Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  The path ahead is clear; three more terms at West Point, lower the head, grind it out, finish. Word ripples through the corps. For weeks people treat him differently; he’s escaped from another locked room, he’s demonstrated the soldier’s fundamental attribute: endurance. George walks the post resolved and enlivened, like someone who’s just eaten after a long fast. “For good or ill,” George says, “I’ve become a survivor.”

  The Twelve Days of Christmas

  A masked man has been sneaking into the rooms of West Point females, rifling their clothes, staring at the cadets while they sleep. Because the man cloaks his features with a terry cloth, cadets call him Towel Man.

  West Point is a surprisingly open place. Most afternoons you could convene a model UN from the tourists photographing the monuments on Trophy Point—a plateau overlooking the river, dotted with cannon and statues—or a kennel club from locals who use the post to exercise their dogs. So Towel Man could be a cadet or a civilian, and most companies organize security details. Jeremy Kasper is working up the G-4 patrol schedule with a lively-eyed plebe named Patricia Teakle; Teakle has won a contest that allows her to shadow the company commander for a day. This is the part of the job Jeremy seems to like best, passing along his cadetness. They agree on which late-night hours to post cadets at stairwells and latrines, when to send them walking down the halls.

  Jeremy trains his John Wayne smile on the plebe. “So we’re done organizing. Now all we’ve got to do is give a snazzy name to this operation.”

  “Does it have to be a professional name, sir?” Teakle asks.

  “No, it dudn’t. But . . .”

  She thinks hard. This is a big opportunity for a plebe, and she doesn’t want to waste it.

  “Come on,” Jeremy says. “This should be the easiest part. What’s your favorite animal?”

  “How about Brain Stalker or something like that?” she asks brightly.

  Long pause. He looks at her; both are learning a principle of military etiquette, that one’s opinion isn’t always welcome, even when it’s invited. Finally he suggests, “What about Operation Jaguar? Hunts at night, drags things off. I like it. So we’re going with Operation Jaguar.”

  When they’re done and Teakle stands by the door, Jeremy says, “Please remember what we learned today, and try to use it to make yourself a better leader in the future.”

  “Thank you so much for the opportunity.”

  If some West Point conversations sound scripted, it’s because they are, after a fashion. Cadets are screen-testing military dialogue on each other, gauging how persuasive they can sound. Kasper shakes Teakle’s hand, walks down the hall toward another role: checking on cadets who took an APFT today. George Rash is among them. Kasper knows about the honor hearing, and harbors the usual mixed feelings about George. But he has no mixed feelings about the Academy. If the Academy says that George is meeting the standard, it leaves Jeremy in a pickle. “He still has a long way to go,” Jeremy states carefully. “As long as he keeps his motivation high and he’s willing to put forth the effort, then he will—he has every chance of becoming a leader for America’s youth.”

  He gives George’s door the double rap that announces official business. (A single or triple knock tells cadets a visit is social.)

  “Enter, sir or ma’am,” George says.

  Jeremy ambles inside. “George. How’d you do on your APFT?”

  Rash grins. “Passed it. Seventy-two push-ups, sixty-eight sit-ups.” He grins again. “And fifteen-forty run.”

  “Congratulations,” Jeremy says.

  The cadets gaze at each other, like two sides of a mirror. Both arrived at West Point resembling each other far more than either one did the ideal cadet. Jeremy has worked ceaselessly to achieve that ideal; George has, against numerous assaults, fortified the personality he came in with. Each seems to see in the other an alternate reality, a path not taken. Then Jeremy swings his gaze down toward George’s feet. “Shoes aren’t lookin’ too bad, George.”

  George treats this as the conversation starter it isn’t. “Gotta shine my class shoes again.”

  “Keep up the good work,” Jeremy says, with the slightly worried look of someone who’s running out of prepared remarks.

  “They got a little scuffed.”

  “You and me both,” says Jeremy, stepping toward the door. “You and me both. Well, I don’t wanna interrupt . . . I just wanted to say ‘Outstanding.’”

