Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  Iggy joined the Army for family. But sooner or later your uniformed family will come into conflict with the one that runs through your blood. Iggy’s people are waiting in California: his mom, his dad, two older brothers, all those uncles, a baby niece he hardly knows and a Filipina girlfriend named Corrine who he loves. Corrine has become just a whisper on the phone, raising patient, troubling questions: “When are you coming home?” Iggy wipes them aside the way an eraser pushes insoluble problems off a blackboard, makes promises about weeks of leave. “But it’s more like,” Iggy says, “there’s a secondary meaning—home. Not ‘When will you physically get here?’; ‘When are you coming back to stay and shit?’” Catching his breath on the ladder, Iggy did calculations. “I’ve been in the military six years,” he explains. “My mom and dad, my friends and brothers, Corrine, if you add it all up, it doesn’t even come out to—ah, fuck—I haven’t even spent a year with them.”

  When Iggy flies west on leave, the days pass at the tightly scheduled clip of hours in the Army: family functions, dinners with Corrine, all boxes he’s got to check off. His brainy friends from high school rap the grate over his door, looking to talk Japanese anime and computers. His old gang-banger pals—neck tattoos and spooky fingernails—pull him out to clubs for shots and pool games. The last night, Iggy stands by his brother’s Prelude in the parking lot, breathes the cool, spicy California air, gazes at the moon high above the palm trees. “I won’t be here for another six months,” he says. “It’d almost be easier not to come back. So you don’t have to leave again.”

  It’s been a challenging year. Iggy strolled to meet his platoon on a chilly 0630 morning, heading the formation with no Ranger tab, with nothing to officially reassure his unit but himself. Because the Army is short-handed, the platoon didn’t contain the thirty-two soldiers West Point prepares you for; only twenty young faces blinked back. “I have four rules,” Iggy announced. The first was integrity. The nature of the business, you don’t lie: they shouldn’t question him, he wouldn’t have time to question them. “If you tell me,” Iggy said, “that there’s a bunch of fuckin’ aliens flanking us on our left side, then that’s what it is. “Second rule was, don’t sell out. “What I mean is, you know what’s right: if you do what’s wrong anyway, that’s fuckin’ selling out. Somebody makes a correction on you, and you get all bitchy but it’s a valid correction, that’s selling out.” Don’t point fingers was the third. “I’m less concerned with whose fault it is than with what we do to improve ourselves. I can tolerate mistakes; mistakes are how we learn.” The fourth derived from news stories Iggy followed in Army Times, and from advice an old upperclassman passed along at Benning, about a growing problem in the Army. “Fourth rule is, we don’t hit our children and we don’t beat our wives. You’re men and you’re soldiers—men and soldiers don’t act that way. If I find out any of you are doing it, I will hammer you.”

  Brotherhood came down to a simple equation: if they took care of Iggy, he’d do the same for them. Platoons get nicknames, Iggy’s is called Mafia. Two weeks in, Iggy led Mafia through a nighttime blank-fire. “We got disoriented, shit happened and we screwed up,” Iggy says, making a sour face. Next morning, Iggy’s commanding officer instructed Mafia to report back as spectators; they would observe a platoon tackling the exercise successfully. The men Iggy is responsible for were squinting at their boots, at the clouds. “My NCOs are proud people,” Iggy says. “They consider themselves good at what they do. And to be forced to watch another platoon that doesn’t have any extra training . . . it was demoralizing.” Iggy huddled with his platoon sergeant. Iggy was a new LT, a cherry, with no business second-guessing the commander. “Don’t touch this one, sir,” the sergeant advised. Mafia shuffled forward. “I took another look at my squad leaders, and I was like, ‘Fuck this.’” Iggy walked to his commander. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “Is it all right if we don’t walk through?” The commander weighed it, told Iggy yeah, that was fine, Mafia could go and train.

