by David Lipsky
Lynsey points at herself, waves a hand by her eyes, mouths, “I’m gonna cry, I know.”
John places his paper on the lectern. “‘It’s the morning of the seventeenth, 1991. I just said goodbye to Lynsey. And it was the hardest thing I have ever done. I tried to be outwardly cool, but on the inside I was crying as much as she was. I pray to God that I may see her again.’”
Lynsey’s eyes spill over. John’s voice goes wobbly as he continues reading. “‘She has been so supportive. An Infantry officer—or any man, for that matter—could not ask for a finer wife.’”
He looks at Lynsey again. “That feeling—I just can’t tell you how much stronger it is today than I felt it back then. Thank you, Lynsey.”
She mouths something—it looks like “You too”—and John’s gaze moves to take in the rest of the room. “To all my peers,” he jokes, “all the officers and NCOs I work with, I’m sorry I got so carried away emotionally. But, you know, we hope in our lives to make a difference somehow. When you come into the Army, they tell you, ‘Missions first, men always’—or people always. Sometimes you wonder what that means. Well, it’s taken me a long time to figure out: in the Army, what we do is about people, about relationships you build.” Vermeesch looks out at his cadets. “I know we all get down, and complain sometimes. But when you really peel back the onion, and think about the opportunities we’ve been given as Americans, particularly as American officers—man, there’s just nothin’ better going out there.” The room dissolves in a storm of applause. Vermeesch blinks at one edge, surprised by the unfamiliar power of words, how a handful of sentences can smear a room like tear gas. As the crowd breaks up, Sergeant Tierney is dabbing at his eyes. “If any of this gets out,” he tells Vermeesch, “that I lost my shit, I’m gonna have to punch you out.” Vermeesch jokes right back, “Man, you’ll never see me tear up again.”
By West Point standards, Max’s show is a breakout hit. His speech packs in the first-nighters, and the cadet production team grasps one of the most heartening lessons of real-life theater: a sympathetic audience will laugh at anything. The script is a froth of inside jokes, expressed through movie scenes and scraps of TV dialogue. There are nods to Bull Durham (“I believe in using Napster and Audiogalaxy. I believe in lifting the tables for Christmas dinner”), Fight Club (“First rule of Firstie Club is, we do not talk about Firstie Club; second rule is, we do not talk about Firstie Club; third rule is, someone says ‘Huah,’ the night’s over”), Animal Planet’s Crocodile Hunter (“We’re at remote Camp Buckner, stalkin’ the wild yearling”). During musical numbers, rock songs follow the Mad magazine as-sung-to rule: “It’s the End of the Corps As We Know It.”
The Adamczyk character is the showstopper. When he crows “BTO!” or one of Skeletor’s slogans (“Puerile,” “Sophomoric”), cadet laughter shakes the auditorium. When he yelps the BTO’s off-limits Christian name—“Joey!”—there’s a hush, and when he then dives head-first into a prop desk, the cadets are ready to tear apart their seats. Fresh from John Vermeesch’s promotion, the real Adamczyk watches from the first rows, his expression frozen and unreadable, eyes darting.
After the curtain, Adamczyk grimly climbs the stage risers to the platform. Each step reveals another slice of Adamczyk: head, blazer, chinos, loafers. Captain Noel Smart, the Hundredth Night officer in charge, follows his approach with a plebe’s lock-kneed fear. After five years, the BTO has been involved with enough shows to master the idiom. “Obviously,” he begins, “I have notes.”
The show’s director is a firstie named Dawn Drango, who moves with the bamboo springiness of a judo champion, which is what she is. She watches, hands twiddling the curtain, as Adamczyk does fifteen minutes of one-way talk with Captain Smart. Then Smart walks stiffly to her, and they hold an anxious conference. “We need to make some adjustments,” Smart says. “This is gonna be difficult.” First, there’s a quick run of silencings: the word bareass was included in this evening’s performance. “‘Bareass,’” the captain says, “is a no-go. Also, you can’t say ‘honor nazi.’” “Right, sir,” Drango says. “I understand. The BTO is thinking about the public image of the Academy we need to keep.” Tomorrow, generals will be in the audience, joined by the supe, the comm, the parents. This is about West Point brand management. Second, due to Max Adams’s speech, the cast is under orders not to acknowledge him Saturday night. Most important is the BTO character. “This is number one, the biggest challenge. Just don’t make it look like he has bad, um, random, lack of muscle control,” Smart says, picking his words so carefully you can see the thesaurus running behind his forehead. “Basically, don’t take him to the point where he’s drooling over himself. Make him more excited, crazed . . . as opposed to, well, y’know, mentally challenged or . . . retarded.”
