Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  The Only Time You Can Think About Quitting

  In the morning, Bravo Company polishes off the hand grenade course. They buckle up in flak vests, lob fragmentation devices over a concrete wall; their targets are bowling pin–shaped plaster figures called Ivans—snarling Soviet Cold War troops who’ve taken some beating and chipping over the years. The windows in the bunker shake, bits of metal splinter down into puddles. Bravo charges through the sniper course, tossing pretend grenades into machine-gun nests. (One cadet throws the equivalent of a wild pitch and frowns: “Oh, fudge.”) Then the cadre give the saddle-up command; Bravo has an eight-mile road march back to post.

  The cadets separate into two files; they flex and clank down the margins of the road. Their features grow strained and fixed, with a dried-sweat stare, facing the quiet, basic human question: Can you make yourself go a few more steps? PT squads of upperclassmen jog cheerfully down the center, singing in cadence: “You got mud on your face, a big disgrace, never gonna make it out of this place.” Then they’re gone, and it’s silent but for a tree squeaking in the wind, boots crushing gravel, canteens rattling against rucks. There’s the clacking, dropped-tennis-racket sound of a slipped rifle. Upperclassmen murmur low commands: “Keep your intervals.” The cadets pass chapels, then chain-link fences, road signs, the mowed lawns and brick walls of officer housing. For the first half of a march, there are the high spirits of any group on the move, where everybody not in the column seems to be missing the point.

  When rain comes to the forest, it filters down through terraces; leaves first, then thick branches, then the drumbeat of water hitting 150 BDUs and Kevlars. The first groans rise from the quiet. Faces drop the effort of expression. By the midway point, the first stumbles. The cadre creeps in, hustling down the middle lane, issuing commands. “Anthony, Manders—help Moore!” Squad leaders step alongside, match their stride to yours. It’s not just that you shouldn’t quit; nobody will let you. Legs, boots, determination and will belong to the unit. “We’re close. You can do it. Don’t let down your company. Don’t let down your squad. Don’t quit.”

  The cadre begins the repetitions of motion hypnosis. “Come on, Averakis, we’ve moving onto a flat piece of land. You can do it, Averakis; we’re more than halfway there.” The cadet murmurs seep in, an undertone. “You’ve got to want it. I know you want it. Let’s go, let’s go. There you go. We’ve got a little short downhill. You’re doin’ great. Stay with me. Here comes the downhill.” And if this wears off, a bad-cop squad leader leans in, face full of camo. (At West Point it’s called happy paint.) “You will not stop. Mental toughness. Mental discipline. Quit—that word is not in your vocabulary! Fall out—those words are not in your vocabulary!” Then the kind voices soothe in again. “Let’s go. Stay with me. If you need me to carry you, I will.”

  New cadets prepare to fall out. “I don’t think I want to go on,” a hurting cadet will announce. “You don’t think you want to, Averakis? Well, you’re going to.” The other new cadets break silence around you. “Come on, Stephanie.” “You’ve got this.” “We’re all behind you.” If the words won’t lift you, there’s actual, physical hefting. “Grab onto my ruck. You started this—whether you like it or not, you’re going to finish it. The only time you can think about quitting is when you’re done.”

  The new cadets understand. The decision to quit isn’t yours alone—it can’t be—because an Army isn’t just you.

  “You’re not gonna stop, Av. I don’t care how you feel.”

  “Grab my ruck.”

  “Uuuh! Anx! Mmph! Oh my God!”

  “Grab my ruck.”

  “Quit thinking it’s hard. Fight it.”

  “Love it! It’s easy!”

  “Last hill. You can do this.”

  “Now let go of the strap. You are going to finish it on your own.”

  After the morning rains, the afternoon has turned bewilderingly hot, air lending clothes the damply warmed effect of a restroom hand dryer. As the cadets cross grass, their steps are muffled, items delicately shifting; when they march back onto blacktop, the clanking is like a train. Calls come down the line. To not bunch up; to drink water; to help your buddy up the hill. The column winds into the forest, new cadets reaching for tree trunks, the mud as thick as frosting. A plane glides overhead and necks tilt back. “Take me,” a new cadet named Sullivan jokes. George reaches out and shuts the open canteen on somebody’s ruck. At the bottom of the hill, you can see actual steam rising off cadet necks. “We’ve got just over a mile to get to the top,” George tells his squad, then thinks it over. “Maybe a mile-point-six.”