  “Thank you. It was a relief. I was running pretty hard. I didn’t even look at my watch for the last two minutes of it.” George is deep in his own persona, giving more information than anyone wants.

  Jeremy deploys the Wayne smile. “Well, I’ll tell you, George—you crossed two big hurdles these last couple of weeks. So hang in there, stay focused, continue to do the right thing. And you could make it out of here.”

  This should be the key that gets Jeremy through the door. “All I have to do is bring up the push-ups and the sit-ups to where they should be,” George offers. “I know I can do better.”

  Jeremy reprises his exit line. “Well, hang in there. Have a good one.”

  “You too.”

  Professionalism has a limit, even for Jeremy. Every year, for the official Christmas dinner, all four thousand cadets enter the mess hall in full dress, red-faced from the cold air and excitement. At the end of the meal, they sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” The verses pass to each wing of the hall, to each company, and as “five golden rings” arrives, cadets leap on the heavy wood tabletops while their dinner companions hoist the tables over their heads. “It’s the greatest cohesion-building event,” Jeremy explains. Song, effort, the sense of doing something in a huge, jolly group that no one else is doing in any other place in the world. This year, though, higher has been pondering how unprofessional and unsafe this tradition might be—asking what’s really gained by exposing cadets to tired arms and the laws of gravity.

  Fifteen minutes before Christmas dinner, an e-mail goes out to company commanders like Jeremy: cadets can sing, but they may not lift tables. “And we don’t have time to prepare the cadets,” Jeremy says, “for this whole change in the biggest holiday event of the year.”

  This year’s first captain, a broad-backed, heavy-browed South Carolinian named Dave Uthlaut, mounts the poop deck in the center of the mess hall, above the din of talk and cutlery. “The corps is cordially invited,” he says, with the measured flair of a joke, “NOT to raise their tables during this evening’s singing.” The hall buzzes hopefully: maybe Uthlaut’s phrasing means that it’s a suggestion, not an order. The singing begins. During the first verse the companies exchange looks, finger their tables, don’t lift. But by the second stanza cadets jump aboard, and the thick platforms start to levitate. The BTO, Colonel Adamczyk, is here, along with the commandant and the TACs. They’re running from table to table, yelling, as the cadets bellow and sing and the tables rise up together like spirit.

  Afterward, every company commander is summoned to a bottom-floor day room in Eisenhower for what Jeremy calls “a mandated ass-chewing.” The BTO offers a few stern words; the commandant, thin-faced General Olson, describes how disappointed he was to see the entire corps violate a direct order. The comm asks the thirty-two company commanders, “If you were responsible for a lifted table, please raise your hand.” Thirty-one hands go up; only one company commander abstains. The comm turns to her.

  “Stand up, position of attention. Tell everyone here why, while they were failing to obey a direct—while you were in a sea of people doing things wrong—why you did the right thing.”

  “Sir,” she says, “everyone at my table is female, and we couldn’t lift it.”

  Shortly before Christmas break, Huck Finn gets a surprise gift. After Navy takes Army, 30–28, he’s preparing for a relaxed, football-free second semester when he learns from Super-V that he’s about to become a striper. He’s been selected as next year’s battalion command sergeant major. The job is a lunch-box vers
ion of Ryan Southerland’s—a position that elevates Huck to first sergeant over four first sergeants. “If you can find out how I got picked for this,” Huck tells people with a shrug, “you let me know.”

  Vermeesch knows. “People can change,” he says. “And I feel pretty strongly about this: I think it’s perilous to only recognize the folks who play right and stick within the limits. There is something to be said for someone who’s willing to take a little personal risk. Now we’ll see how Reid Finn performs with the spotlight on him twenty-four hours a day.”

  Bareass Is a No-Go

  Since the days of Sylvanus Thayer, West Point has treated pop culture like a controlled substance. When prohibition succeeded, cadets became models of the unmediated life, showing what people might become once they’re shielded from every uninspiring influence.

