Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  It’s a strange conversation. Greer asks if Ryan wants the job; Ryan answers no—he’d really prefer to be a platoon sergeant. Greer asks what he thinks about his fellow cadets. Ryan declares that there’s a problem with cynicism, and Greer asks what should be done to erase it. Ryan points out that all cadets ever hear is that various actions are unprofessional—no one ever tells them how they should act, beyond just saying it should be professional, so instead everyone is sticking in their rooms and playing on their computers.

  The window goes dark outside, the conversation runs past the allotted fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes pass, an hour. Ryan finds himself talking about the Army values card that hangs around every cadet’s neck—how stirring ideals can become just a sliver of plastic that rubs under your collar. “You just don’t want cadets to say, ‘This is the way it should be’ without proving it to yourself first,” Ryan says. “You want to put that critical eye to things—not just trust something ‘because the SOP says it.’ When the Academy lets you get there under your own steam, and you’ve been down that road yourself, then you know it and believe it so much better.”

  When Ryan steps outside, the same two cadets are still waiting on the same bench, glares and worry on their faces. A few weeks later, assignments get posted, and Ryan is the new brigade command sergeant major.

  Honor

  It would be hard to estimate just where George Rash falls on the Kegan scale. In company, he’s part of an anti-clique. Generally, once they’re past plebe year, cadets gain some control over their housing partners. George bunks with cadets who’ve been shunned by their peers, who forget to list their picks on the sign-up sheet; he’s G-4’s roommate of last resort. This term, he’s paired with Scott Mellon, a small, snarly TEDs wearer from Oregon. Mellon’s a math-science whiz who’s been on the service end of a lot of cooperate-and-graduate stories. Sharing plebe-year quarters with Huck Finn, he guided the big footballer through the hoops of each class. “Frickin’ tutored me every night,” Huck grins. “He’s one reason I’m still here—the kid’s a genius, man.” “He got me through math,” Huck’s teammate Cal Smith says. “That kid cooperated with me, otherwise I’d have no chance of graduating.” As George’s honor investigation gears up, Scott has an idea for how George could cooperate with him. “Why don’t you just quit and leave now?” Scott asks at night. “That way, I could have the room to myself.”

  The honor system that has snared Rash is one of the Academy’s proudest achievements. As is often the case at West Point, higher notions spring from the practical. Early superintendents had good sound military reasons for stressing honor: in the field, under fire with lives at stake, an officer’s word had to be his bond. In the cities, dredging expensive harbors and canals, graduates with unmonitored budgets would face the temptations of the ledger book.

  The second reason had to do with the peculiar role early-nineteenth-century colleges began to play in American life. After the Revolutionary War, college attendance grew fashionable, and the campus atmosphere turned into a heady mix of hedonism and disorder; students went on one extended bender. University presidents complained of “riotous action,” “profane swearing” and card-playing—the way contemporary deans will grouse about underage drinking and PlayStations—while urban students slunk off campus to attend horse races and the low-cost, ad lib entertainment of the public hanging.

  New colleges took to the woods. The 1789 charter for the University of North Carolina, the nation’s first public university, specified the campus be constructed no closer than five miles to a city; cities were thought to emit corrupting doses of what was quaintly called “vice.” (The University of New Jersey had followed the same rationale years earlier when it relocated to tiny Princeton. Students, a trustee explained, would be “more sequestered from the various temptations” of modern city life, “that theatre of folly and dissipation.”) This didn’t spare Chapel Hill. Students were expelled for “firing pistols in the buildings” and “throwing stones at the faculty,” for breaking a “window-glass” over a tutor’s head, for attempting to burn down the trustees’ house. In 1799, for a full week, students rioted; they went after the faculty. A professor testified, “They accosted Mr. Flinn with the intention of beating him, but were diverted from it, and at length uttered violent threats against Mr. Murphey and Mr. Caldwell . . . [they] waylaid and stoned Mr. Webb . . . they beat Mr. Gillaspie personally.” When the university’s president suggested an honor pledge “to suppress every species of irregularity,” it sparked the Great Rebellion of 1805.