  MacSweeney breaks out his bagpipes—he studied the instrument with the Catholic brothers at prep school—and offers the company motivational wheezing. Bravo weaves up the last hill before the halfway break. George begins encouraging his people, the same mix of coax and prod G-4 gave him two years ago. “Pick up your feet. You’re doing all the work if you’re dragging. Gravity will help you out. You’ll already be a third of the way up the hill once you hit that corner.” His cadets are wilting into the dangerous T shape. “You can do this,” George says, breathing hard. “Keep on goin’! Let’s go, Calabanos. I know you all can finish this. Sims, Rosenfeld, catch up. You don’t wanna be a fall-out like those Rough Riders”—the cadets who’ve already fallen out—“in the back.” The road begins to flatten out. “Two hundred meters,” George calls. “This is the top of the hill. Everyone’s gonna finish this!”

  George doesn’t have any fall-outs. He looks over his squad, who’ve gone for the long refreshments table, grabbing apples and Capri Sun juice boxes. Sergeant Constance Ashford, a tart-tongued middle-aged woman who’s one of Bravo’s two NCOS, glances up at MacSweeney and his bagpipes. “That would definitely let the enemy know exactly where you were at.” The new cadets whimper and joke. “My feet are killing me.” “Mine have no feeling. I feel like I died and came back to earth. Except for my feet.”

  Then Bravo mounts up for the second half of the march, curves down the same hill they just climbed. Suddenly George slams into a road sign. Time snaps backward; George Rash is in plebe year again. He rolls on the ground, his new cadets halt and gawk. “Keep moving,” Sergeant Rafael DeLeon tells them. (He’s Bravo’s second TAC-NCO.) He sizes up George. “Dehydration. Put his ruck straight—use it as a back brace, sit ‘im up. Where you got your cramping at?”

  “Ooof,” George says. “Thighs and calf. I was sweating too much, lost all my salts—or my electrolytes.” George’s face doesn’t show disappointment, or any personal thing. He’s disappeared in a squinting generic: injured cadet. The cadre swing by—dark appraisals, shaking heads. “He’s done it,” they mutter, “too many times.” The medic coasts in, greets George with some Army humor: “What’s up, highspeed?” Flies alight on every arm, every shoulder, but today they’ve sworn off George. “They won’t land on me,” he says morosely. “I stink too bad.”

  Bull Hill

  The new cadets have only ten more days of Beast, so Bravo passes afternoons on post, knocking out required honor classes. They’re standing at the riverbank, waiting anxiously to cross into plebehood. They take an APFT, all eleven hundred of them, in shifts so as not to crack Gillis Field House. West Point specializes in freak chances: George Rash is overseeing the two-mile run. He gives the morning weather an APFT gourmet’s appraisal. “Good day for a PT test. Cool, but not cold. Slight breeze to keep you drier.” In two days, Bravo will be marching twelve miles back to Frederick; a week later, they’ll attempt a march route that covers the fifteen miles back. George isn’t worried, he’s philosophical. “I can do it,” he says, “if my feet don’t give out on me.”

  Bravo steps off at 0630, and by 0730 the weather is so sweltering—the sun pressing down like an iron—that one new cadet has brought out a plant mister and is spraying down marchers as they pass. The new cadets sing a cadence: “Little hill, no sweat. Big hill, better yet.” Bravo starts its long, winding crawl up Round Pond Hill; same
hill, same pace, same groans as last week. But George doesn’t make it as far. His body makes three separate thumps going down: shins, butt, ruck. The sweaty medic pounds down the road. “You better be almost dead, cadet Rash. I was at the top of that hill.” The medic won’t even open his first-aid kit. “You do not need an IV, and I’m not going to give you one.” An FLA—a field line ambulance, a Humvee bearing the red plus-sign logo—pulls in and picks up George. He stares ahead, utterly defeated, like some hard truth has come to him. “I can’t perform the task as a squad leader,” he says, “so what good am I?” The back of the FLA, with its swaying medical gear, bangs and tinkles like a restaurant kitchen. George sighs, feeling what this means for his future.

