the grass and stuff,” Huck explains. “Philadelphia is old school; fall on that, you start bleeding.”

  At their banquet all the Black Knights go quiet, watching an NFL film called Field of Honor: 100 Years of Army Football—antique leather helmets, Heisman trophies, players who passed through the end zone straight into politics. It sucks the breath out: what they do tomorrow could show up on history’s reel. The menu isn’t designed for elegance, it’s just feed, carbo-loading, food to spell you through each quarter. Meat, oil-seared vegetable
s, pasta. Then the graduating firsties stand, to make what are called their last hurrahs; they want the team to know how much these four years have meant. Around the table there are tears and gulps; most firsties get at least a little humid. Much of what they say is platitudes—“Be sure you make the most of it,” “Time flies”—but in the face of life’s big events, what does anyone find in their pocket but clichés? The team keeps farmers’ hours: the Knights are back in rooms at ten, lights out by eleven. But Huck stays up till two-thirty watching TV—miracle ads, bass-fishing shows—volume turned low. He insists he’s not nervous: “Before the first game I was gonna play in, I almost shit on myself. But I don’t even get butterflies now.”

  Five hours before the noon kickoff, the team eats a quiet, calibrated breakfast. Mac-and-cheese, eggs, no sausage or bacon, nothing greasy to turn you sluggish. The buses pull out for Veterans at ten behind a fifteen-car police escort. (“That’s pretty cool,” Huck says.) On the roadside, fans shake signs: Go Army. Sink Navy. To Hell with Army, Go Navy. Silence fills the bus, players tuned in to private soundtracks by headphone. In the locker room they admire the sweet NFL accommodations and suit up, helping each other tuck pads into jerseys. No joking, no talking, lips two tense lines across. A couple of hours before the game, bladders start distilling their natural response to tension, lines stacking up behind the urinals.