by David Lipsky
At the official halfway mark—what’s called Change of Detail—Huck’s company takes the flag for best in Beast, and Huck walks off with Best Squad Leader. He comes away with a Finn-style Successory. “I guess what I learned as a leader is, if you try your hardest, those little fuckers are gonna do their best too.” He’s entering the fall with some square-jawed resolve. “I’m gonna stay outta trouble from now on,” he says. “I don’t want to let Captain Vermeesch down.” But he’s driven by more than devotion to military ideals. “I wanna keep my position for football.”
A few weeks later, Huck crosses the Plain, marching some new cadet football players to the stadium; by coincidence, he passes his old squad. “And I was missin’ ’em real bad right then, you know? I wanted to be back around ’em all again. And one of the kids sees me, he gives me the company greeting: ‘Go Wolfpack, Sergeant Finn!’ And the whole squad just erupted, everybody screaming. I almost started crying right there. That’s probably a better feeling than I ever got playin’ a football game.”
The Braves
Beast is split into two details, which gives a new roster of upperclassmen their swing at command: George Rash is now on deck. The new cadets have been warmed up for him. They’re already speaking West Point dialect. They pass off Knowledge, they sham out of duties. (“I wasn’t shamming—I was at sick call.”) They’ve dropped for push-ups. They’ve discovered that the secret acronym for TEDs is BCGs—birth control glasses (because you have no chance, cadets believe, of getting laid while wearing them). And they’ve learned why ass is the most popular slang term at West Point. The ass is the unprotected flank, the one important body terrain you can’t even see—if you get shot at, you can always duck your head, you can jerk your arms and legs, but what can you do about your ass? At West Point, the ass is on the chopping block; it’s either getting ripped or it’s getting sunshine piped up it. There’s chewed ass and, if you have quick enough footwork, covered ass. Your ass gets hazed, if you’re taken out for some really exhausting PT it’s smoked, if you move too slow you get a boot put to it, on a bad day you’re assed up or have gotten the ass. All this in addition to the civilian usages, which still apply. Vermeesch reminds his Beast chain of command to send their new cadets to parade rest during room inspections, “because—I mean, think about it—nobody likes to stand at attention for some asshole who’s going through their stuff. So my advice to you would be, do not be that asshole.”
John Vermeesch in the field is a changed man. He’s an infantryman, a field guy; West Point offices are not his natural habitat. He’s like something domesticated sprung from captivity, one lean crackle of energy. He prowls the ranks of a drizzly road march, head snaking and bobbing, sniffing out sore spots and the wobble of surrender. A new cadet starts to crumple under her thirty-pound ruck. Vermeesch paces in front, gives her a tow on his ruck straps. After a mandatory ten-minute break, he plants his ruck on the gravel by his toes, leans forward, then saddles up in the Infantry style: the pack goes trapezing up and over his shoulders until it bangs down hard against his back.
It’s been a wet summer, the smell of mud as pungent as in a greenhouse. (The new cadets have picked up the traditional Army salute to poor weather: “If it ain’t raining, we ain’t training.”) After a march, while the cadets flick muck off their boots, and some Bible studiers kick back for a discussion of the Scripture—“you open up Ezekiel, start reading about the dragons, that stuff is deep”—Vermeesch talks about the essence of officership. In the field he’s more direct, as if his argument is up and patrolling by his side.
And as much as the Academy talks values, Vermeesch knows that officership is half physical: what the body says is just as important as any words. The brain can overpromise, say “I’ll be there at 0530, count on it,” and then not show up; the body is either there or it isn’t. “Just like this road march,” Vermeesch says, “you can either choose to quit or you can choose to drive on. In this profession, the end state is taking care of your soldiers. Being able to overcome whatever pain or discomfort you’re feeling—and they have to know you’ll do it—in order to not let ’em down.” Vermeesch isn’t sure that’s a drive George Rash could understand. “And I question whether he has the capacity to ever learn that, which is a hard thing to say.”
