Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  A few evenings before Thanksgiving, Jeremy and four friends were lounging in his barracks after a night of clubbing. A firstie named Chris Ward dropped something on the floor—it made a plastic click—which nobody gave much thought to. Jeremy was asleep when his roommate found the object. It was a transparent, bullet-shaped, single-dose container called a snuff rocket.

  By midday, the Criminal Investigation Division of the Military Police was tossing Jeremy’s room. Each item the CID turned up was another round fired into Jeremy’s cadet career: a gram of cocaine, two bottles of GHB, a lick (a ten-milliliter bottle) of ketamine, a powerful veterinary sedative. Jeremy and his friends were charged before Christmas. As the sole cadet in possession, most of the weight fell on Jeremy; the others were allowed to quietly resign. The authorities, Jeremy says, “wanted to prove that I was the drug seller for West Point.” Rumors had made it down to Florida, so he decided to call. It was the kind of conversation where the phone turns to lead in the hand. “Of everything that happened,” he says, “having to tell my mother and my father was the worst. My mom did pretty good. She’s a businesswoman, tried to stay calm and very professional about everything. I was so proud of her.” Jeremy went home on administrative leave, kicked around Florida as his fate took shape a thousand miles north. He would be charged only with possession; there would be a court-martial; there would probably be time at Leavenworth. After a month, he returned to West Point.

  A few nights before his trial, cadets take him to a divey bar called Firesides for a sendoff. Cohesion still counts, even at the end of the line. Jeremy is simply the friend who tripped up. Star athletes from several sports are there, standing him to drinks, slapping the table, bucking him up. But for all the assurances that he’s not alone, Jeremy will have to walk the final steps by himself. He sits at the end of a long table as his buddies laugh and shout over the thump of the jukebox, observing the scene with the stone eyes of someone who knows he’s already looking at a memory.

  “We’ve got eight more Goldschlägers comin’ . . .”

  “Goldie shot? I’m made outa that.”

  “Yo, what’s our tab gonna be?”

  “It’s free, the guy behind the bar said, because . . .”

  Jeremy’s face alternately darkens and lightens, thoughts passing like clouds. “I know I have to take the hit, because I know I screwed up in a hard place,” he says. If there’s anything about Jeremy Green that can still make the Academy proud, it’s the way he stands to the charges and the prospect of prison. He sees it as a challenge, an unanticipated avenue for development. “It’s like—it’s a hurdle,” he says, resting his big arms on the table. “Some people say you can’t live life until you’ve hit the bottom. And that’s what’s happening to me now. I was at the top—I was given the chance to go farther and see things—and now I have to start all over. It’ll be hard work. But I can’t change it, so I’m going to make the best of it and try to learn from it. Benefit from it and build for the future. There’s got to be something I can learn from this.”

  Even in his last hundred hours as a cadet, rules still apply. Jeremy and his friends rise, shake it off, prepare to head back to West Point for taps.

  Jeremy is convicted of paraphernalia, of drug possession, of violating a lawful order. He avoids prison, but drug charges carry traps of their own: because of the conviction, he’s disqualified from receiving a civilian college’s financial aid. A year later, G-4’s Cal Smith is spending spring break in Florida, he opens the door of a Miami bar. There’s Jeremy Green, arms folded, working security. Cal Smith shakes his hand, says, “So this means I can’t get in any trouble here?” Jeremy smiles, shakes his head. “Not tonight.”

  Hiding in the Middle

  Gloom Period has slipped from cadet usage. This year, the pinched days between January and spring vacation have been one unbroken snowfall. Cadets are calling it White Period.

  The weather feels Old Corps, a haze from above. Snow flickers by cadet windows thick and fast, pathways become a relief pattern of sharply incised boot prints. When the daylight dies out and the night lamps come up, West Point feels socketed in at the base of white hillsides, the last place in the world.

  Huck Finn is a command sergeant major, which means he’s on constant correction patrol. Taking a nighttime walk, he’ll spot unaligned windows, milk cartons refrigerating on a sill. All of a sudden he’s pulling open a warm door, squelching up a stairway, giving the kinds of orders he wouldn’t have followed a year ago. “Some of my classmates are like, ‘What the hell are you doing with that rank?’ Well, I could give a goddamn what my position is, but now, after finally growing up here, I’m going to do whatever job they give me the best I can. This job requires me to enforce the standard.”