  In the Keller Army Hospital waiting room, Katie Couric is throwing to Al Roker’s forecast on TV; the march is half over, and the Today show is still running. Magazines wait on tables, George sits in a comfortable chair. It’s like being restored to the civilian time stream, a sane, ordered world. When nurses send you out, they don’t say “Mental toughness” or “Never quit”; they smile and urge, “Have a safe day.” George follows a nurse, she draws the consulting room curtain. She asks, “What happened?” and George answers, “I was definitely not made for the Infantry.”

  Meanwhile, Bravo is making its ascent up Bull Hill. This steep, endless incline is the Cadet in the Red Sash of the marching world. The cadets approach over a dry stream bed, rocks giving their footing a hard time as a little more civilian gets marched out of them. Halfway up the hill, new cadets begin to wheeze with each step like broken accordions. “Get control of your breathing,” Captain Engen says. “Keep it going now.” Gold Bond powder flies through the air, spilling off necks and out of boots. “Let’s go, Bravo!” Engen urges. The cadets are bent double; you’ve never really heard foot-dragging until you’ve heard 150 pairs of feet actually drag. This is what George is missing in the hospital. Then the landscape turns sweet, flattening all at once. Engen dashes ahead—pumping down on his knees with his palms—and turns around with his arms opened wide. “OK, Bravo, this is the top.” He beams. “I first made it here in the summer of 1987.” Hoooop! “Come on and join me on the top of this hill!”

  Hammered, Slammed, Toast—You’re Done

  Whitey Herzog’s parents had a colorful divorce, so he’s already familiar with the process, how memory can shrink even the biggest experiences. That’s what’s happening with Loryn: the recollections are working down to a manageable size. But though he waits all spring, Mark Matty’s death never loses its original dimensions. He begins to understand it’s the sort of event that can shift your direction through life.

  Mark’s funeral lasted for hours; it wound up at some girl’s shaggy Victorian house, the boys taking pulls on their flasks, getting angry, getting drunk, then angry-drunk. They found a Halloween jack-o’-lantern on some lazy neighbor’s porch, dragged it into the street, stood on the steps winging it with beer bottles. They hauled somebody’s Christmas tree out onto the sidewalk and tore it apart. They were mounting an assault against the calendar—how could people celebrate holidays when their friend was dead? When the cops showed up, Whitey helped everybody get the street clean, working the broom, bagging the garbage.

  Back at flight school, Whitey wrote Mrs. Matty a letter: he said he couldn’t stop replaying the night. He was watching it through his military eyes: like an officer with his troops, he’d lost one. He wrote that he was sorry he’d been there. Mrs. Matty wrote back, “You’re not only in the military—you’re my friend. And so you’ll get no response from me when you say that. No authority in the world could have prevented what happened to my son. I’m just so happy you’re the person who was there with him.” A few weekends later, he flew north to Buffalo to spend the day with Mrs. Matty. She asked if he’d mind walking outside to the back garden and keeping her company while she read the newspaper. Whitey stood there chucking tennis balls to the dog. (“The dog doesn’t know what happened,” Whitey says. “The dog’s sad.”) After a while Whitey turned around to find that Mrs. Matty had folded the paper. “Her face was glowing, just because I reminded her of Mark with his dog. It was wonderful to do that for her, she enjoyed it so much.” Whitey knows from watching crash videos that family tragedies can endanger pilots as surely as wires strung across a road. “One guy was having marital problems—severe problems—and he shouldn’t of been flying. The camera was mounted in the aircraft behind him, and you can see him go right into the ground. If people are having trouble and they’re not one hundred percent focused, they die.” Now Whitey can’t concentrate. He zips into his flight suit, grabs his helmet, reports to the flying line, and his mind remains in Buffalo. One day he takes the aircraft up, flies like hell, back on the ground his instructor pilot lights a cigarette and asks what’s the problem. Whitey tells him. The IP smiles. “Jesus Christ,” he whistles. “Damn LTs—always trying to do everything themselves. Man, if you’re hurting, you don’t feel like you can fly, you tell me.”