It’s 1930 and breezeless, evening bats make sorties among the tree-tops. Through a tangle of foliage and past a valley, you can make out the soft roof lights and car parks of Woodbury Commons outlet mall. A cadre member has leaned her canteen with a cake of soap on the fender of a Humvee; new cadets use them to wash up for chow. Vermeesch takes in the two competing views, rough-and-ready military versus the consumer glow. If George doesn’t succeed this summer, Vermeesch would like to see him walk down into that valley. “He has to get this figured out in the next month,” Vermeesch says. Cow Commitment is four weeks away. “I think being a squad leader will be exceptionally good for him. He’s gonna be forced to face all his weaknesses, lead from the front. And my hope is, either George steps up and is able do it. Or if he can’t, I hope that he recognizes it for himself. And takes appropriate measures.” Vermeesch’s voice croaks, the hard concepts jamming his throat: soldiers, leadership, quitting.
George knows the stakes. “If I fail this summer,” he explains, “I could get kicked out of the Academy. Or, if not kicked out, definitely go through a looot of remediation. But I’d have to screw up pretty badly.”
Rash is lacing his boots for Change of Detail. Beast II is the toe cruncher, the boot splitter, a grudge match between head and foot. Beast I features the three-mile, five-mile, six-mile road marches, the shallow end of the pool. In Beast II the marches turn serious: six-mile, eight-mile, twelve-mile, fifteen-mile. “Those last two are gonna be ugly,” George predicts. When he was a new cadet, road marches were charted in foot injuries; this year he’s taking preventive measures. “It’s hard to find the really good socks,” he says. “Good socks help. What the medics actually suggest is, not only powder the feet, which I do, but also wear knee-high pantyhose. Then the thick wool socks over those, then boots.”
George can’t believe he’s back at Beast; he’s excited, spirits high. “Two years ago, I was in their position. And now here I am in charge of ’em. Go figure. Half of me is saying just, My God. And the other half is saying, Thank God, two years are done, only two more to go.” What’s he discovered? Rash shakes his head. “That a human can learn to put up with practically anything. Anything, given enough time, becomes tolerable.” He brightens. “And I had a looot of friends, they carried me through.” When George says a happy thing like this, you try not to think of Steve Ruggerio.
George has decided to adopt an easygoing leadership style. Three quick rules: “Do what you’re supposed to do. Do it when you’re supposed to. And . . . don’t piss people off too bad. Past that I don’t really care.” It’s a mutual non-aggression pact between leader and led. He’s not going to put on the huah act. (This is part of George’s odd integrity: he won’t pretend to be something he’s not; in the whole time I know him, I never hear him utter the word huah.) “If you fuck up, I’ll have to be a hardass—and I don’t wanna be a hardass, so don’t fuck up.”
And then the night arrives, Change of Detail; new cadets lined against the walls, the new cadre throwing a yelling festival in the corridors. “What are you gonna do when you’re firing a live round?” someone shouts—not to the new cadet getting corrected, but to the girl by his side. “You gotta think for you and for the guy next to you!” George is leading Fourth Squad, Third Platoon, Company B—Bravo Company. (To keep things clear over the radio, the military adopted the phonetic alphabet: A is Alpha, B is Bravo, C is Charlie, so on through Zulu.) Bravo Company’s nickname is the Braves. “Before we went away for leave,” explains Captain Chris Engen, Bravo Company’s summer TAC, “we had arranged to be the Bulls—the Raging Bulls. But Colonel Adamczyk, the BTO, wanted to ensure that the name sent the right message and didn’t exclude people. And when you think about it:
Bulls . . . not inclusive, there’s a male connotation.” Engen chuckles ruefully. “When the cadets found out, they said, ‘Well, what about Braves? Braves is a male kinda thing too.’ And finally you’ve gotta say, ‘Look, just follow the order.’”
Beast II Squad Leader
For the first ten days, George is a terrific squad leader. Beast II, when you’re not road marching, is skills training: seven days after Change of Detail, the 132 members of Bravo Company camp in two-person tents near the Basic Rifle Marksmanship range. It’s a rainy, cool night. (The cadets have now mastered a second weather joke: “It’s not rain, it’s liquid sunshine.”) You toss a blanket over the wet grass, the porous canvas tent admits a sheen of moisture (like the beads on a beer can) so it’s not like sleeping under a drizzle, it’s like sleeping in the clouds. Rest comes like airplane sleep, an act of logy will. At 0430 the camp wakes up, and I have an encounter that shows me how it feels to be a new cadet at Beast. I’m using a Maglite to find my other boot when Cadet First Sergeant Ryan Southerland raps the outside of my tent: “No white light, new cadet.” I feel: embarrassed, confused, eager, put upon, tired, excited. A shock and a comfort: there are rules for everything.
