Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  At eleven, the team glides on the field for an easy stretch. Huck takes in the ring of artificial light, the bowl-shaped sky, the low rumble of early birds finding seats. Sound cracks sharper, objects drop their shadows. “I love this stuff,” Huck says. “I can’t believe I’m down on the grass, the place is gonna be full, people paying good money to watch us play, the feeling is just awesome, a thousand times better than sex if you ask me.” Navy takes its side of field too; but you don’t look at them, because you don’t want them staring at you. Huck does practice snaps. Huck is the Knights’ long snapper, the special-team guy who shovels back the ball on kicks. Navy sends a coach over to track him with a stopwatch. “So they can see how good a chance they’ll have to block the punt,” Huck says. “Dudn’t bother me at all. I look him in the eye. Bring it on, man: time me all day, because I got all the confidence in the world.” Huck’s standard snap takes .67 second; NFL centers do it just .02 second slower.

  Back in the locker room, Coach breaks the silence. “Everybody take a knee.” The chunky noise of joints, cleats, pads pressing the carpet. Football players aren’t engineered for bending. Coach quotes stacks of e-mails, from grads and officers: “You never forget Army-Navy.” “I can still relive every play from fifty years ago.” “Don’t lose this game.” Most of the Knights have slung so deep into the pregame burrow they couldn’t recount Coach’s speech for money. “You keep thinking about what the hell you’ve got to do,” Huck says. “You’re about to go to war.” Kneeling there, the team knows every other quarter has just been warm-up, the overture, West Point football is a one-game season.

  The Knights snap to their feet, buckle on helmets, crowd into the tunnel. They breathe in the dusty, cinderblock smell, the scratch of cleats on floor, the tiny extra-lush square of field. The corps of cadets is lining the end of the tunnel. Roommates, squadmates, classmates, all these people dying for you to crush Navy. The guys ahead of you begin trotting through, hands flash out to thump helmets, voices roar. “Adrenaline starts flowing more,” Huck says. “Heart starts beating faster. You’re waiting, thinking, ‘Almost here, almost here.’ You can hear everything super-loud, it echoes in the helmet. Then Coach says ‘Go!’ and it’s like Fuck yeah. You start running towards that cordon of cadets and it’s the best feeling, just extreme joy. You haven’t felt anything like it since last year at Navy, you only get to feel it four times in your life. When you run through that cordon—they slap your ass to death—and see the field, you feel like you could jump all the way over the stadium.”

  Once Huck makes it through the cordon, he walks to the punter on the sidelines. “I never felt that good,” he says, “in my entire life.” The coin is tossed, the game begins. Army loses, 19 to 9.

  The Knights stand at attention for alma mater. Huck feels wet in his eyes—for West Point—and lets it fly, cameras darting in for the close-up. The clip gets recycled on ESPN, his pals from Louisiana calling and giving him shit. “Sure, you made fuckin’ SportsCenter,” they say. “You were crying like a wuss, though.” Huck shakes his head. “They don’t understand about Army-Navy,” he says. “This ain’t a fuhball game.”

  The Theory and Practice of Professionalism

  Back at G-4, Captain Vermeesch has a warning for Huck. If he can’t shape up—stop missing class, start shaving and correct the attitude—he’ll lose the privilege of playing Army football. At the new West Point, Huck’s troubles now fall under the category of unprofessional behavior.

  In peacetime, fads sweep West Point higher—field explorations of the culture gap, authors mapping out paths back to the rest of the country. For a while, a 1997 study of Marine basic training called Making the Corps offered trustworthy blueprints. Elitism was the culprit. New recruits developed values, which was good, except they ended up convinced that values outside the military were bad, which was itself bad.

  Then higher started buying up Who Moved My Cheese?, a business bestseller in which readers improve their flexibility through the metaphor of unfamiliar dairy products. “The quicker you let go of old cheese,” the book argues, “the sooner you find new cheese.” The Army chief of staff, General Erik Shinseki, saw a valuable lesson (the Army had entered a period of cheese diminishment—smaller budgets, fewer recruits, less support); he purchased copies in bulk and organized conferences, where generals were instructed to catch out several varieties of old Army cheese.