  West Pointers follow the can-do movie gospel imparted by Cinderella sports tales, romantic comedies and revenge thrillers. There’s no problem that cannot be overcome through a combination of determination and positive attitude. This makes them a tough market for psychologists. When his commander advises Whitey to seek grief counseling, fear is his response: he doesn’t want it on his record. And fretting about career repercussions isn’t conducive to opening up. “I went,” he says, “but it wasn’t helpful. It was just an evaluation, what I needed was fuckin’ talking. The psychologist was a captain, very cool. He told me, ‘You’re fine, you’re grieving, you’re a very healthy person mentally, so just grieve. Don’t even worry about this going down on your file or me telling your commander. There’s no need.’ I said, ‘Thanks, sir, I appreciate that.’ The one uncool thing he did, he tried to make me cry. I’m a semi-intelligent guy—I knew what he was doing. ‘What was Mark like? How does this feel?’ And he just looked at me. He was waiting for me to get emotional, it’s not gonna happen. I was just whistling: ‘All right, sir, let’s go, next question.’”

  Just as doctors have pet names for emergency room regulars, and firefighters for the many ways flame can take a building, soldiers are on a nickname basis with injury and dying. You’re lit up, jacked up, tore the hell up; you can get broken, hammered, slammed; worse comes to worst, you’re waxed, whacked, toast—you’re done. But this makes it sound like rotten sports luck, having to do some time in the penalty box. What Whitey knows is, people never get out of the box.

  After the funeral, he saw a picture of Mark on someone’s piano, and he understood he was never going to see him again. For months he tries to put this into words for friends at Rucker—it’s the lesson Mark Matty always hoped to teach him when he was still alive. “I’ve learned that life is short,” he says, “and life is precious.”

  Back at the Academy, Whitey could have hashed this out with the Goodfellas. But they’re hard to get a hold of; they’ve got their own Officer Basic Courses to complete. John Mini is finishing strong at Knox, near the top of his class, packing up to ship for Germany. Suppy is cruising toward the end of flight school. He’ll graduate in the top third (the Army has three ratings for officers: above center of mass, center of mass, and below center of mass), and soon he’ll pick his career aircraft. He’s leaning toward the Blackhawk, which will give him a shot at the Aviation equivalent of Special Forces, Task Force 160. He’s mastering Basic Combat Skills—firing live rounds, lurking behind the treeline, then swinging around to hit targets sliding by on a railroad track. For him, it’s almost as fun as surfing. He flies nights, 1900 to 0200, racks during the day, so he can’t be around when Whitey would talk.

  Iggy is knocking out the Infantry course, whose hurry-up-and-wait quality makes Buck-nam seem like a well-oiled machine. (Whitey bumps into his old first captain in Atlanta, and even Rob Shaw admits he’s hurting on motivation.) Infantry climaxes with Ranger school, another elimination round, so Iggy is preparing for the sixty days
of no food, no sleep, endless training and patrolling. What you learn is how much punishment you can take; in war movies, when a costume department wants to make an actor look hard, they’ll stitch the yellow and gold Ranger patch on his left shoulder. (The patch is called a tab.) It’s so crucial in the Infantry community that some failures will risk court-martial and wear black-market Ranger tabs on their uniforms.

  If Whitey had made different decisions, he’d be on the ground getting ready with Iggy right now. Instead, every morning he wakes up, tries to get himself stoked for flight. “Walking to my helicopter,” he says, “I’m like, ‘I don’t wanna be doing this.’ I wouldn’t mind dying if I’m out with soldiers and we get ambushed. That’s different, I’d be OK with it—I’ve done my part, if we get hit, we get hit. If I was in my helicopter at two thousand feet, a bolt fell off and I was headed towards the earth, my attitude right now would be: I’m pissed. There’s lots of stuff I wanted to find out about, I’m fuckin’ pissed off that I’m gonna die because a machine has broken down.”

  His number one priority has always been serving his country, so he studies, passes test rides, inches toward the end of training. One afternoon in May he’s on the phone with Mrs. Matty, and she cuts him off with the key words: “You’re not happy doing what you’re doing, are you?” Whitey doesn’t know what to say; it’s the question nobody’s asked. The words slash out. “No. Not at all. Not one bit.” Mrs. Matty thinks about it. “If you’re not happy, then you have to do something else.” Whitey hangs up feeling better than he has in months. He tells Brian, tells Bart, tells Iggy, rehearsing the decision in his mouth. West Point is there with the terms, helping him make sense of the whole year. “This year,” he says, “has developed me.” Then he goes to his commander and puts in his request for branch reassignment. He doesn’t want to be in Aviation anymore. He wants something on the ground, something controllable: he wants Finance.