Outside, in the morning gray, the tents look like a herd of animal skins, wrinkly and mysterious. Betty Simbert, a small, energetic black junior from Miami, is trying to shout her squad into action. “Let’s go First Squad! Bring those tents down!” (Betty, who’s a cheerleader, makes most orders sound like advanced pep; she’s the best cadence caller in Bravo Company, it ticks her off when Southerland swipes her chants.) Matthew “Mac” MacSweeney—a cow from Westchester, New York, with the boozy good humor of a friar—spent the night rubbing his eyes in the rain: fireguard duty. While the new cadets clink out their tent poles and fold the canvas, he complains to Simbert with the mix of discomfort and boast that comprises an Army gripe. “I sat outside and froze my ass off. I’m still wearing wet BDUs. Four in the morning, in just half an hour, we stopped forty new cadets going to the latrine. No rifle and no Kevlar.” The rule is, any time you venture outside, you must be ready for an assault; Kevlar is the Army nickname for your helmet, which is made of Kevlar and can stop a bullet. “No battle buddies either. A battle buddy is there because he or she is supposed to hold your rifle—they’re not allowed to take ’em inside the latrine. Four years ago, some kid dropped his rifle down the latrine. And, uh, he ended up having to climb in after it.”
Betty makes a face: “So harsh.”
The cadet commander of Bravo is a muscly, thick-faced kid confusingly named Chuck Sargent—so his title this summer is Cadet Captain Sargent, like a form-letter misprint. He pulled fireguard detail with Mac—a safety duty that’s usually a new-cadet job—so the kids could be better rested for marksmanship qualification this morning; he’s stumbling around, annoyed and sleepless like a frustrated mom. “You do that for these guys, and they can’t follow the simplest rules. One kid’s latrine excuse was he had to go really bad.”
When you wake up in the field, you clean your room so effectively it’s not there anymore. Within ten minutes, the tents disappear into rucks, and there’s a line of new cadets in front of the latrine shack. The latrines contain one of the Army’s most intimidating field traditions: toilet seats side by side, like benches on mass transit. The new cadets conquer this design flaw by going in at a modest one at a time. (The urinal is just a long canted sink with a drain at one end and no faucet—you’re the faucet.)
First Sergeant Ryan Southerland is Bravo’s enforcer, the cadet with the Keirsey assignment of keeping you fired up; under an overhang, he motivates the new cadets by reading Vietnam-era Medal of Honor citations he dug up on the Web.
“This lieutenant,” he declaims stonily, “did some great work in rain much harder than this. ‘Realizing his platoon could not hold very long, and seeing four enemy soldiers moving into his position, First Lieutenant Joseph Marm moved quickly under heavy fire and annihilated all four. Then, seeing that his platoon was receiving intense fire from a field machine gun, he deliberately exposed himself to draw its fire, thus locating its position . . .’” It builds to the standard Army close, words slotting into place, combat’s panic and quick breaths compressed into a formula of achievement. “‘First Lieutenant Marm’s gallantry on the battlefield, and his extraordinary bravery at the risk of his life, are in the highest tradition of the U.S. Army, and reflect great credit upon himself and the armed forces of his country.’”
Southerland fixes his moody eyes on the mass of new cadets. “Rain doesn’t matter. Fatigue doesn’t matter. Exhaustion doesn’t matter. Do the mission.” Huah.
The company breakfasts under another overhang, new cadets joking and yawning in small clusters. Army order of precedence dictates that the highest rank dines last; only after your troops are fed can you think about chow. Cadet Captain Sargent follows Southerland through the line, Captain Engen piles up his tray in the rear. The meal is chunky, greasy-smelling stuff that packs the belly like a ruck. Egg patties, sausage patties, hash browns, biscuits, orange slices of American cheese (it’s no surprise the great heyday of fast food came after World War II GIs shipped home; pre-cooked foods under keep-warm lights is Army dogma).
Chris Engen is a tanker. His blond head is as smooth as a tank round. His smile trains on you slowly, as though it’s revolving on treads. Engen has been watching George Rash improve. “He’s going pretty good,” Engen grins. “He’s confident, I’m seeing that confidence increase, now that he’s been doin’ it a few days.”
