Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  His father, Ray Kasper, was “shocked that he chose to go. He never was physical. He never played sports—just debate team, chess club, stuff like that. I think he wanted to see if he could do it. But immediately he stood straighter, he walked taller, had more confidence. The first Christmas he came home, he was bored, he said there were no physical challenges—he wanted to get back.”

  How West Point molds cadet personalities like Kasper’s and Pimentel’s is a topic for detailed analysis. “The outcome we’re trying to shape here is their sense of self,” Colonel Barney Forsythe explains. “The fundamental question is, How do you develop their professional self-concept?” Forsythe is West Point’s vice dean of education—sandy hair, square glasses. The world of ideas is solid for him; when he refines a point he raps my notebook. Forsythe’s father was Major General George I. Forsythe, who instituted the Army’s last great shift, from a draft basis to a professional, all-volunteer force.

  Colonel Forsythe has been working alongside Colonel Scott Snook on the new Cadet Leader Development System, a quieter sort of revolution. Instead of focusing on the know or do elements of “Be, Know, Do” (the Army’s standard training pattern actually was devised by a friend of Forsythe’s), they’re focusing on the be. West Point, he says, is about “planned change—fundamentally changing people. “As of 2000, that job is more complicated than ever, because there’s no clear answer as to what types of conflicts they are preparing cadets for. “The argument is, we can’t train them for every possible encounter,” Forsythe says, “’cause we can’t anticipate what those encounters will be like. Instead, we have to develop them to be the kind of people who can sort it out for themselves once they get there.”

  To that end, Forsythe and Snook rely on a framework created by the Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan, in an influential study called The Evolving Self. Kegan broke down the evolution of any self into five stages. Stage one is more or less how everybody acts as toddlers and children: impulse driven. (“I am my impulses,” Forsythe explains.) Stage two is early adolescence: the formation of a personality, but one still devoted to serving your own needs. (“So if you ask a high school student why they do community service projects, the stage two answer might be, ‘Well, I know it’s an important way to get into college. And I sort of feel good when I’m doing it.’”) Stage three is late adolescence: your values are defined by your group affiliation, whom you’re standing next to. You’re a team member with a team persona; before you answer, you look down the row to hear what the other guys have to say. (“So the stage three perspective on service projects might be, ‘West Point is about selfless service, that’s something we do here. If I didn’t do it, I’d be letting my buddies down: it’s what’s expected of me, therefore I do it.’”) Stage four is adulthood, the haven for the well-adjusted: you’ve internalized the values and made them your own. (“So you could articulate the value of service by what it means to you. You don’t say, ‘This is what my buddies and the profession expect of me.’ You say, ‘This is what I really stand for.’”) Stage five is some kind of super-adulthood. Maybe your values are right, maybe they’re wrong; they’re just values. (“I’m not even sure I understand the stage five person—I’ve never met anybody like that.”)

  “When you look at West Point,” Forsythe says, “we have a heavy stage three emphasis—be a team player, be part of the profession, be part of the group. What we really want to do is develop autonomous stage four people. So we push three and hope we’ll mature them into four.” Forsythe chuckles. “Well, we’ve been studying it for six years, and it turns out that the West Point experience is really about the transition from stage two to stage three.”

  This stall at stage three is receiving special emphasis now because of something that happened in Kosovo to a 1998 graduate named John Serafini. He was interrogating an Albanian prisoner; his NCOs suggested he get a little rough, and he held an empty pistol against the back of the Albanian’s head until he learned what he needed to know. The story eventually made its way over the wires, to stateside papers and Time magazine (under just the worst kind of headline, “How U.S. ‘Peace-Keeping’ Became a Reign of Terror”), where it was described as “cross[ing] the line.” There’s talk of a court-martial for Lieutenant Serafini; his defense is that he was following the NCOs’ advice, not values of his own. At West Point, this explanation set off alarm bells in every office. “This was clearly an officer stuck at stage two or stage three,” Colonel Forsythe explains. “You can take advice from your NCOs, but then if you have your own values, you can say no. Because the officer is expected to be the one who sorts that out. That’s why we’ve got to pay attention to this. It may well be that those who stay and color within the lines may be the least well equipped to deal with the challenges.”