  But since the late nineties, the most popular culture gap solution has derived from a 1957 study called The Soldier and the State. (It still polls number two on Amazon’s West Point bestseller list, one slot shy of The Green Letters—a collection of Christian meditations—but wiping the floor with Gates of Fire, Platoon Leader, and Tender Warrior: God’s Intention for a Man.) Samuel Huntington, a Harvard sociologist, did what great engineers do: he turned the structural problem on its head. The important thing was not getting civilians to understand the officers’ job—that was gravy—it was making sure civilians respected them. His design for the bridge across the culture gap was one efficient word: professionalism. You could string the thing up and start moving traffic across it with a single conversation.

  Officers in West Point’s Office of Policy, Planning and Analysis (OPA)—the developers behind the Cadet Leader Development System—were tracking a problem. Grads were five-and-flying, leaving the Army behind to follow other careers; civilians were talking perks and salaries, parents wanted to see their kids situated in professions, with the kind of degree that’s a rain hat in a storm, a résumé in one word and a portable business address. (You’d find the same thing on TV; some nights, the networks seemed to be staging doctors’ and lawyers’ conventions with romantic subplots.) Huntington solved the problem in his first sentence. “The modern military officer is a professional man,” he wrote. “This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of this book.” He attacked the status issue head-on, by assuming its prerogatives. “In our society, the businessman may command more income, the politician may command more power, but the professional man commands more respect. Yet the public certainly does not accord [to] officers the same deference it gives to civilian professionals . . . Professionalism, however, is characteristic of the modern officer in the same way in which it is characteristic of the physician or lawyer.”

  It was the answer West Point higher needed. Colonel Scott Snook, a Harvard-trained MBA with the broad-shouldered accent of eastern cities, is the author of the latest version of CLDS. “We refocused around professionalism,” he explains. “It was a whole different way of thinking.”

  The word passed hand to hand around West Point like a new high-caliber weapon. For cadets, tidying your room for inspection didn’t just save your ass from getting chewed by the TAC; it was professional. Cursing not only made you sound like a Martin Scorsese character; it was unprofessional. The all-volunteer Army became the professional Army; in 1999, when West Point launched a new department for boosting honor and values, its name was the Center for the Professional Military Ethic; Academy officers pulled all-nighters, wrote papers on The Future of Army Professionalism. (Cadets both caught on and didn’t. “God, all day long,” Huck Finn sighs, “West Point fuckin’ preaches professionalism, professionalism, professionalism.”)

  Professionalism met the efficiency test. Civilians—parents, boyfriends, girlfriends—got a glossy new way to think about military service (“It’s the same as being a doctor or a lawyer”). Cadets had their five-and-fly questions answered with a question: “Why leave the Army to join a profession when it turns out you already belong to one?” (In OPA circles, this is referred to as professional self-concept; once you get cadets thinking of themselves as professionals, they’re less likely to leave; doctors and lawyers, for example, never stop being doctors and lawyers.) It became the go-to concept in speeches, a kind of vitamin that energized a sentence and nourished cadets’ self-esteem. Colonel Adamczyk was praised as “the model of professionalism”; “Duty, Honor, Country”—West Point’s motto—became “the professi
onal values of ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’” When the Academy celebrated a birthday, the Air Force supe offered these congratulations: “West Point has become synonymous with professionalism.” If you sat down to a briefing, professionalism and Huntington were waiting. “I’d like to talk about this notion of ‘officership,’” Colonel Pierce would say, fiddling with his Academy ring. “Because it’s something that might not be understood by a lot of Americans. It’s a profession. There’s a guy named Samuel Huntington—works at Harvard, very famous—he wrote the definitive book. He says the military fits the bill.”