  Up and down the states, students revolted to protest liquor restrictions, expulsions, bad food (Harvard had two menu incidents, a Great Butter Rebellion and a Rotten Cabbage Rebellion) and rules in general. A professor wrote they had “wild notions of liberty.” In 1807, to protest suspensions—over cursing, liquor and “tavern-frequentation”—Princeton students seized Nassau Hall, repelling faculty members and concerned townspeople with banisters yanked from the staircase. A few years later, they jailed tutors in their rooms, nailed shut the doors and windows, set fire to the outbuildings. At the University of Virginia, when a professor tried to break up a drinking party, he was shot in the belly.

  At Harvard, student-organized “combinations” kept informants from ratting on miscreants, and groups vandalized the homes of professors who handed out too much schoolwork. (Night watchmen who tried to stop the vandals got walloped too.) More than half of one class got booted out before graduation, and in 1821 about a tenth of the student body reported suffering from venereal disease.

  In its early days, West Point wrestled with the same sort of student behavior that bedeviled civilian colleges. Early cadets went AWOL, fired muskets from windows, found professional women to service them on campus. In 1804, the second superintendent walked away from the job. A professor urged him to return, in a letter that is one of the first examples of corps-has: “Everything is going to ruin. Morals and knowledge thrive little and courts-martial and flogging prevail.”

  The fifth supe, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, started bringing the Academy to heel in 1817. Thayer’s solutions laid the groundwork for modern West Point. (Thayer is the sort of romantic, exacting figure historians write about this way: “He never married. The Academy was his only love.”) One idea was the invention of TACs. Another was strictly limiting vacation time. (Thayer found that cadets on furlough would travel to New York and other cities, “there to indulge in dissipation and to contract disease, vices and debts. Others were put in jail and several of the young gentlemen I have not heard of since.”) He curtailed their on-post free time too, scheduling nearly every moment of the cadet day, and greatly reducing the opportunities for delinquency. Thayer also prohibited smoking, drinking, gambling, spare-time novel-reading, cooking, chess, cards, subscribing to more than one periodical, playing a musical instrument, and swimming in the river.

  Thayer’s greatest innovation, the honor system, was somewhat at odds with these others. While the new restrictions severely limited cadets’ actions—the theory being, as Thayer wrote President James Monroe, that any liberty offered a chance to misbehave—the honor system relied on cadets’ moral strength and free will. Thayer streamlined the matter to its essence. If a cadet found himself accused of a regs violation, he was asked to confirm, excuse or deny it. Thayer accepted the statements at face value. Since cadets were gentlemen of character, he reasoned, their word was beyond doubt. He defined honor as the cadets’ most treasured possession, which forced cadets to recalculate the value of any potential infraction. Would they trade their honor for a drink, a smoke, a game of cards?

  The regulations and principles transformed West Point into a spartan, ethical ideal, and by the 1830s made it a popular tourist destination. Even Americans who would never live so correctly were relieved to know somebody still was, in the way agnostics get cheered up by Christmas. A midcentury Board of Visitors reported that cadets followed “a course of conduct that challenges the admiration of every beholder.” J
ournalists swooned too. “Oh,” wrote one 1870 Boston Globe reporter, “for such honoring of honor.”

  At first, cadets enforced the code on their own. Known liars—or suspect, bureaucratic survivors of the process—were silenced. The old-time phrase was “sending them to Coventry”; breaking a silence constituted an honor violation in itself. If one cadet disturbed another’s honor, they settled it by stepping outside. This evolved into semi-official “scrapping committees.” If cadets lied about their whereabouts, or stole, they could find themselves shaken awake after taps. Cadet gangs would march them to the gate by lamplight, sometimes tar and feather them, sometimes force them into civilian clothes, sometimes hang a sign saying Thief around their necks, and send them packing. This evolved into a semi-official group with the menacing name “vigilance committee.” In the 1920s the thirty-first supe, Douglas MacArthur—while restoring vacations and other contact with the outside world—organized them into Honor Committees with a formal hearing system. In 1947 General Maxwell Taylor drafted the honor code’s terse mandate: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal.” In 1970 the phrase “or tolerate those who do” was added, in a sense enlisting every cadet on post as a member of the vigilance committee.