  In G-4, at this year’s Dining-in: the Corporation makes most of the challenges, the jokes are mainly inside-Corporation stuff. Eliel is forced to wear Mickey Mouse ears. “Because I’m from Orlando and I’m not a big fan of Disney—so instead of me drinking the grog, they had me wear the hat.” Captain Vermeesch glows at the front table. “This crew could run the company,” he says, “even if we were never here.”

  Happycadets.com

  If the Corporation represents stage three thinking, Ryan Southerland is an exemplar of stage four, with some of that inner Keirsey too-muchness. It makes him a standout, a cadet other cadets look to when he enters a room.

  “He’s just an outstanding dude,” class vice president Carter Smyth declares. “He cares about the right things, and he’s one hundred percent genuine. He’s inspired me to be a better person, because when you see someone like him, you’re just abashed. You’re like, ‘Why can’t I be like that?’”

  Right now, Ryan’s leadership abilities are lying fallow. Companies follow a few Soviet-style nostrums (“Oh, it’s an irony, we’re very socialistic around here,” one officer tells me); command opportunities are rationed like a commodity. If you’ve recently had a chance, as Ryan did this summer, you can expect to warm the benches while someone else takes a turn. In Ryan’s case, he was picked Soldier of the Quarter last spring, he got to be first sergeant at Beast. He asked for a platoon sergeant’s job, so he could have some effect on cadets. Instead, he spends the term compiling intramural statistics as athletics sergeant.

  When work shrivels, personal life balloons. During Beast, Ryan noticed Betty Simbert—the compact black junior who calls cadence like a cheerleader. (Betty can’t be over five feet tall, but her toned limbs give her the look of a concentrated statue.) During the last weeks of Beast, Ryan would make his way from talking to Betty’s new cadets to talking to Betty. By October, they’re talking all the time by instant message.

  MsBit [Betty]: what are you doing?

  Grumpy [Ryan]: shining boots, we’re having company inspections tomorrow . . .

  MsBit: sounds like fun. us too. any chance to come over and shine them over here?

  IMing has stormed the post. Cadet rooms thrum with the bells and bleeps that announce incoming IMs. A few years ago, you’d see cadets prowling the barracks before taps, hoping to scare up some human contact. Now they’re craned over their keyboards, hailing one another over the Net. (TACs frown about it. “What bothers me when you look in the rooms is they have their backs turned to each other. A class can’t get tight that way.”) When they’re away from their desks, cadets leave an “away message” on their IM, a gripe or a mission statement. One cadet collects them, posts the funniest and most telling at Happycadets.com. (“This site,” a disclaimer runs, “is based and maintained in a neutral location so as to be in accordance with United States Military Academy Memorandum 93–01 . . . So far I am led to believe that this site has been a great morale booster.”) Visiting the site is like strolling the Plain, reading people’s minds.

  giving up is a surprisingly good feeling

  The phrase “high school hero, West Point zero” was developed in anticipation of my arrival at the academy.

  “Get
it together guys, I have a dog to kick and a wife to beat and I don’t plan on being here all night.”—TAC NCO

  My parents keep asking how school was. It’s like saying, “How was that drive-by shooting?” You don’t care how it was. You’re lucky to get out alive.

  This week’s MOPG [Moment Of Pure Genius] again comes to us from the sweet dudes in the Brigade Tactical Department. The TAC came into my room and busted on me for having my gray blanket over the heater. He called it attempted arson. As if a radiator . . . heated by steam . . . could ignite a 100% wool blanket. It is now 120°F in my room because I have no control over the millions of BTU’s that the heater is pumping out. He said he would authorize me to buy a wrench with my own funds to manipulate the knob that controls the heat.