  But professionalism isn’t what draws cadets like Rob Shaw or Iggy Ignacio to the Academy. For them, huah means loving your work so much you’ll do anything for it; professionalism means loving your career so much you won’t do anything to jeopardize it. If you looked at it under a cool, professional light, why would anybody join the Army? Low pay, relocations every three years, and the chance to risk your life for your country? (Over at DMI, Keirsey puts the question more gruffly: “Why the hell would you want to see yourself the same as a doctor or a lawyer?” He clears his throat. “These kids are special, steely-eyed—it requires more than the nine-to-five dedication.”)

  In the best cases, cadets choose West Point because of hopes and dreams, the chance to feel strung to something larger than themselves—their shot at a range of emotions beyond personal consideration. The moments cadets treasure in Army movies are the unprofessional ones. The platoon sticking around the smashed French town in Saving Private Ryan and dying for a guy they’ve just met. The two stony-faced Delta Force sergeants (at West Point they’re known as D-boys) jumping out of the helicopter in Black Hawk Down, knowing they are headed to death. People will risk their lives, or stake careers, for many values, but professionalism is a hard concept to sacrifice for. Many cadets are confused by it. “This whole professionalism thing,” frowns Ryan Southerland, a yearling from Oklahoma. “Higher is so scared of being unprofessional, they won’t do anything positive, anything to light fires in you. It’s just this ideal of professionalism that nobody can really define, it ends up as a crutch for being politically correct.” TACs brood over the concept in the same workday hours that they model it for cadets. “I never thought they should call it a profession,” one departing TAC explains to me, looking out at the Academy’s green fields. “It’s more of . . . a calling.”

  A Number of Adopted Sons

  For the first time in four years, Hank Keirsey doesn’t give his speech before Army-Navy. He’s not in the Washington Hall crowd either, and when cadets glance around Veterans Stadium—checking for the big stride in any cluster of officers—there’s no sign of Keirsey there. They don’t understand it; the game is chock-full of the stuff—courage, endeavor, uniforms—they know the lieutenant colonel lives for. They wonder if he’s turned his back on the corps.

  No officer is ever entirely safe; his last tour before West Point, Keirsey bit the bullet and brought his family to Camp Swampy, Camp Armpit—Fort Polk, Louisiana. He helped put together a new school there called the Leader Training Program: exercises for commanders, a course in leading large-scale operations like Saudi. Keirsey wanted the colonels and their staffs to develop the same sure touch for reading a battlefield that surfers use to predict waves. (Officers who visited Fort Polk in the 1990s can still remember his briefings: “It was last hour of a twenty-one-day rotation,” a major tells me, “when everyone is usually too tired or burned out to listen, when I first met Keirsey. I never saw such a performance. He taught us more in one hour—and motivated us to train until we got the lessons right—than we learned through our entire rotation.” Then the major lists the long-night Army skills. “He is simply a master of team-building and motivation. I’ve worked with very few leaders who even come close.”) When his three years were up, Keirsey asked to go back to West Point.

  He was surprised by The Changes. People even spoke differently—whole dictionary pages had been silenced. “They’d toned down most of the tough language,” Keirsey remembers. “Made it completely acceptable to everybody, so in the end it didn’t appeal to anyone, it didn’t inspire.” And there was a new Bedrock Value around. Through most of its history, West Point has had what it calls one Bedrock Value, Honor. (Drop into a slippery situation, where conditions are unclear and you can’t find any footing, honorable behavior would always give your boots solid ground.) In 1995, the Academy made space, and the two Bedrock Values became Honor and Consideration of Others. Cadets were supplied an official definition, which sounded like talk-show boilerplate set to cadence: “Actions that indicate a sensitivity to and regard for the feelings and needs of others [Sir!] and an awareness of the impact of one’s own behavior on them [Ma’am!].” The program’s founder used the example of posthumous Medal of Honor recipients to illustrate the concept: by jumping on grenades, and thereby saving squad members’ lives, these fallen soldiers had demonstrated “an extreme instance of Consideration of Others.” (In 1998, the value was streamlined into one high-and-tight word, Respect.)