  God, These People Absolutely Hate Me

  In late August, two firsties from the Honor Committee, Balog and Mahoney, show up in George’s room, posing deadly questions with FBI courtesy. George is facing two separate charges of lying: to Cadet Wilkins when he said he checked his Beast squad’s feet “all the time,” to Captain Engen when he reported he last checked them “on Friday.”

  Balog and Mahoney return a few days later for a sharper round of questioning—so it’s clear different truths are being held up to the light, they want to measure George’s word against others’. George writes and signs a statement after each interview, they carry it away for use at his hearing. Then they’re back again, to introduce a term George has never heard before. “So, you’re self-admitting that you lied?” George says yeah, he guesses he is.

  Then, for a month, nothing happens. George walks the post in that eerie suspension that comes to any accused man, when it seems the authorities might simply have misfiled the paperwork, moved on, dropped the case. It’s this period that nibbles away at many cadets on honor like acid. But George has already been inured by his West Point experience. “There are barriers that I’ve unfortunately built up,” he explains, sitting alone in his room, “—fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it. To try to take criticism in stride. I might not do the job as well as they’d like to see me do it, but I can put up with a lot more shit than most people could . . . handle. When I came to West Point, the barriers were like clay, they were malleable and I could occasionally get around them. And the first two years were like the kiln that basically hardened them into bricks.”

  The hearing process doesn’t start well for George. For some reason, the Brigade Honor Committee forgets to give him a copy of the packet containing the evidence against him. So George has no idea exactly what he’s up against until he’s sitting in the shiny, paneled hearing room at his preliminary hearing. There isn’t enough time to proofread everything and make his objections, so they send him on his way.

  Next morning he meets his JAG lawyer, Dan something, it could be Schimik, in the rush of events George never catches his name. First they go over the self-admitting botch. In fact, his lawyer explains, what he’s told was not a lie but a falsehood. George had no intent to deceive anyone; he just got his facts wrong.

  Then JAG Dan marks what’s inadmissible and hearsay in the packet—about half the testimony. The words will be whited out on the photocopies for next week’s hearing. No lawyer is allowed to assist there. George will serve as his own attorney: delivering opening and closing statements, cross-examining each hostile witness, defending himself. (At West Point, every cadet on honor is the lawyer who has a fool for a client.)

  As he prepares his case, he rereads statements from cadet Kim Wilkins, from Captain Engen, from Mrs. Como the Red Cross volunteer; from members of his Bravo Company cadre and the new cadets in his squad. George’s stomach sinks to his toes. “My God,” he says, “these people absolutely hate me.” The witnesses haven’t stopped with George’s performance; they’ve gone after his motivation, his character and drive. “They’ve basically called my whole existence into question. Whether I should be here, what kind of person I am, why I do the stuff I did. Basically they’ve called me a scumbag a dozen ways from here to Tuesday.” Mrs. Como goes farthest: for her, George is an aloof figure, cold and menacing, a taskmaster who drove his squad past exhaustion into injury. “I met the lady for five minutes, ten at the outside, it sounds like she wants to put me on the stake and burn me.”

  Climb to Glory

  As a self-eliminate at flight school, Whitey Herzog has to complete true-false psychology tests; the questions, soldiers joke, are the do-you-paint-with-your-own-excrement variety. The other phase of changing branches is an all-you-can-eat challenge. Whitey reports up the chain of command, from his captain to his battalion commander, downing another serving of reproach at every stop. The officers don’t just want to make Whitey feel small—the aim is to make him feel small enough to stay Aviation.