“I guess he can’t ram his head into the desk anymore,” Dawn sighs.
The production team spends the night with conferences, complaints, rewrites. It’s a values clash: solid cadet instincts (“We’ve got to square this away”) versus Entertainment Tonight (“We’re sitting on top of a hit show”). Next night, the crew holds its breath before the BTO character’s entrance. The show’s versions of the supe and the comm say they’ve found a scapegoat, someone on whom to blame the West Point changes. The performers turn stage right, and the BTO comes wheeling out. There’s a beat when the night could go either way. Then the actor squeals “Joey!” to the show’s biggest laugh.
“That’s pretty much all he says,” the pretend supe explains. “He’s taken a lot of head injuries.”
“BTO! BTO!” the stage-Adamczyk chants, to whooping.
The show-comm shakes his head. “Here’s a dictionary. Go look up some new words.”
“Ho ho ho. Puerile!” Pandemonium. At the curtain call, Dawn says, “Most of all, we’d like to thank our head writer back there. We love you—thank you.” This earns Dawn a brigade board, where she will contend that because she didn’t mention Max by name, she’s stayed within the guidance. (Dawn ends up losing rank and privileges, living as an underclassman for the rest of the year.)
Max receives so many hours they amount to complete days: there’s no way to work them off and still graduate, cadets bet he’ll be commissioned late, if at all. (The post is pulling for him. For months afterward cadets will chuckle over the performance, call it the best Hundredth Night they’ve ever seen.) As part of his rehabilitation, the Academy decides to find Max a new company and a new roommate, one who can teach him about discipline, professionalism, the pleasures of the straight and narrow. The cadet they choose is modest about his selection. He insists the reassignment was luck of the draw, but it’s the pinnacle of his cadet career, a measure of how far he’s traveled since watching a game of rugby on the snowy Plain. The Academy sends Max Adams to live with Jeremy Kasper.
The Right Reasons
The Hundredth Night show is produced by cadets from the West Point Dialectic Society and the Theatre Arts Guild. West Point sometimes has the rites-and-rituals feel of a large club, but it really breaks down into more than one hundred small ones. There’s the Margaret Corbin Forum (the female cadet experience) and the Military Film Forum (lost squads), the Mountaineering Club and the White Water Canoe Club (ropes and paddles), and Officers’ Christian Fellowship. (OCF is probably the best-attended club; cadets by the hundreds crack open their Gospels at Tuesday night Bible study. “God,” says a slim yuk named Justin Pullen, “is a really popular guy at West Point.”) Eliel Pimentel, from G-4, is a born joiner. He’s toured the FBI through the Law Enforcement Tactics Club and test-fired advanced weapons with members of Infantry Tactics. As a part of the Domestic Affairs Forum, he’s visited Rudolph Giuliani (“Great guy”), sat in on ABC News meetings with Peter Jennings (“Awesome—he’s just, he’s a presence in the room”), discussed constitutional reform in a Supreme Court side chamber with Antonin Scalia (“Just a very strong personality”). “I always say,” Eliel explains, “West Point brings the world to you on a silver platte
r.”
The platter holds the world’s good and bad. Another element is illicit drugs, which deeply unnerves the administration. “It’s taboo even to talk about it,” a high-ranking cadet explains to me, after saying he can’t have his name used. “Parents, the administration, nobody wants to hear about it.” The Academy treats drug use seriously, conducting random tests, and punishes it harshly, with courts-martial and jail time. The honor code’s toleration clause is nearly handcrafted to remind cadets of their responsibility to keep their post drug-free. There’s higher’s understandable concern with brand integrity. West Point’s influence, its standing in the national community, derives from its absence of temptation, its ability to stay dry above the civilian bog. According to First Captain Dave Uthlaut, drug use can endanger more than reputation. “In our line of work, there’s absolutely no place for distracters—for something like drugs, that’s gonna take your mind off the job. You become a liability to your unit, not one we can depend on as a nation: out on the front lines, you’re not gonna have access to that stuff.”
