Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  Whitey’s personal mission is to flush Loryn out of his mind. He takes out some local women—he meets them while grazing at the supermarket, browsing the new-release shelf at Blockbuster—but they aren’t college girls. They’re adults, feeling their circumstances harden; they want a boyfriend, but they also want a romantic crowbar, something to get them out. Whitey makes an assessment: OK, move into a higher age bracket, early thirties, women who’re already comfortable with the shape of their lives. It makes him miss cadet girls; it turns out he had more in common with them than he thought. There was a wider range of personalities and ideas. “The irony of it is, the common belief is that the opposite is true. How you relate to people, it’s almost more evolved in the Army. The best thing to do is say what you think and feel, then accept the consequences. You meet these girls in Atlanta, they don’t know how to act like themselves in front of you. Everybody’s concerned with getting the same things right, they click into a format, and it’s not even a fun format.”

  He ushers at a cousin’s wedding up north, meets a smart, thirtyish career woman from Philadelphia—“that’s an incredibly sexy age,” he says—they head for the hotel bar, then a late-night bar. She keeps telling Whitey how much his officer’s poise impresses her. He leans in for the kiss—everything goes well, nice lips, he sits back. Suddenly she gets this weird look and talks for five minutes about black holes. They’re ancient collapsing stars, the end result of some very complicated math and physics. “What are you doing?” Whitey asks. “I’m sorry,” she says. “When I panic, I talk about the black hole.” The next morning, it hasn’t worked; the thoughts don’t even wait for him to get back to Rucker, all he’s thinking about on the plane is Loryn. He hardly even notices he’s in the air. At flight school he’s grown used to that.

  Flight school is a pleasure. For one thing, there’s the diversion of fresh lingo. Within a few weeks, Suppy, Brian and Whitey have discovered all new ways to confuse civilians as they speak. When you fly, you ride with a stick buddy, the other Aviation student learning in the same helicopter. An IP is the instructor pilot who trains you and your stick buddy. (IPs are usually retired military with nicotine cravings: “Smoke addicts,” Suppy explains, “because we scare ’em so bad.”) The first time the IP hands you the stick—the cyclic—is your nickel ride; you’re supposed to find a nickel with your birth year on it so when you land, you can hand it over. And BCS, Basic Combat Skills, is gun runs and weapon-targeting, the last phase.

  There’s the complicated fun of clearing space in your brain, filling it with a new body of knowledge. Aviation students learn the actual speed of a knot (1.1 mph), they learn to always check both sides of the aircraft for traffic. (“Clear right?” “Right,” your stick buddy says. “Clear left?” “Left.”) They learn Aviation branch lore, how Army helicopters are named after Native American tribes, the Blackhawk, the Apache, the Chinook, the Iroquois (the Iroquois is better known by its Vietnam-era name, the Huey). They appreciate the virtues of the plebe Knowledge system: they’re old hands at memorizing data.

  Flying a helicopter is like being a one-man band. There’s something for each hand and foot. Your right hand works the collective, a stick that controls power; your left is on the cyclic; your feet are on the pedals, one takes you up, the other down. If you make a mistake and the music stops, down you go. When you master everything at once, you can hover. Then the IP says, “You’ve found your hover button.” (“It’s so sweet,” Whitey says. “You automatically relax, fuck yeah, you wanna keep hovering.” When the graduates learn hovering, they ask their stick buddies to smuggle cameras on board, to snap pictures with their helmet on, visor down, looking hard.) Then you’re ready for your first supervised solo. Just you and the IP. Whitey watches the ground sink under him; instead of riding on the side of a helicopter, he’s piloting it. When he lands, the IP gives him his solo wings, to sew onto his hat, before he meets the class for his solo party.

