Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  You’ve Been Visited by the BTO

  Hank Keirsey has departed into the clouds of the Army afterlife, and that leaves just two points in the West Point sky. Supe sightings are rare—his job, like any college president’s, in-good amount of off-campus fund-raising. So Colonel Joe Adamczyk, Skeletor, the brigade tactical officer, is now the most inspirational figure on post. Keirsey stood for military exploits, the adventures still to be found threading their way under modern life like a system of cables and pipes. Adamczyk embodies regulations, living to standard. Cadets scurry out of his eye-line, grin when he nails somebody else. But he’s their daily reminder that more and different things are expected of them than from anybody else.

  If you were to watch the BTO progress across North Area from above—from, say, an upstairs barracks window or the Washington Hall roof, where smokers gather—it would bring to mind a state trooper cruising the highway, cadets braking and swerving aside. Some cadets actually jump indoors. “I’ve never seen him cross the Area and not make a correction on somebody,” Mike Ferlazzo says. (“He’s one lean and slender individual,” Huck Finn says. “You can spot him from a long way off, and you stay as far away as possible.”) Adamczyk sends cadets ricocheting back to barracks with too long sideburns, because they’ve forgotten to wear a belt with their civvies or tuck in their shirt, because the overall effect “makes you look like you pump gas at a service station. Is that how you represent this Academy?”

  As the BTO, Adamczyk is the TAC for the TACs, the boss of bosses. Captains who left their cadet status behind a decade ago metamorphose into flustered plebes at his side. (Hearing he’s canceled a meeting, TACs will whistle “Forget your troubles, come on, get happy.”) When he goes on a regimental inspection, he’ll start ticking off infractions in the entranceway. “Somebody taped a memo to your regimental sign, they left the tape residue behind. Someone left a coffee cup on your heating unit, you’ve got some stains. And look up there.” A ghostly spider web is riding the air currents near the ceiling. “Think that just happened this morning? Busy spider.” There are learning points in this. For the TACs (“Keep an eye on your standard maintenance; it’s gotta get done and it ought to be done to standard”), for cadets (“You’re gonna be responsible for critical pieces of equipment when you leave here—tanks, helicopters, weapons—and a soldier only does what a leader checks. When leaders adhere to, set, and enforce the standard, life is good”). And there’s a severe Martha Stewart homily to bestow on everyone: “People make an immediate assessment of a unit based upon its entranceway. If it doesn’t present a neat, clean appearance, they’re gonna say, ‘Here’s a unit that doesn’t have much pride.’ Entranceways are one of an organization’s most important aspects.”

  On the whiteboard outside his office, Adamczyk writes a new biblical verse every couple weeks. One week he’ll post Proverbs 15:10, “Stern discipline awaits him who leaves the path; he who hates correction will die,” or 15:32, “He who ignores discipline despises himself, but whoever heeds correction gains understanding.” When you come back, it’ll be Proverbs 12:1: “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid.” But there’s a warmth to Adamczyk. Under Washington Hall, he posts a weekly Xerox called “Rumors of the BTO,” with a snapshot of Adamczyk holding his finger to his lips. The rumors are: “Please give blood this week. Support mankind . . . Ever wonder why DWI is illegal?”—picture of a gory, mashed-up car—“Be careful during this weather, don’t take ‘risks’ you don’t need to take. Think SAFETY! . . . Do something nice for someone. Go Army!”

  During summer training he is everywhere. In August, when Rob Shaw returns to West Point to marry General John Abizaid’s daughter in the snug Catholic chapel, the BTO is kneeling on the altar beside them, to the left of the Catholic chaplain. (The priest’s white hair is the longest in the church; in West Point’s stubbled environment, men of God look countercultural and racy.) Then he’s outside, grinning on the patio, as Rob and Sherrie Shaw walk through the traditional saber arch. Cadets in dress gray line up three on each side; at “Attention!” they raise and cross their swords. When the couple reaches the end, the last cadet lowers his blade like a tollgate, forcing the Shaws to kiss; then he uses it to swat Sherrie on the behind: “Welcome to the Army, Mrs. Shaw.” Another August morning, he’s piling into his Humvee, first inspecting it like a cadet’s uniform. Then he’s rolling off to visit cadets in the field.