  But that prohibition has now become unenforceable. For three years, TV has glowed in the barracks and DVDs have spun inside computers. The post bookstore—which retails airplane bestsellers, souvenir mugs, Art of Camouflage videos and soft-jazz CDs with misleading titles like Sensuous Sax—Up All Night—also rents videos to cadets. Shutting off the outside world now seems a noble, futile gesture, like blockading a country that’s all shoreline. Higher picks its battles. MP3 download sites are embargoed on a solid intellectual-property basis. Internet pornography is prohibited on the theory that the American taxpayer, if consulted, wouldn’t be thrilled to subsidize cadet tours of the erotic. Type in the wrong address, and the West Point helmet-and-sword logo fills your screen. The memo explains:

  To continue to access such sites is inconsistent with the central element of the USMA mission, with our stated Army values, and with our standing as the world’s premier leader development institution . . . USMA has recently installed software which allows the Director of Information Management to monitor access to pornographic web-sites around the clock. This program provides a realtime, detailed report of such activity, including the specific computer user, the web-sites visited, and the time spent on each site. Users are violating government policy by proceeding beyond this point and are subject to disciplinary action.

  (It’s not an empty threat. “The kid across the hall got ten hours for looking at porn,” Huck Finn says, shaking his head, “and there’ve been about five others in the company.” On Happycadets.com, complaints turn sociological: “I’m not sure if everyone recognizes how detrimental this is to four thousand men who are not allowed to touch girls. They must seriously assume that we are the only four thousand guys without any hormones, and therefore sexual activity is not necessary.” One away message simply wails, “Unblock our porn!”)

  A cease-fire is declared each year on Hundredth Night. The event is a milestone for firsties: the start of their last hundred days at West Point. The Hundredth Night show—ninety minutes of nose-thumbing sketches and officer roasts—uses the culture cadets have left behind to lampoon the one that owns them now. This year, references to The Matrix and South Park predominate. Where Keanu Reeves is offered a red or blue pill to discover the truth behind his world, the show’s main characters choose between two different flavors of Gatorade. Colonel Adamczyk generally casts a long shadow across the show: other years, he’s been portrayed as an authoritarian and a kingpin. This year, his character is built around the mentally handicapped South Park character named Timmy, who can only repeat his own name.

  The head writer, Max Adams, one of the Academy’s hardy lit majors, watches from the Eisenhower Hall wings, grinning at the pre-rehearsal muddle. Cadets sit in long cross-legged rows, massaging the necks in front of them, stretching their lips around warm-up nonsense syllables: “Me-may-maw-moe-moo. Me-may-maw-moe-moo.” There’s the backstage strangeness of watching big-shouldered male cadets reach for the makeup box and patiently explain, “No—I need the dark red lipstick.”

  Adams watches with the critical half-smile of someone whose dreams are about to be inflicted on the world. He’s prior service, from Florida, attending West Point through a kind of pop culture scholarship. “I was gonna go to Florida State film school—ever since high school I’ve been the kid with the video camera—but my SAT scores were in the toilet, I wasn’t paying attention, I had my head too far up my own wazoo.” Max ended up enlisted; he got sent to the Ranger battalion at Benning, where he entertained soldiers with long stretches of movie dialogue—Rambo, Patton, Platoon, Heartbreak Ridge, “any Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, tough-guy flick, that’s what the Rangers love to hear.” A Ranger mentioned Adams’s name to a relative in the admissions office at West Point; a kid who could memorize movie scenes, he reasoned, was a cadet who could memorize Knowledge. One thing led to another. “They sent me to the prep school,” Max says, “and here I am.”

  Since November, he’s been working moonlighter’s hours, running his script through what he refers to as “table-reads” and “tweaks” like a suntanned Writers Guild veteran. The show will run only twice: on Friday, March 1, for an audience of underclassmen and the BTO, then on Saturday, for generals, VIPs, the firstie class and their dates.