  The only drawback is possible death. Whitey sits down in a twenty-student classroom—an aviation class is like the earthbound type, desks and a whiteboard—and the lecturer tells everyone to look around, somebody in the class will be dead in five years. The IPs teach you how to survive a power failure by taking you up a few thousand feet and then killing the engine. They announce, “Simulated engine failure.” (If you angle the rotors correctly on the way down, you’ll catch enough updraft to get them spinning again.) The instructors run crash videos on a screen; you watch pilots die, learn to understand and avoid their mistakes. Wires, bridges, trees, collisions. It’s part of what you have to know—you let your concentration lapse, you’re done—and it’s also part of the dicey pleasure, you have to risk death to master gravity. By December, Whitey has found his hover button.

  Christmas in Buffalo: fireplaces, hockey, overworked snowplows. Whitey made the mistake of taking Loryn to all his favorite spots. Now her memory is like graffiti in the corners of every place he’s liable to visit. (At least she’s moved with the other guy to Los Angeles, so there won’t be an embarrassing, accidental meeting.) Whitey decides to spend New Year’s Eve—the turn of the millennium—quietly. He smokes on the cold back steps of his dad’s house, because his father hates seeing him with cigarettes. At ten he crosses through the house, says good night; he’ll face the new century alongside Mark Matty.

  They pile into the car, flick on the heater, crunch over wet slush into north Buffalo. Whitey says he wouldn’t mind just relaxing at Checkers, but Mark prefers a New Year’s crowded with faces, music, women. He teases Whitey, “Hey, your whole job is about making decisions.” So Whitey decides to make Mark happy—Mark has always looked out for him, and it is New Year’s—and they drive to find their friends. They shiver into a bar called 67 West, but everybody’s already left for a party. The bartender tells them the address, they cross the street to their car. Mark only clears one direction, Whitey sees fast, wet headlights. He looks up, sees Mark’s head bent far over the windshield, and then Mark is flying.

  By the time Whitey gets to Mark, blood is smearing from places you wouldn’t think of: ears, eyes, mouth, nose, dark on the pavement. The car is twenty feet away, windshield caved in, steam rising over the headlights. “Mark,” Whitey shouts, “if you can hear me, don’t move.” Whitey hears himself issuing crisp orders—everyone step back, someone call 911—and then he’s bending down for Mark’s pulse. In emergencies, you learn how many people on any given street are off-duty paramedics. Two guys materialize at his side. An ambulance glides in, Whitey sees it in pieces: flashers, legs, scrubs, stretcher. One of Mark’s shoes got knocked off, it’s on the sidewalk, and Whitey runs and grabs it before jumping into the ambulance. There’s an awful moment on the cramped ride: Mark comes to and starts fighting away the paramedic’s hands. “I’m scared of dying,” he says. “I’m scared.” Whitey leans over him, takes his hand. “I’m here with you,” he says. “I’m here. You’ve got to let them work on you. You’re not alone.” Mark’s oxygen mask gets pooled and raspy with blood. He’s never conscious again.

  The police want to make the call to the Matty family from the hospital, but Whitey insists that he be the one; the Mattys will need a voice they recognize. Mark’s mother asks how serious it is, and Whitey answers, “It’s bad. You need to come right now.” When she arrives, the first thing she sees is the shoe under Whitey’s arm, and that’s when her face crumples. Mark squeezes his mother’s hand a few times during his five days in the hospital. A priest from their grammar school—one of the big, kindly faces that lean over a kid’s world, encouraging you to grow up well—arranges the funeral service. Mark’s friends roll in the front pews, laughing and crying, trying to guess how Mark would have wanted them to handle this one. (Mark had a prankish streak, and to honor it one of his buddies swipes a road sign and nails it to Mark’s front door, a one-way arrow pointed to the sky.) Whitey heads outside into the gray wind with the other guys to burn a cigarette. He’s been wrestling for months now with the risks Aviation entails;
it never occurred to him that his civilian best friend might die before he did. Whitey slaps his pockets, asks, “Who’s got a lighter?” A voice behind him answers, “I do.” It’s his father.

  Jake Bergman’s Last Job

  Each of West Point’s thirty-two companies is an employment agency, with a hundred percent placement rate. There are chain-of-command jobs for every cadet. Companies acknowledge the old rule of the sea: you have to work every post—scale the rigging, swab decks—before you’re permitted to climb the ranks. By the time you become a captain, you understand the function of every member of your crew.