By next night, Rash’s leadership is growing even stronger. He taught Squad Tactical Training, leading his unit through a combat simulation. He ran it like the playbook—split them into two teams, sent one flanking through the woods, pushed the other one forward in small bounds to draw fire. In the end, Rash’s squad took out four soldiers and gained the objective, the graders paying his work the highest Army compliment, “Outstanding.” George walked downhill looking thrilled. “That was gut-wrenching,” George says, “and it was exhilarating.” Engen smiles after him. “His cadets are very motivated. He’s doin’ a good job.”
This evening, Bravo Company is spending the night camped in the foggy, muddy grasses of Lake Frederick. Dinner’s over—lines for latrines are at post-movie levels—and the air is full of the kind of spicy ocean smells that can make you forget what season it is. Ryan Southerland leads me over the squelchy mud to George’s squad. Southerland hails from Norman, Oklahoma, with a solid plains build. He’s muscular and heavy-browed, parents divorced, mom a teacher, dad a farmer who wanted to paint. “So my middle name is O’Keeffe,” Southerland says. “After the painter, Georgia O’Keeffe. I use her paintings as computer wallpaper, always have. From the Plains, The Lawrence Tree, From the Faraway Nearby” It’s probably the last thing Georgia O’Keeffe even expected, to have a measured career assessment delivered from a set of BDUs. “Her early collection, all the cityscapes and everything—the more industrial, mechanical sort of canvases—they get a little lost in the shuffle. But they’re beautiful.” Southerland has the kind of bone-deep huah that makes most rules seem like surface stuff, a tie you put on for company. “Are you familiar with Army values cards?” he asks. “They call it a leadership card, a credit card everybody’s supposed to carry around with values on it, and then you get another one to wear with your dog tags around your neck.” Southerland won’t touch it. “That’s not how I operate. I don’t carry my values on my neck. It’s how you act, not what you carry in your pocket.”
George is walking the narrow avenue between tents. “I’ll be glad to be back in garrison,” he says. “Hot showers.” A new cadet in another squad misplaced a rifle today—a hasty search, an angry TAC lecture, this is the kind of mistake terrorists just lurk for—so George is performing a squad weapons check. The new cadets treat him simply as a leader. “Make it run, Sergeant,” they say, after he issues orders. He spots one kid deploying toothpaste in his tent. “You’re supposed to brush your teeth o
ver there—that’s the hygiene area. OK, pull your rifles out and show ’em to me.” Muddy hands, barrels pushing through tent flaps. “OK, thank you,” George says politely, the rhythm of the civilian world in his command style. After everyone has shown their rifles, George is done, but he doesn’t leave. Captain Vermeesch would smile if he saw this: George is putting soldiers first. “Hey, Fourth Squad,” he says. “Make sure you put on dry clothes, ’cuz it’s gonna get cold tonight. If you have to, wear your field jacket. Also, change your pants. And I’ll help with bungee cords.” In foul weather, you string your poncho over the exterior of your tent. George shows me how it’s done on his tent. “I put that up there two days ago—not two days ago. I put it up yesterday. Only about a dozen other tents in this whole bivouac,” he says proudly, “managed to keep them on.”
George is one of the most truthful people at West Point; it has nothing to do with honesty, which is conscious truthfulness. George can’t help it, some finicky instinct sends him chasing down the longest, narrowest, least rewarding corridors of veracity—his answers are so complete that his listeners can walk away with no idea what information he considered most important. “This is full circle,” Rash says. “Two years ago, I was out at Frederick doing the exact same things as them—or if not the exact same, pretty damn close to it.” In Fourth Squad, he’s got some George Rashes of his own. “Three problem children,” he says, shaking his head. “One can’t stop grinning. Another is just shy of beating his roommate up—the roommate doesn’t help, by being basically a slug. And the other one, Calabanos, just doesn’t have the proper attitude.” This detail is as near to being an exemplary cadet as he’s ever been. He even speaks in Successories, but his have a Rashian overlay: “It’s a lotta responsibility. Leadership—sometimes it’s exhilarating, uh, refreshing. And it’s not quite a giddy, heady feeling. But it feels good.” He pauses, thinks some more, locates a truth. “Other times it’s extremely frustrating, if not just downright annoying.”