  Then he’s back in his room, hammering out memos on the Alcove Policy and the Latrine Policy (“stuff I didn’t even know there was before”). “Alcoves: One barracks laundry bag will be placed on the hook nearest the wall.” “Latrines: Cadets may hang wet clothes in the latrines opposite the showers. Clothes must be removed no more than 12 hours after they were placed there . . .” Rizzo teases him in North Area when he catches Huck kneeling to grab a plastic bag frozen into the snow. “Goddamn if this ain’t the new Huck.”

  George Rash is shifting too, even at the physical level: the year has filled him out, turned him stocky. The mess hall lards on the carbs during Gloom Period—fully loaded pizzas, fried everything—to maintain cadets in an up mood. (The DPE nutritionist explains: “There’s a psychological boost that comes from eating a big, fatty, sugary meal.”) George’s cadet boss, Mark Thompson, says crossly, “Your uniform pants are fitting like they’re painted on.” George lands in the Army Weight Control Program. Once a month, he reports to Sergeant Tierney’s office, strips down to his boxers for weighing and taping. Cadets take deep breaths, to bull out their necks and Schwarzenegger their pectorals, in order to meet body-fat limits determined by an algorithm of pounds and inches. Progress is defined as a two- to six-pound drop every four weeks; if George can’t hit these Weight Watcher goals, he’s out of the corps. “Laying off the cheeseburgers?” Sergeant Tierney asks, looping the tape around his throat. “Last time here you were two-oh-five.” “Two-oh-seven, sir,” George corrects. “I’m down somewhere around one ninety-nine point five right now, but who’s counting?”

  Crossing the ice to the computer lab, George can measure his internal changes. “I think I used to laugh a lot more when I was younger,” he says. “I probably wouldn’t even recognize the person I am today. I was a teenager, I got good grades, I could afford to be screw-the-world. Now I care what others think. Because I’ve learned the impressions I leave upon others reflect on how others treat me. Anyway, how easy is it to laugh when everything’s gray and white?” He points at his uniform, then at the snow: white, gray.

  And for the first time he’s raising his eyes, looking ahead to graduation. “I ordered my ring last week.” Rings, while not mandatory, are strongly recommended. “Only one or two people in every class don’t buy one, and you have to go through your whole chain of command, all the way up to the supe, and explain your reasons to him. Personally, I think it shows you have absolutely no school pride.”

  Chrissi Cicerelle has been mulling over a different type of ring. She and Mark Thompson have been together for almost two years. “When somebody says, ‘What do you wanna do after graduation?’ I’m like, ‘I can’t wait to get married and have kids.’” Even her computer’s e-mail alert has a marital subtext; it’s clipped from the film The Wedding Singer, the scene where a suit-wearing kid sneers at Drew Barrymore, “You’re a bitch.” (E-mail alerts can tell a cadet’s whole story. Eliel Pimentel’s program alternates between the Infantry slogan “Follow me!” and “Rangers lead the way,” his roommate Matt Kilgore’s computer coughs out the sound of an M-16 discharge, George Rash’s mail is announced by a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Message for you, sir.”) “Mark and I talk marriage—this is my first adult r
elationship, it’s almost like playing house. ’Cuz we’re here, this is a safe haven, you have to wait till you graduate to get married. I want more than anything for it to work, but there’s so much baggage, so much history.” They’ve been a couple so long, they’ve become a piece of landscape cadets monitor closely, watching for slips and flubs. “Oh, my Lord,” cadets in H-4 say. “Thompson’s so military, he bought Chrissi a saber for her birthday.”