  Being in the BTO’s company is an exercise in rigor, a demonstration that there is a right way to do everything. It’s also a demonstration of one sad, entropic principle: left to their own devices, people will generally go wrong. At the Basic Rifle Marksmanship range—cracked smell of gunpowder, new cadets sitting back to back cleaning M-16s, sprinkling Gold Bond on their toes—he spots a pile of green blankets left unprotected by a tree. Then he steps over a gray-and-yellow puddle of latrine runoff. A cadet tells him it’s water, and Adamczyk says, “Water? It’s seepage.” “Sorry, sir,” the cadet says. “You’re right. It’s urine.”

  Adamczyk came to West Point in 1968, from Harrison, New Jersey, whose down-heeled visuals HBO has made famous with The Sopranos. (When Adamczyk feels homesick, he can look over the actors’ shoulders for familiar street corners and storefronts.) “I had Sisters of Charity elementary school for nine years. I went to mass every day in grammar school, Benedictine monks and priests in high school—and an Irish-Catholic mother. West Point was easy” In the disorder of the times, a teenaged Adamczyk watched the glow of the Newark riots, fires across the river. When he reported to school in downtown Newark next morning, St. Benedict’s was one of the few buildings still standing. “And the only reason why it wasn’t destroyed was it had a Benedictine abbey attached, and the monks just absolutely refused to leave. They stood their ground even as the riots were going on, folks respected that, they didn’t mess with them.” This taught Adamczyk a valuable lesson about toughness and holding your position.

  Officers who endured the Army of the sixties and seventies have the same narrow-eyed disposition as civilians who survived the Depression. At the Vietnam-era Academy, before cadets left post to march in Veterans Day parades, they were schooled in ignoring taunts and defending the flag in case the crowds attacked. At Adamczyk’s first Infantry unit, he walked into the home front’s big muddy: low morale, alcoholism, a drug addict whose nickname was Slow Death MacGregor. “Every payday, old Slow Death would get his paycheck, head downtown, buy a new set of clothes. And before the weekend was over, he’d be back in the barracks, no idea what had happened, no clothes, and flat broke” Adamczyk had graduated too late for Southeast Asia. “You feel a little cheated,” he says. “You train, prepare—not because you savor war, but if there’s a conflict going on, you automatically feel you should be there.”

  In 1975, Adamczyk was reassigned from Fort Bragg to the Old Guard, outside Washington, D.C. Because the Old Guard is a ceremonial division that often appears on television—inaugurals and funerals—they are platonic visions of soldiers. At first, Adamczyk hated the spit-and-polish routine. He’d just come from The Division, the Old Guard was like a unit constructed by a BTO. Everyone was over six feet; Adamczyk is five foot ten. At his first function, a captain asked, “Hey, I want to know how tall that lieutenant is.” And Adamczyk balled his mental fists and responded as Huck Finn might: “Sir, tall enough to beat the shit out of anybody in this room.” After a few years—parading and planning Arlington funerals for the Vietnam dead—Adamczyk refined his answer: “Someone said, ‘Jeez, I thought you had to be six feet in the Old Guard,’ I’d say ‘If you’re six feet and you’re in the Old Guard, it’s because you’re six feet. If you’re my size and you’re in the Old Guard, it’s because you’re good.’”

  Adamczyk’s Old Guard experience left him as perfect a garrison officer as Keirsey was a field officer. The Army eventually sent him to Germany, to Hawaii, before winging him back to West Point—a pretty luxe ride for a boy from Harrison. What he wants cade
ts to know is that he walked a tight path in the Army, and found it to have surprising views. When Keirsey met cadets, he searched for verve. Adamczyk builds his impressions on demeanor, posture, handshake, appropriateness of dress, on the same principle that says a healthy animal will keep its fur clean. But both men look first in the eyes: Will a cadet directly meet your gaze? For Keirsey, this meant you had the right spirit inside, and so had nothing to be ashamed of. For the BTO, it means you have everything correct on the outside, and so have nothing to be ashamed of. Adamczyk’s twins are both at West Point: Matthew will spend next year as the brigade XO; Leslie is in H-4, the same company as Keirsey’s oldest, J.D. Next year, she’ll room with Chrissi Cicerelle.