But the first captain has noted changes since his arrival. “There is somewhat of a drug problem here. Obviously, I’m not the one the, uh, majority of the corps comes to with these issues. But my classmates will tell me, ‘I could name you off ten people right now that are struggling with it.’ I guess people slip through the cracks, or maybe they change once they arrive, either get disillusioned or fall in with the wrong crowd. I don’t wanna give the response that we’re a microcosm of society—‘there are drugs out there, so we’ve gotta expect drugs in here.’ Because I don’t agree with that at all. I think we are a cut above, and we need to hold ourselves to a different standard.”
Adamczyk understands that West Point must do more than simply say no. The new plebes are coming, “and we’re planning substance abuse classes. I talked to the yearlings yesterday. They’ve experienced things we’re only reading about. They’ll talk about designer drugs, club drugs, all the combinations and permutations in between. They could educate us. The kids who were doing drugs when I was growing up, they were kind of the deadbeats of society. Now it’s mainstream.”
Drug violations at West Point are enviably low. The Academy is rightly proud of its record—most years pass without higher seeing a case. To cadets, the question isn’t whether classmates are doing drugs but whether the Academy is catching them. The cohesion that West Point painstakingly develops has a side effect: cadets rarely rat on each other. “You see, for honor violations, your loyalty is to the organization,” a yuk tells me. “But for regs violations—are you gonna turn your brother in? You’re supposed to stick together and help each other out, not screw each other over.”
What some cadets have developed amounts to an early-warning system. Stripers get word when a urine test is in the pipeline; they need advance notice to work it into the schedule. “Put it this way,” one staffer tells me. “Let’s say I have word about when everybody in Second Reg is going to get tested. OK? Now, I’m not saying I’ll hand that information around. But I’ll explain it like this. If Joe Schmo is a good friend of mine, and I know he just snorted coke the weekend before, I’m gonna tell him: ‘Hey, buddy, you might wanna chill out for the next couple weeks. Especially on post, here in the box. Now drive on.’ So all of a sudden everybody finds out. ‘The drug test is coming, the drug test is coming.’”
Many cadets will tell drug stories about a classmate, squadmate, roommate, a friend. “My roommate, last night he sneaks out of bed after taps, swings over to his girlfriend in Highland Falls, takes some E-bombs, runs back in before morning formation, hits class high as a kite.” The cadets who use drugs have a simple explanation—a kind of reverse reaction to the Old Corps system Colonel Thayer put in place 180 years ago. “There’s not a whole lot else to do around here,” a cow says. “So people are kinda bound to do drugs. They won’t let you go out drinking or keep alcohol. The easiest way to get messed up is to pop a chill pill and just cool out in your room. This place caters to it, because they just won’t let you have fun any other way. Ecstasy is in and out of your system in seventy-two hours—they can’t test for that.”
Cadets shape their drug selections to fit West Point realities: what can be discovered, what can be concealed. Ecstasy, cadets explain, “looks like vitamin pills.” The club drug GHB can be ordered online from the shadier art supply houses. It arrives in a can of rubber cement, and from there you can transfer it to any container; it’s a clear liquid. Sit in a cadet room with the door open, another cadet will wobble in. “I’m drunk, I’ve got half a calzone, and I’ve got a whole bottle of GHB. If you don’t come upstairs, I’m gonna drink all this G myself.”
“Yo, you shouldn’t be drinking that shit if you’re drunk.”
“I don’t care. You oughta come upstairs.”
“I don’t want any G. But save me the calzone, I’m hungry.”
“I was surprised by the reliance on stuff like that,” a firstie tells me disapprovingly. I think he means drug use in general; what he’s referring to is the substance hierarchy. “G and ecstasy. I mean, those are primarily club drugs. You take them to get messed up and that’s all. Most people aren’t comfortable enough with themselves to really break down the barriers of reality and go off to some other plane. It’s disappointing,” he says, in the voice of a Beast squad leader sizing up new cadets, “because they’re not doing drugs for the right reasons. But that’s a personal thing with me.”