  Before climbing into uniform, Iggy was filled with apprentice enthusiasm. He’s been learning a hard travel lesson, that the colors on the street don’t necessarily match the ones in the brochure. When he was at West Point, his adult NCOs from JROTC would call to say they were packing it in. Iggy would disagree: they could be walking away from the one soldier who might have looked up to them. “Wait till you get inside,” they told Iggy, “you’ll understand.” They explained about the Army’s downsizing—how before Saudi the Army stood at nearly a million personnel, how after what’s called the draw-down the service had contracted to a lean 490,000.

  The result worked like a science experiment: halve the space and you double the competition. “My old platoon daddy would say how there was no room for promotions. That scared the shit out of people.” It was like opening the door to admit one of the worst elements from the civilian world: there was no time to watch each other’s back when you were busy watching your own. “He said soldiers were thinking, ‘How can I make myself look good? By making somebody else look bad.’ Which I believe is just stupid. The things my top sergeant told me,” Iggy explains, “they might have happened before, just not to this extent. Back in the day, people looked out for each other in a heartbeat. Top said there had to be something wrong if we’re losing so many people.” Iggy understands all the five-and-fly stuff, but it can’t just be about perks and salaries. “Civilians can say all they want to about money: soldiers back in the day weren’t exactly getting paid either. So what made them stay? It ain’t money—that’s not what makes an Army.”

  Even the new Army ad slogan rubs many of his soldiers the wrong way, a four-word sentence of rankle. “‘An Army of One,’” Iggy says. “Some focus study says it reaches the target group of high-school-age people. You don’t come into the Army to be a ‘one’—because you hope to be just another individual. That’s for civilian life. You come to be part of something.”

  Mafia doesn’t have Fort Drum’s plum assignment, the Kosovo rotation. Iggy talks with his brothers about volunteering for deployment to the Middle East or switching to a company that will reach the Balkans. The phone goes silent.

  “You’re getting older,” his brothers say. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Why?” Iggy asks. “Because that’s what a military person does—you go where the shit is.” It’s the reverse of a question Iggy wanted to put to a sergeant during his last summer at West Point. The sergeant told him, “One thing to remember, sir: when you get here, I want you to keep in mind, your family comes first.” Iggy tested the thought out. “I said I understood. At the same time I was thinking, ‘Why? You should dedicate yourself to the Army.’”

  His brothers say, “The family doesn’t want you to go.”

  There’s a voting bloc inside Iggy that always leans the same way: stick it out, go harder, get back to Ranger, try out for Special Forces—“if you’re in,” Iggy says, “go all the way in.” But Corrine and his family campaign on the opposing platform: there are duties closer to home, jobs that can meet his brotherhood needs, organizations with fresh acronyms: FBI, LAPD, SWAT. When Iggy talks about maybe leaving, his voice goes gingery, testing out the syllables to see if they hold his weight. “See, if I leave this life, leading soldiers, I’m gonna miss the shit out of it. Part of me is gonna be so hurt, I wouldn’t be able to explain it to you. And the suckiest thing about it is, it’s not like you can do reconnaissance on the results. That’s what sucks about the whole deal. You can’t recon the bitch.”

  Iggy and Whitey hold a conversation all year that, though they never use the words, amounts to one question: Is it worth it? They have it at dinner, they have it watching videos at home—Whitey will give curveball rentals like The Messenger a shot, Iggy runs war movies, so that even TV becomes a kind of homework. Then it’ll come up again at Applebee’s, at Denny’s for Saturday morning breakfast, waiting extra minutes for a table in the smoking section. And Whitey has the conversation with himself all the time. To
prepare himself for the life he’s adopted since Mark Matty’s death, he’s put his tongue on a special training program. Every time Whitey says something good about the Army, right away he’s got to add something positive about civilian life. “I don’t know, Igs,” he says, “you’ve just gotta drive on. That’s why military people always do so good out in the corporate world. We’re prepared for anything.”