  At 1600, Adamczyk parks his Humvee in the Keller Hospital lot. “I try to come at least once a week,” he says. “It’s a responsibility of leadership, checking on your soldiers. And there’s the training aspect: somewhere down the line these kids are going to have soldiers in the hospital. Hopefully they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember when I was in the hospital Colonel Adamczyk came by to see me, maybe I ought to go visit my soldiers.’” The wide, creaky elevator doors open on white hallways and prints by Monet and Matisse, and then Adamczyk goes room to room. Cadets are laid up with heat exhaustion and soccer accidents. (“You’re gonna look more macho with that scar,” the BTO says. “Yes sir,” the new cadet replies, “mean and tough.”) The cadets are surprised to see the BTO and shy to engage him in conversation. In one room, Adamczyk sits with a new cadet checked in with a muscle pull. “I saw you yesterday,” he says. “You were on the road march, hollering ‘Let me keep going, let me finish.’”

  The new cadet, a black kid from Tennessee, wrinkles his face warily. “I apologize about that, sir.”

  “No apology necessary. You’re from Memphis? So when Army plays Memphis, who you gonna cheer for?”

  “I’m going to cheer for Army, sir. I plan on being a West Point graduate, this is my home now, sir.”

  “Good for you, huah.”

  In the next room, Adamczyk finds a worried mother occupying her daughter’s bedside chair. “I didn’t call her, sir,” the cadet says quickly.

  “I hear ‘blood disorder,’” the mother says, “and I freak”

  “You a little bit calmer now, Mom?” The BTO smiles, using her civilian rank.

  “She’s leaving tomorrow morning, so I know she’s OK. As long as she’s not dying, I’m OK.”

  Adamczyk turns to the cadet in the next bed. “Is she spoiling you too? I know the mothers never come up here and just spoil their own kids.” In the rooms where cadets are absent, for treatment or tests, Adamczyk fishes a card out of his BDU pocket, leaves it on the pillow: You’ve been visited, it says, by the BTO.

  Cooperate and Graduate

  If Joe Adamczyk had returned to the hospital the next day, he would have found Nick Calabanos, the most Rash-like cadet in George Rash’s squad, being treated for trench foot—the condition that sidelined George as a new cadet. And if he stuck around for a few hours longer, he could have watched George Rash himself being lugged in, nearly unconscious.

  West Point likes to immerse cadets in their imperfections. Huck Finn is bad about rules: so when summer assignments came around, he was teaching new cadets to make beds, polish boots and follow regulations, learning he could do the same. George got Beast II—the marching portion of Cadet Basic Training.

  Early in the summer, John Vermeesch gave George his high-stakes warning. “I told him that as of now I wouldn’t want to serve with him as a lieutenant,” Vermeesch says. “So this summer is very important. I hope he can step up and lead from the front. And if he learns he can’t, before Cow Commitment, I hope that he recognizes it for himself. At that point he has to say, ‘I can’t be an Army officer.’”

  Cadets have a fixed motto: “Cooperate and graduate.” The idea is that cadethood is too much for any solo operator. But when corps opinion turns against a cadet—if peers think you’re bound to wash out, or that you’ll be an embarrassment if you do survive—there are any number of ways to stick a boot in your path. After he falls out of the twelve-mile march, cadet opinion solidifies against George Rash. They know Cow Commitment is coming too; they’d like to be rid of him before then.

  “I feel bad about it,” says Matt MacSweeney. “He’s not a bad guy if you get to know him. But people aren’t helping him anymore—they’re kinda leading him toward mistakes, kinda hoping he’ll mess up. The attitude right now is, ‘Hey George—here’s a screwdriver, go see if that electrical socket is working.”

  After the eight-mile march, Calabanos removed his boots to show the cadre his black-and-blue, torn-up feet. It was George’s responsibility to check his squad’s feet, to make sure they didn’t get as bad as Calabanos’s were. “But that’s first detail’s fault also,” explains Jonathan Tullos, a cow in Bravo Company. “He’s had those boots since R-Day, someone should have caught it before this.” Now Calabanos is sitting pretty—he’s on soft-shoe profile, no boots, no marches for a week. “But George could’ve known what to look for. I don’t know, it just seems like any mistake he makes is getting put into the spotlight now.”