  He gives his salute in front of their desks, standing eyes-front, hearing the five-year-old echo of his words before the Cadet in the Red Sash: “Sir, Lieutenant Herzog reports as ordered.” From there it’s a kind of haze: Whitey ranks in the class’s top half, he is leaving with only a few weeks to go. The officers ask, “Do you know how much money the government has paid to get you this far?” They ask, “Do you realize you’re being selfish? Do you understand what sacrifice is?” They ask, “Do you want a kid someday? What are you going to say when that kid comes up to you and wants to quit something? You’re going to be a real good quitter by then, aren’t you?” One says simply, “I can’t let you walk out of my office feeling good.”

  One of the final officers receives Whitey’s salute, sends him to parade rest, then makes an invitation: “Let’s both sit down on the couch. I know you’re a strong pilot, it’s clear you’re working hard, everyone in your chain of command has good things to say about you.” The tone surprises Whitey; they talk for half an hour. “There’s no other branch like this,” the officer reminds him. “Aviation goes everywhere, there’s some real huah stuff, the shit we do is amazing.” “I’m like, ‘I know that, sir,’” Whitey remembers. “‘I’ve got nothing but respect for this branch.’ Then he says, ‘Plus flight pay—but you know money’s not what it’s about.’ I go, ‘Roger sir, I know that.’ He says, ‘It’s a great branch and a great career. I just don’t want to see you having any regret. You have till Thursday to think it over.’ Then he looks me in the eye and dismisses me, doesn’t say a single bad thing. I wanted to tell him so bad—but you really can’t say it—‘Sir, I appreciate you not giving me a hard time about this.’ Because when something like that gets done, it’s just done. You don’t talk about it or say, ‘Thanks for not being tough.’ I just said, ‘Sir, I appreciate your time.’”

  Then Whitey heads off to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, home of the Finance Corps, for a four-month training course. (Finance’s motto is the unassuming “To Support and Serve.” It’s one of the oldest branches—when you field an Army, you need an apparatus to pay it—and there’s even a Finance song: “Pay Day, Pay Day / That’s our special day . . . / When the Army gets the call / We’ll be ready one and all / We’ll be there when you hit that distant shore.”) He has his own quarters in Dozier Hall, a kind of snug hotel room: sofa, microwave, TV. (“Victory starts here,” a recorded female voice declares on the phone system every time a friend calls.) Studying in the Finance classes, Whitey finds friends among the sorts of relaxed people he never had time for at West Point. It turns out they aren’t bad guys. There’s one Academy grad who took his $25,000 cow loan, invested and day-traded it up past $1 million. There’s an ROTC guy who shares a list of promising IPOs.
Every afternoon, as soon as classes break, there’s a stampede for the computers, students rushing to check on their stock portfolios.

  Classes are a mix of Finance material—they learn to break down a paycheck—and general Army doctrine Whitey’s taken before. They bond over Developing Unit Cohesion, worry together about Reducing Vulnerability to Terrorist Attack (not that anything’s on the fall 2000 radar, but with people like bin Laden around, it’s something every officer should get used to considering). They admire the beautiful simplicity of the Military Problem-Solving Process. “It’s a class I’ve had a million times,” Whitey says. “But it’s great, everyone should take it at least once. Any problem you have in life, there’s seven guidelines to keep things rational.” Difficulties, which come in a tangle, submit to assigned slots like cleaned dishes going into the pantry:

  Recognize and Define the Problem.

  Gather Facts and Make Assumptions.

  Define End States and Establish Criteria. (“‘Criteria’ is how you know you’ve reached those end states,” says Whitey. “That’s one of the most important steps.”)

  Develop Possible Solutions.

  Analyze and Compare Possible Solutions.

  Select and Implement Solution.

  Analyze Solution for Effectiveness.

  There’s only one Recognized Problem for Whitey. It arrives at the Finance field training exercise and awakens all his old Infantry yearnings. Whitey and the other LTs spend five days performing pay missions in the rainy South Carolina woods. Driving a Humvee, they deliver salary to an Armor battalion. Along the way, OPFOR—the opposition force, Infantry soldiers practicing their guerrilla techniques—harries them. This is part of everyone’s training: in a forward area, Finance officers must be capable, essentially, of making change under fire. Whitey keeps his cool, helps his squad pin the OPFOR down and fight them off.