For firsties like this one, experimentation is about seeking higher truths. Dog-eared counterculture Baedekers by Aldous Huxley and Hermann Hesse still circulate through the West Point underground. “The Doors of Perception, Steppenwolf—those are life-transforming books. I wanted to experience things like that, experience myself.” For these cadets, the challenge is making connections at West Point, locating the people who know people. Some let civilian friends do the work. “Because that’s where you get caught, the selling and bartering. Someone catches my friends, they’ll just go to jail. But if I get involved with it, the penalties for buying or selling . . .” He widens his eyes, lets it drop. Drug conversations on post are a cautious weave of euphemism and allusion. “First of all, you find out if you have the same interests. Look at their personality, sometimes check their CDs. After a while, you start saying, ‘Hey, I know about this,’ and they’ll say, ‘Hey, I know about that.’” For ecstasy, they substitute Molly—the telltale hard e—for mushrooms, they’ll talk about fungus, like a road march hazard.
Cadets estimate that 3 to 10 percent of the corps use drugs. Those who do find a variety of rationales. “Kind of how I look at drugs is as a First Amendment issue. The law doesn’t look at it like that, but that’s ideologically how I do. And I’m careful with the work side. If you’re hung over or stoned or whatever, you can’t do your job. But I don’t know, actually. In the Army, if you’ve done that stuff, how can you punish somebody for getting caught doing the same thing? What the hell do you do with that? My gut reaction is, you’re a hypocrite.”
Once they’re comfortable, these cadets share risks and experiences. “Me and the guy I roomed with and another cadet got about an eighth of mushrooms—which isn’t even that much if I want to do something crazy or hair-raising. I had two classes that afternoon, so I took a very large cap, which was probably the size of a quarter, I ate another two stems with that. And then I went to class,” an upper-level mathematics course; theories, coordinates. All at once, the whole room began to bend theoretical. “Midway through class, I started tripping my balls off. The teacher was pulling down graphs and the like, and I was seeing trails. And he called on me in the middle of class—I had to answer a question while I was seriously freaking out, holy shit, what am I doing? I wanted to get up and leave. And then I’m telling myself, ‘No, wait a second, that wouldn’t be cool.’ I finally get back to my barracks. In the meantime, the two other guys I’d done it with, they’ve been sitting around staring at the damn carpet, seeing how cool that was.”
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Generally, cadets approach illicit substances with care. “You have to be responsible about it,” a cow from the Southwest explains. “There are ways to be a responsible drug user, like a responsible everything else.” They rely on the analytical skills they’ve perfected: testing the equipment, performing the risk assessment. They track which chemicals urinalysis is good at sniffing out; they’re up-to-date on where evidence will reside in their bodies. (GHB and LSD will slip out of the record in twenty-four to seventy-two hours; hair can reveal ecstasy use for upward of ninety days.) After making a purchase, they’ll check Erowid.org, a comprehensive listing of psychoactive drugs and their effects. When the substance has distinctive packaging—for example, ecstasy tablets stamped with the Pokémon character Pikachu—they’ll click to Erowid’s sister site, Ecstasydata.org, to learn the components. “And it turned out, that Pokémon stuff, it had a lot of PCP laced in—a good thing to know in case we got piss-tested. We gave it away.”
Not all these cadets are as careful; as the Academy makes its checks and sweeps, there’s no telling who’ll turn up in the net. Jeremy Green is a cow from central Florida; he rose through the same West Point Parents Club as Chrissi Cicerelle and Eliel Pimentel. He’s clear-eyed, big-built and smart—the ideal military starter kit. By the middle of his yuk year, he’d climbed to the number one spot in his class. He had the highest cumulative performance record across all three West Point areas—military, academic, physical—a kind of triple crown. On post, Jeremy became a celebrity, someone cadets watched from the corners of their eyes, wondering what he had that they lacked. Higher groomed him for feather-in-the-cap scholarships like the Marshall and the Rhodes. As a cow, he broke the academic bank, a 4.1 average. When he left for nights on the town, classmates thumped him on the back. “Hey—we’ve got the number one cadet right here.”