  It’s official, hell has frozen over—it’s snowing

  Top 5 Reasons Hell is Better Than W.P.

  5. You can’t get thrown out of hell

  4. No one expects you to be perfect in hell

  3. You wouldn’t tell your friend to ‘go to West Point’

  2. There are more women in hell

  1. Hell is forever, West Point just seems like it

  So today in Beverly Hills, my Mom sees Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Benecio Del Toro on the street . . . So today at West Point, I got to see George Rash . . . I definitely got the better of my Mom today.

  Betty grew up in inner-city Miami, among palm trees and thunderstorms. Her parents came over from Haiti, her father went back soon after she was born. The year she was ready for high school, Miami Central established a JROTC program; as in many inner-city schools, the program was intended to keep students on the straight and narrow. “To build up people’s self-esteem,” Betty says. She’s on West Point’s cheerleading squad, the Rabble Rousers, and her words come in short cheerstyle bursts. “They wanted to start with freshmen. And they looked at me. ‘You have the best grades and you look like you know what you’re doing—you’re the battalion commander.’ I was like, ‘What?’”

  When Betty led her squad in competitions, they became famous as the team with the freshman leader. “I go back to my high school now and people I don’t know say, ‘There’s Betty, oh my God, that’s Betty Simbert, I want to be just like you.’ I didn’t do anything special. I just went to school.” Her mentor, a retired major, directed her to West Point.

  There are four regiments at West Point (G-4 is really shorthand for “Company G, Fourth Regiment”). African-American cadets jokingly refer to themselves as the “Fifth Regiment.” Ogochukwu Obele, a big boxing-team champion from Boston with arms like truck tires, explains, “The Fifth Regiment is a way of saying the African-American population has to stick together.” Of all the places I’ve been in America, including the thirty-five or so colleges I’ve visited as a reporter, West Point strikes me as the most successfully integrated, the least afflicted by racial tension. And it seems that way to most cadets as well. Yet the Fifth Regiment is distinguished by more than skin color. Many African Americans shun the post barbers—they’re not great with blacks’ hair—getting their hair trimmed in Harlem instead. They go clubbing off post more often than white classmates. And though they comprise 8 percent of the cadet corps, the gripe is they snag a much higher proportion of the leadership jobs. (TACs fret in their offices over meeting the “proper demographic distribution.”) White kids bellyache about this affirmative-action disparity, but black cadets perceive it differently. They point out that while the percentage of women at West Point exactly matches their numbers in the service, blacks make up far less than the 30 percent they do in the regular Army.

  Another reason for the tight connection among African Americans: they’re often directed to West Point’s prep school—in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey—one final hurdle, a year to bring them up to academic speed. (It isn’t just African Americans. Andy Blickhahn—the odds-on favorite right now for next year’s first captaincy—did a prep school year himself. If you don’t make C’s there, home you go.) Even when a black candidate has exceptional grades, she’ll sometimes cool her heels at the school anyway. “I had straight A’s and twelve hundred on my SATs,” explains Mary Tobin, a yuk from Atlanta. “I know people who entered West Point straight in with some significantly lower scores than myself. My year they were doing a huge push for minority females. So almost thirty of us entered the prep school together.” With more minorities in the enlisted ranks, this becomes an important consideration; soldiers like to look up and see they’re being led by a face that resembles their own.

  The same holds true at West Point. Black cadets know how important it is to spot another black face in class, in the mess hall. Betty says, “We try to keep a close-knit family. When I see someone, I’m always like, ‘How are your grades, make sure if you need anything, you come see me.’ We’ve got to stick together, because if you don’t see someone that looks like you here, then you start to think, ‘I’m the only one,’ and it gets harder.”