  Plebes do the company’s cabin-boy work: haul laundry and tote packages, slice cakes in the mess hall. They’re learning to follow, their chain-of-command title is Member of Squad. Yuks are their team leaders—they police the plebes. A West Point company is split into four platoons, same as in the Army. (Sociologists speak of the magic number 150 as being any organization’s ideal size: large enough to complete tasks, small enough so you never lose track of names or faces. West Point companies average 130.) Cows become platoon sergeants, implementing orders from the firsties, squaring away yuks and plebes for duties like inspection. And firsties are platoon leaders, PLs, the top of their staff tree, keeping eyes on who’s doing good things, who’s ate up, who’s taking an APFT, who needs a tutor for Dirt (environmental engineering class) or Baby Juice (fundamentals of electronics). Once you graduate, you’ve lived four lives; you know how it feels to be a private, a corporal, a sergeant, an officer.

  By firstie year, cadets can also try out for glory positions on regimental or brigade staff (you live in separate barracks, and because there are additional stripes for the uniform, you get the nickname striper). The companies also provide other jobs for firsties: respect officer (keeping track of consideration for others), activities officer (arranging white-water rafting trips and barbecues), regulations and discipline officer (West Point dialect: regs nazi). But the job most firsties want is company commander: reading reports from your platoon leaders, sending back orders, leading by example, setting the standard. Best of all is having the job second term. Your parents get to see you marching your company at graduation as the loudspeaker voice announces, “Leading G-4 is Company Commander Ryan Nelson, of Ivanhoe, Minnesota.” Just like that, you’ve shed glory on state, town and family name.

  Jake Bergman and Trent Powell—G-4’s weight room lifers, the physical studs responsible for saving George Rash—have their own glowing vision for second term of firstie year: as little interference from West Point as possible. Jake wants to spend his last months golfing, lifting, mixing protein shakes, hanging out with his buddies before the Academy clock ticks out.

  So both cadets apply for regimental staff. They’re after the same cushy position: not activities officer, assistant activities officer—no parades, no hassles, no after-lunch military classes. “You live in an upper-floor barracks,” Jake explains dreamily, “so who’s going to wanna climb all those stairs just to bug you? And funny as it may sound,” he continues, “I’m higher ranked as a cadet than Trent is. But what happens? He gets on staff and I don’t. He’s right where I want to be, assistant activities officer.” So Jake asks Captain Vermeesch if he can grab the XO position—executive officer, the slot Mr. Spock fills on Star Trek. This makes Jake Bergman second-in-command of Company G-4. “I wanted it just because XO tends to be a lot less work than being a platoon leader,” he says, “so it looks like a good situation.” The company commander is Jim Edgar, a tall, freckled firstie (Edgar was the physical development sergeant last January, working the stopwatch at George’s first remedial APFT) who’s an exception to the West Point rule—hangdog but popular, with a slow voice, as if he can see his words in the air and doesn’t want to bunch them up. Being XO means that you room with the commander, fine by Jake. Edgar is a friend of his. This gives Jake a front-row seat when Company G-4 chews itself up. And it also means he’s one of the first cadets to hear, in February, when George Rash flubs another APFT.

  “He’s a great kid,” Jake explains, “but he’s the kinda person—well, he’s just one of those kids, trouble always finds him.” Jake still has leftover fondness for George, a residue of last year’s APFT. “We really set him up for success, he did so fantastic at the end.” Jake shakes his big head. “All that effort, just hoping he’d take the next step.”

  Together, Edgar and Bergman function as a kind of sink trap, catching the steady flow of corrections and attaboys through Company G-4. West Point companies are self-policing. Recidivist cadets work their way up the chain like ballplayers perfecting their swing. Smaller infractions will earn you a hearing before a company board—your TAC, your company commander, your XO. Once you bat your way out of the infield with a subsequent offense, you appear before a battalion board (more TACs). Slugging the long ball carries you to a regimental board, until, when you finally hit one out of the park—complete failure in academics, DWI, gross insubordination—you make your way to the show: brigade board. Cadets who live through all four boards say they’ve done the cycle. Huck Finn is pretty sure he’s the kind of cadet who’ll end up doing the cycle.