  This would be a relief to talk about with her sister Marie, but Chrissi hardly sees her. “I don’t know what she’s doing. I was real excited having her here, but she’s very independent. It kind of irritates me. When we try to have dinner, I can’t find her, I have to IM: ‘you’re a plebe, you can’t possibly have a life, where could you be?’” So the sisterly role falls to her roommate, Leslie Adamczyk, who doesn’t approve of Chrissi’s relationship. “Leslie doesn’t like the way we fight,” Chrissi says. “She doesn’t like to see me hurt. She’ll tell me, ‘I want to shake you, it’s not worth it, it’s too hard, you shouldn’t have to try this hard.’” The fights circle the same topic, like a plane with no place else to land. Chrissi has never dropped her yuk grouchiness; since Mark loves West Point wholly, there’s a transitive principle: criticizing the post equals criticizing him. “I’ve become real bitter about this place. So I dwell on the rules and the regs. And he’s very motivated. So it comes down to a professional argument—professionally, we don’t seem to mesh.”

  Mark is a prior-service cadet from Los Angeles. He spent two years at Bragg, mastering a Joe’s tricks: when to perform, how to sham. “You line up for formation in four squads. Well, when they’re looking for people to go clean the latrines? The natural tendency is, they’ll pick people out of First Squad: Boom! Boom! You guys, go clean latrines. So everyone stands in back—but see, after a while the platoon sergeant knows he keeps taking from First Squad. So he’ll say, ‘You guys in Fourth Squad, you’re always hiding, lining up in the way back. Why don’t you guys go clean latrines?’ So you learn the best spot to be in is always Third Squad. Because you’re not in the front, but you’re not in the far back—you’re kind of hiding in the middle.”

  Mark is sick of hiding in the middle. As winter begins its slow retreat from post, the Emerging Leader Review process begins—another series of elimination rounds. Each of the thirty-two companies picks its best cadets to send to a battalion review board. Eighty survive, move ahead to the regimental level. Forty head all the way to brigade, where the twenty-four strongest are picked for Emerging Leader positions. The first captaincy waits at the end like a Grail. Get there, and you become the public cadet face of West Point.

  Mark has thoroughly handicapped the process. “You wanna get one of the four primaries,” he explains, counting them off on his fingers. “For summer training, it’s Beast commander first detail or second detail, Buckner commander first or second detail. Those are the ones who get considered for first captain.” Vermeesch has picked candidates from the Corporation, to begin the process, which doesn’t surprise Corporation member Rob Anders. “Me, Mark, Eliel, Matt Kilgore—we’re all really damn good cadets and very competitive guys.”

  Eliel Pimentel has already lined up a foreign-exchange slot in Venezuela this summer; going for Emerging Leader means letting that go. Eliel told Super-V he wanted to pass. “So he asked me to think about it till 1500. I called at 1500. I was like, ‘Sir, I think I’m gonna stay with my original decision.’ He said, ‘Well, I would like you to do it anyway.’ We went back and forth, I told him I was sticking. Then, that night, after Officers’ Christian Fellowship, he came up to my room.”

  Eliel’s roommate, Matt Kilgore—a broad-shouldered, friendly kid from St. Louis—swivels around at his desk. “V was wearing civilian clothes—a turtleneck,” he says. “Made me laugh. It was huge. I thought, ‘What the hell is he wearing?’ They had a pretty heated discussion.”

  “Not heated completely,” Eliel says. “We got into it a little, but we maintained respect. He asked, ‘Have you made your decision?’ I said, ‘Sir, I’m still going to stick with my original choice.’ He said, ‘Fine. If you don’t wanna grow as a leader, that’s OK. You can just maybe be company activities officer next semester—I’m not gonna guarantee you’ll be company commander. You wanna stay at this comfortable level of leadership, don’t wanna take the challenge—hey, that’s fine.’”

  “The reason,” Matt says helpfully, “is that obviously Major V thinks Eliel’s going to do well—as we all do. It was a funny conversation to listen to. Major V kept denying he was trying to push Eliel, just kept packing his bags for the guilt trip. ‘I don’t wanna tell you what to do—you know you could do great things, but I don’t wanna tell you what to do.’”

  “I gave him a few sirs,” Eliel says. “‘Sir, let’s be realistic here. “Sir, plainly you want me to do this.’”

  (Major Vermeesch smiles over his own memory of the night. “Eliel said, ‘But sir, you know, what you think of me means a lot.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe that’s something you need to think about.’”)

  The combined weight of the Lord and Eliel’s parents won him over to Super-V’s position. “My folks see this as God’s mission for me in my life, manifested in this opportunity. And they said, ‘Go for this. You owe yourself to at least try.’”