  Unfortunately, George’s one bright moment occurs outside the spotlight. He does a fine job leading his squad of new cadets through Warrior Forge—a day of ambushes, reconnaissance, casualty drills in which all the summer’s skills are tested together. But no one’s there to see it except his new cadets, and their opinion can’t help his standing with cadre or Vermeesch. He shows his squad how to move under fire, how to administer first aid to a fallen comrade, how to deal with EPWs, enemy prisoners of war. “First kick their weapon away,” George says, “in case they’re playing possum. Then give them a swift kick to the gender—you have to make sure they’re down or dead.” (George’s technique receives some refinement when Rosenfeld, one of his new cadets, goes to check an EPW being played by a regular Infantry soldier. “If you kick me in the nuts,” the soldier growls, “I will rip your ears off.”) George slows the squad as they march down the side of a mountain, with the kind of caution soldiers appreciate. “These rocks are just asking for a twisted ankle,” he says; Rash’s instinct for self-preservation would keep other soldiers healthy too.

  Tonight, Bravo Company will make a tricky nighttime patrol, spend an evening under fire in deep woods. There’ll be a march to the site, probes by the Army regulars through the small hours, another march to Tent City in the morning. “I expect to see a lot of foxfire,” George says with pleasure. I ask if that’s a weapon. “No, it’s basically when you get fungus on rotting logs and stuff, that glows phosphorescent in the dark. It’s very pretty.”

  Army trucks called deuce-and-a-halfs (they can carry two and a half tons) ferry George’s squad to the staging area at 2000 hours. Calabanos has found a way out of tonight’s patrol: this morning, he showed George a new and engorged blister. But he’s been on profile for a week, how could he have gotten it? “He hasn’t done anything,” George says.

  “That thing was huge,” one new cadet marvels. “Maybe he took a lighter to his foot. There’s ways to get out of any training—don’t put anything past anybody, especially Calabanos.” First Sergeant Ryan Southerland gives the order (“Let’s go, Bra-vo”) and George passes the word down to his soldiers: “Fourth Squad, get it up, get it on, follow me.” They move out into the woods. A night march is an eerie sensory experience. Camo patterns work especially well in the dark; it’s difficult to see anyone, yet you feel the heat of the cadets around you, smell the fabric and locker room smell of a unit on the move, hear the mash of boots. In the distance, through the trees, the company hears small-arms fire. Everyone goes into the prone position, a long line of shadows and green along the trailside—boots, helmets, sets of eyes palely blinking.

  The smallest woman in his squad begins to labor and huff under her pack; George offers to ruck it for her. Bravo doesn’t get probed during the night. (It turns out, in the morning, that the cadre marched too far; the
Army units couldn’t find them.) The cadets doze in long rows, crawling under ponchos when the sky decides to rain. At 0445, they’re on their feet, ready to march back; darkness bleaches out of the sky. The cadre leadership again loses the route, going forward, stopping, marching back, pulling out the map, making Ryan Southerland slightly angry. But he walks the line, bucking up the new cadets. “This is a beautiful morning,” he tells Rosenfeld. “Think what you just accomplished, think what you’re about to do. What are your friends doing back home? Getting over a hangover is about the best thing they could be up to. But we’re out here on this beautiful morning.” George mutters under his breath, “This sucks” Then he says to no one in particular, “I’m going to have a field day with my feet after this.”

  Southerland is one of Bravo Company’s most effective cadets. “He can make good stuff happen just by showing up,” Captain Engen explains. When he pulls up beside a limping cadet, he makes the clearest appeal: “Like all the best things, this is you versus you. Get through this, you’ll probably forget it. If you don’t, that’s what you’ll remember, and you’ll regret. So you have to minimize regret.” Colonel Adamczyk will often describe the pre-Changes style of cadet leadership—with its threats and hazing—as “puerile, sophomoric and degrading.” (It’s one of his catchphrases.) His ideal cadet leader would be able to apply pressure without raising his voice; Ryan does this instinctively. “He’s kind of an icon to us younger guys,” a new cadet named Collins tells me. “When he corrects you, he always gives you something positive. He’s not just there taking advantage of the power.” Southerland is marching beside Fourth Squad as the rest of the cadre begin to nudge each other and grin. They know the signs. George Rash is limping, sweating; he’s getting ready to fall out of another road march.