  Edgar and Bergman are the ones writing up quill—punishments, since in the old days quills were what you used to write them—when Huck slaps the snooze button and sleeps through class, and they’re among the first to hear when Huck and Josh Rizzo are officially split as roommates. (The cadets are bad influences on each other, a mirror placed in front of a mirror, reflecting one long corridor of not giving a crap about West Point.) And Jake is there to witness the negotiations between Jim Edgar and Captain Vermeesch over Edgar’s tricky girlfriend situation.

  Ginny Whistler is a G-4 cow. As company commander, Jim should not be romantically involved with a cadet in his chain of command. If the company commander gives in to temptation and shuts the door while in barracks with his girl, or shares the same piece of furniture—the delicate West Point euphemism for being together in bed—how can he order his cadets to not do likewise? Vermeesch knows that love can make cadets do strange things: under the press of rules, even the most casual West Point relationship can feel as excitingly dire as Romeo and Juliet. There’s the constant, heady provocation: Show me how much this means to you.

  As a TAC, Vermeesch is like a couples therapist with veto power. “From my perspective,” he explains, “it would be hypocritical to allow Edgar to start in this relationship and then say, ‘Well, now you can’t have it.’ I don’t like to deal in complicated issues; I think everything should be much more straightforward.” So he strikes what seems like a reasonable deal with Edgar. So long as Edgar promises to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, he can serve his dual roles as company commander and Ginny Whistler’s boyfriend. The two shake hands, commander to commander.

  So when his friend continues sneaking off to Ginny Whistler’s barracks, Jake can’t believe it. “Stop it,” Jake tells Edgar, waving his Popeye forearms. “Just stop it, wake up, something’s not clicking in your skull.” A rumor spreads through G-4: Ginny is secretly hoping Jim Edgar will get turned back. That way, they can spend another West Point year side by side. “The way he and his girlfriend talk about it,” Jake says, “it’s as if they’re victims of something, like people are out to get them. But this isn’t a normal college, and if you can’t accept that, you leave. We all know the rules—you could put Cindy Crawford in the room across the hall from me, I’m gonna graduate from this institution. I’m tempted to just glue his butt to the chair so he won’t be able to get to her room.”

  As the company tries to overlook afternoons of closed doors and probable furniture-sharing, Colonel Adamczyk’s baseline premise about living to standard starts making new sense. Once you’re an officer out in the real Army, how can you expect soldiers to shine shoes, maintain uniforms, if you can’t follow the discipline yourself? It’s a form of inadvertent leader development: Jake Bergman is a cadet who hates gum-chewing regulations and dust checks (during inspection, the co
mmander will don white gloves, then run a hand inside a drawer or along the frame of a mirror to show cadets his gray fingertip). Here’s something he hates worse. “You know me, I don’t even like seeing the TAC walking in the company area.” Now Jake finds himself hoping to see the rules come down hard. “I said to Jim, ‘You are the worst kind of leader, because you’re a hypocrite.’” Jim Edgar, preparing to walk over to Ginny’s barracks, just uncomfortably laughs.

  Super-V

  George Rash had good solid reasons for failing another APFT. He lays them out, multiple choice: “Problems with the ankle. Also, my arches were flaring up real bad. And I’d just gotten a pair of orthopedics for my sneakers—they broke my feet in, instead of the other way around.” Push-ups and sit-ups went fine (George has a soldier’s broad upper body), the run not so hot. Rash jogged awhile, walked, ran some, jogged, limped across the finish with a 16:30. (Vermeesch couldn’t believe it: “You just don’t ever wanna see someone walk at the end—you’re walkin’, you better be dead or bleeding.”) But whatever the path, it leads to the same destination: George has to march to the TAC’s office and sit down with Captain Vermeesch.