  On Friday afternoon—nine hours before premiere—the head writer traditionally delivers a box-office pitch from the mess hall poop deck. Max climbs the staircase and steps forward. He looks out over the usual sea of high-and-tights, notices an island of generals, polished stars on their shoulders. (They’re visiting post for an annual leadership conference, slipping into the mess hall like an old suit of cadet clothes.) Max tries to compose a pitch relevant to the sight: to compress his show’s message to a few words, connecting all the work required to travel from plebe year to that big generals’ table. He smiles and says, “I guess the key thing to remember is that West Point is a lot like anal sex. It starts out feeling great, but by the end it’s just a pain in the ass.”

  His joke is a slow-motion bomb. Laughter and a crack of applause rise from the outer rim of tables. Then silence falls. Cadets are pretty sure they’ve just witnessed a first: a classmate separating himself over lunch. Then there’s the scrape of a single chair pushing back. Colonel Adamczyk steams furiously across the hall toward the deck. Four hours later, Max Adams is seated on the chair outside Skeletor’s office.

  The Hundredth Night curtain won’t go up until 2100, but down the hall another performance is already starting. This evening John Vermeesch will be promoted to major. About half of G-4 crowds into the ceremony, along with Vermeesch’s wife, his family, his closest colleagues among the NCOs and officers. The winter has been snowy; the coarse, textile smell of wet uniform circulates through the Red Reeder Room—leather chairs, oak paneling—as Vermeesch’s guests stand in their own slowly expanding puddles. Adamczyk, now in a much brighter mood, oversees the promotion. On the podium, Vermeesch moves with the hunkered, excited manner familiar from road marches. Beside him are his pregnant wife, Lynsey, and their four boys. The BTO clears his throat. The Army life that tonight’s show will parody is being celebrated by eighty people inside Washington Hall.

  “You cadets hear me say all the time that the Army is a family,” Adamczyk begins, as the audience hushes. “And right here on my left you see a family in spades. Tonight they’re being promoted together.” Lynsey Vermeesch smiles. At Army promotions, it’s never the officer alone. Husband and wife, who’ve shouldered the sacrifices together, rise in rank as a unit. “John relates that he and Lynsey met each other on a blind date, summer before his firstie year. John, I’d have to say that she was more blind than you.” Big laughter from the room. Adamczyk has some small-town politician in his background; he knows exactly how long to hold the joke. “John also relates that they did not like each other at first.” The BTO points out four children and a pregnancy with a nod. “It’s really obvious these two like each other a whole lot now.” Another swell of laughter.

  “Now cadets, listen to this,” Adamczyk says, voice picking up. “John Vermeesch, commissioned Infantry, 1990. He took over his platoon in January of 1991. And listen, guys: twelve clicks from the Iraqi border. All
right? So when we say West Point is a leader development experience, and when we talk about being ready when you raise your right hand, here is a young officer who had to be absolutely ready on the day he accepted his commission.

  “And this officer wears the marks of success—externally on his uniform, but more so within his heart and, as you see here, in the eyes of his family. He will go on to bigger and better things, for our Army and for our nation.” He nods. “So John and Lynsey, thank you. It has been a privilege to participate.”

  Then, like a graduating cadet, Vermeesch holds still while family pin on his rank, his father working at one shoulder, Lynsey at the other.

  John’s voice is an assembly of croaks: each word swells big. “I wanna say I don’t have any great profound wisdom to give anybody today,” he says. “I just want to thank everybody who’s ever been part of this experience. But I will say this: I’m gonna embarrass my father publicly. Emotions weren’t allowed in the Vermeesch household. It was one of those things—you didn’t cry growing up. If there was no blood, there were no tears. Good rule to live by. But my dad has been my hero my entire life, and if I’ve ever had a mentor, it was probably him. I learned more about values and leadership by his personal example than I’ve learned anywhere else. So Dad, thank you for all the hard lessons.”

  Then he turns to Lynsey, asks the pertinent question. “What can I say after eleven years of marriage, after four-and-a-butt kids?” He pats the pockets of his uniform. “I didn’t know what to say, so I’m going to read you something that I once wrote—if I can find it. I wrote this back in 1991, on the eve of combat. And I just want to share this publicly, because Lynsey’s never heard me say it before.”