  For two years, Betty felt strongly that the Fifth Regiment’s cohesion should extend to romance. She made fun of black friends who dated white cadet girls. “All of them did. And I just said, ‘Why?’ And they’d say, ‘Because the black girls aren’t coming across.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s disgusting.’ I’d tell them, ‘You know, your mother would kill you if you brought a white beauty home.’ So when I started dating Ryan, they started laughing, saying, ‘Oh, you’re a hypocrite.’ And I know I am. Even now, I still give them a hard time about white girls.”

  And Ryan had never dated a black girl. He was just “a small-town boy,” in Betty’s words. (Her friends sometimes describe him as a “dorky-ass white boy.”) The delicate issue of race crops up in their IMs.

  MsBit (11:25:53 P.M.): hey can i tell you a secret . . . that i have been thinking about lately

  MsBit (11:26:28 P.M.): well . . . you are the first white guy that i have ever thought about kissing, kissed . . . etc

  Grumpy (11:27:00 P.M.): what have you been thinking about that? because i have thought about that a lot too.

  MsBit (11:30:46 P.M.): i always thought that it would be weird, but its not. i have thought about my past opinions about stuff like this

  Grumpy (11:33:34 P.M.): because as much as it is not an issue for me personally it is still something . . . aaarrrgghhh . . . you know?

  MsBit (11:33:49 P.M.): yeah i know . . . it makes me nervous

  Grumpy (11:35:05 P.M.): do you know why?

  MsBit (11:36:34 P.M.): i dont know . . . that’s just how it was growing up . . . i guess . . . i see it as an insult . . . when it’s the other way round . . . it kind of hurts me . . .

  Grumpy (11:38:43 P.M.): it makes me nervous too . . . I’ve never really been with a black woman before

  MsBit (11:38:50 P.M.): why is it different? just weird jitters I guess

  Grumpy (11:39:18 P.M.): maybe that’s weird of me . . .

  Grumpy (11:40:18 P.M.): in high school it seemed the w guys that had black girlfriends usually were just the kind of guys who really wished they were black

  Grumpy (11:40:25 P.M.): and spent their waking moments trying to fit in with the black guys

  MsBit (11:40:59 P.M.): most of my friends back at home would never date a w guy . . . my school had about 6,000 people, there were only 2 white people . . . but all of my new friends have all dated white guys

  MsBit (11:41:09 P.M.): and i think they kind of change my perspective on things . . . then i wonder why we always come back to that one reason for being nervous

  Grumpy (11:41:20 P.M.): what has that made you think about me?

  MsBit (11:41:30 P.M.): nothing about you really . . . now i am thinking about . . . how my opinion makes you feel

  MsBit (11:41:38 P.M.): does it change your perception of me at all

  Grumpy (11:41:43 P.M.): no it does not

  Grumpy (11:42:11 P.M.): i like you, and it doesn’t matter to me. my real friends would not say anything in seriousness or think anything.

  MsBit (11:42:24 P.M.): same here
. . . my friends . . . would just wonder if the kissing was good and if you were a totally good guy

  MsBit (11:42:34 P.M.): i can confirm the good guy part though . . . lol

  Grumpy (11:43:14 P.M.): ok. good night. you have to read this away message

  Auto response from Grumpy (11:44:02 P.M.): “Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which cuts sharp and straight across . . . Let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.” ˜William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom

  Grumpy (11:44:28 P.M.): I like the last part best

  Toward the end of first term, Ryan is invited to meet with Sergeant Greer, the adult NCO who’s command sergeant major of the corps of cadets. Greer is interviewing candidates for brigade command sergeant major next term. This is the biggest job a cow can have (it’s the job Andy Blickhahn has now); you become the highest-ranking cadet in your class. When Ryan arrives in Washington Hall, two cadets are already waiting for their interview slots on the bench outside Greer’s office. Inside, there are coins and guidons and a life-size cutout of John Wayne, squinting at some surmountable problem on the horizon. Whenever Ryan turns his head, he finds himself meeting John Wayne’s eye.