  The first boards are held in a day room, TACs sitting behind a desk, running a kind of Academy beauty contest. First there’s a judgment on appearance, then on bearing, then a talent portion where the cadet answers questions along the lines of “Provide three brief examples of Emerging Leader conduct” and “What one thing would you change about West Point?” The men come in with high-and-tights; the women sport the female equivalent, a sort of ear-hugging belle-of-Amherst do. You can see fingers and hands delicately trembling. A TAC will ask, “What’s more important: accomplishing the mission or taking care of soldiers?”

  “Ma’am, taking care of soldiers. The mission will be accomplished at its own pace, no matter what.”

  When cadets depart, officers quietly chuckle. “Yeah, ‘The mission will get done eventually.’ You know—when the mission feels like it.” (The correct answer would have been “Mission first in the Army, people here at the Academy.”)

  “She forgot to salute! Just, ‘See ya.’”

  “I was getting ready to smoke her grade on that.”

  “I thought you were gonna fall out of your chair, trying to get a look at her shoes.”

  “How were the shoes, anyway?”

  “Shoes were good, hair a little long.”

  A TAC-NCO shakes his head. “‘The mission will get done eventually.’”

  Ryan Southerland gets called to the boards too. He’s got mixed feelings: “It’s nice, but the jobs—anyone could do them. I guess it doesn’t motivate me that much.” Ryan is learning a soldier lesson early. The high-profile jobs are eating into his Betty time; the relationship suffers as long as he’s brigade command sergeant major. He doesn’t like going to the gym with Betty anymore because there are too many corrections to make along the way: untucked shirts, double-strapped book bags, not to mention what he might encounter inside Arvin Gym itself. At other hours, he’s under a stack of work, the coal-shoveling side of leadership, all the ink-fed workings of the corps. All they can do is meet for hellos at night, in the small cliffside rock garden that’s the couple’s favorite spot on post. Betty and Ryan stand and watch boats move over the dark river, take the cold wind on their faces.

  “But you wanna give it a shot,” he says, reading the Emerging Leader e-mail, “to see what it’s all about.” At Ryan’s first interview, a TAC named Major Custer is president of the board. The three other TACs watch Ryan salute, run their eyes up and down the creases of his uniform. Major Custer leads the questioning with “What one thing would you get rid of in the West Point system?” Ryan talks around it—he doesn’t really have an answer, can’t see the good in offering anything half-assed and official like “Cynicism, sir.” The TACs bring him back, s
lanting the question toward the Survivor-style hypothetical. “OK, thirty-two TACs, the BTO and yourself are on an island. One of you has to go. Who goes?” Ryan thinks it over. “Well, Major Custer,” he says, “out of thirty-two TACs, I think you’re the worst, and I’m going to boot you off.” Custer looks up. “I mean,” Ryan tells me later, “he wasn’t even paying attention until he heard ‘Major Custer.’ And then he asks why, and I say, ‘Well, sir, I’ve heard so much about stuff you’ve pulled as a TAC and stuff you did at summer basic training. I heard you actually drove some new cadets to the point where they got injured. I just wouldn’t want to have that on my island.’”

  A few weeks later, when the results of the final boards are announced, Mark Thompson and Eliel Pimentel are in the final twenty-four; they’ve both earned good jobs, but neither has what Mark calls “a primary.” Beast commander I is Andy Blickhahn. Buckner commander I is Ryan Southerland. The corps understands next year’s first captaincy will be a dogfight between them.

  The Blue Falcon

  George Rash performs a personal rite of spring and bombs another APFT. He cramps up halfway through the run, eases off, finishes forty seconds late at a walk. Mark Thompson has become George’s platoon sergeant. “A cramp—that’s bullshit. You can say, ‘As his platoon sergeant I feel bad, he’s my responsibility to train.’ But I take the hard line—surprise, surprise. He’s a cow at West Point. If he can’t internalize that and pass his APFT run, I have the attitude like, ‘You don’t deserve to be here.’” George has internalized a subtler principle. It’s not that he can’t pass an APFT run—he knows he can—he’s learned that he can fail one without triggering any great tragedy. He’s like a driver stepping away from a car wreck, with the conclusion that there’s really no need to worry about seat belts.