  With the Soviets throwing in the towel, and Desert Storm five years past, the perception was that American power had run its enemies even out of the future. Keirsey had enough sheriff in his heritage to know that when a town is sleeping soundest, rustlers are probably making shadows around campfires, plotting to steal horses and raise hell. He watched cadets in the field. What struck him was that Maneuver Light—the baseline soldier actions of defense and attack—was weak, sloppy, the training uninspired and unrealistic. Instructors would say, “Move ahead two hundred meters, you will encounter snipers, the snipers will engage you”—which didn’t train a cadet for anything, since snipers weren’t likely to be as red-carpet polite or predictable in combat.

  He beefed up Beast combat exercises and added a Polk-style simulation to Buckner. (Keirsey instructed the opposing force to scatter clues. Matches, cigarette butts, bootprints—if cadets hung around that spot, they’d found a good place for an ambush.) He staged terrain drills designed to leave cadets scratching their heads. That way, at the clubs, instead of beer talk, they’d pull out pencils and a napkin and sketch the landscape: How could we have hit the objective better? He commandeered props from the weapons curator and brought them to class for show-and-tell. This is the submachine gun carried by So-and-So on Okinawa. Here, hand it around. There’s a helmet worn in Stalingrad; put that on.

  The West Point day can pound it out of you. In the squinty afternoons of Gloom Period—when daylight feels demoted—you can forget why you ever joined. That’s when Keirsey did his walkabouts. He looked for an internal light switch, the phrase that would fire up a cadet; when he could, he pinned it on an impressive feature. “Look at the arms on you, man,” he’d say. “They’re huge—what’ve you been doing?” Sometimes, all he’d get to work with was how the cadet met his gaze. Then Keirsey would rumble over. “That’s a good-looking stare. Looks like you could take out a bunker.” He became a subject line on e-mail.

  I would like to remain anonymous, because I am not looking for recognition from LTC Keirsey, only that he understand the impact he has had on myself and nearly all the cadets. LTC Keirsey is by far the finest officer that I have ever seen, heard or worked with. He is more respected and more loved by us than any other officer on campus. He seems to be the only officer remaining on this post that realizes that this is a military academy. The reason I am writing is that I realize that not all echelons of the military academy agree. I know some find him a bit too Huah. I would like him to know that if I become half the officer . . .

  Then speaking invitations came from cadets. A crowded schedule; the lieutenant colonel delivered what he called his Keirsey bullshit to honor classes, Sandhurst rallies, bashes, tours, Dining-ins, sendoffs. He had just enough too-much, just enough is-he-serious? When he talked about Korea, a notorious hardship posting, he called it “the frontier of freedom,” and suddenly it wasn’t some bum border check, it was the reason you had decided on the Army.

 
Cadets would take seats for a company’s military development lecture. There’d be Keirsey, talking about entrances and exits, the two sides of West Point, Academy gates and Academy cemetery. “You step inside here and take your shot,” he’d say. “All the graduates of this institution are going to leave here as second lieutenants. So don’t worry if you hear somebody say, ‘Nobody’s serving past five years.’ What you owe this institution—and the legacy of two hundred years that people have moved out and served in America’s conflicts—is complete commitment and intensity for whatever time you do serve. And if at the end of five years you decide to leave, you will march and you will hang up your uniform. And you’ll walk by the tombstones that line the cemetery here. You’ll be surprised by how many people you see from the class of 1966. Class of ’66, died in 1967, in service of his country. You walk around in there, you start ruminating: there was not a whole lot of life these guys got to live.

  “This institution was called on to send its graduates into a firefight, when everyone else is scared. The LT jumps up, and moves to the sound of the gunfire. Now, your goal is not to be in that cemetery. But we’ve got to honor those people, and that particular tendency to lead from the front. So if you feel weak one day, from the mind-numbing cycle of classes and homework, go back to the main mission. It’s described on the MacArthur statue right outside this building. ‘Your mission is to win our wars. All other public purposes will find others for their accomplishment. Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, and the obsession of your public service must be duty, honor, country.’ Any questions?”