  But Whitey is fighting something he knows deep down. The Army offers experiences and feelings you can’t match in civilian life. At Drum, Whitey’s unit pushes through another combat simulation; they’re an SSB, a Soldier Support Battalion. Five days of twelve-hour shifts in the computer room, allocating manpower to field units, arranging casualty evac, dispatching fresh troops. “That’s part of the Army civilians never get to see,” Whitey says. He pauses at the door of the simulation room after his shift: three hundred uniformed backs are hunched over computers, hands groping for phones, for coffee mugs, to massage a stitch out of the neck. “It’s amazing,” Whitey says. “You’re not seeing anything fantastical like a guy charging down a machine-gun bunker, it’s nothing gung-ho. What you see is people working their hardest and stressing their asses off—normal American people, practicing for war, who choose to do this. And it’s not a job, I don’t care who it is, everybody’s in the heat of it. I don’t believe one person is thinking, ‘This is my career, nine to five.’ Everybody’s thinking, ‘I gotta do my part.’ You won’t get perks or money or fame to compensate you, you’ll just get a kind of satisfaction. Knowing you’re practicing, because when there’s a real war there’s no room for error.”

  During the summer, Whitey learns that he’ll be the first Goodfella at Fort Drum to see the elephant. His unit will deploy in November for a six-month tour in Kosovo.

  Best Summer of Their Lives III

  Signs sprout on post (Welcome Class of 2005), officers load moving vans, you can see all the way to the river through the front and back windows of the empty houses along Lee Road. Next year’s firsties receive their summer rank, third lieutenant, and fan out into the Army on CTLT—Cadet Troop Leader Training—for a taste of officership, leading soldiers with regular units.

  Ryan Southerland sticks around Highland Falls, a figure in the landscape. He will command the first half of Camp Buckner, overseeing one thousand yuks and a staff of upperclassmen. The assignment is his audition for first captain, just as commanding Beast I will be Andy Blickhahn’s tryout. (Captain Engen, Ryan’s TAC last summer, is rooting. “I hope Ryan gets it, he’d do a great job. He’s just one of those guys—he’s the only person who ever got George Rash to finish a road march.”) Before packing for Fort Benning, Hank Keirsey’s son J.D. leaves Southerland an old PT shirt—a West Point pass-down tradition that keeps graduated names circulating through the corps—then e-mails a pageful of advice. “And any time one of the Keirseys tells you to do something,” Ryan says, stepping over rocks and tree stumps at Buck-nam, “that’s pretty much the right thing to do.”

  J.D. has poured the problems of life through a single funnel and distilled the formula. It’s a weight-room-and-bookcases mix, arranged in memorandum form.

  Ryan,

  Here are my departing bullet points of wisdom.

  Take care of yourself. Physically. Depression, malaise, etc., are all the result of a faulty PT schedule. Do this above all else. Avoid dessert.

  Read—it provides the background necessary for all disciplines. Cover the essentials: From Anton Myrer [his military novel Once an Eagle is a West Point bible: one of Max Adams’s post–Hundredth Night sentences was a corrective study of the book] to Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Hemingway.

  Take care of subordinates. This is my only “leadership lesson.” You know what taking care of subordinates entails: it isn’t being nice. It is presenting an attainable goal, a charismatic persona that they can aspire to.

  You are one of my closest friends ever. So I expect you to take a personal role in the development of my brother. I ask you to do so and would ask no one else. My gratitude in advance for making him a leader the way you are.

  The new supe pays Buckner a look-in call and chats with Southerland. Officers often end up resembling their branches: General Bill Lennox is Field Artillery, a firm, blocky man with a look of contained force. Lennox invites suggestions on the new job—and Ryan, twenty years old, finds himself passing advice to the highest of higher. “Everybody loved General Christman,” the cadet says. “But don’t try to fill in on what he did, let us see who you are.” Ryan admires Lennox: “He’s trying to cut through the eyewash to see what’s really going on,” he says. “He’s a sharp man. You know, some people are sharp, and some just played a lot of Hacky Sack in high school. I think he’s focused on getting more Army into things.” The general spends the months paging through the Academy like a thick book, making some of the discoveries Keirsey did half a decade ago. At summer’s end, his verdict will become a West Point slogan: “We need to put the M—the military—back into the Military Academy.”

  Commanding Buckner gives Ryan a chance to return some of the glow from those three stars now gone out of the West Point sky. In the morning, when he stalks past the companies in formation, he calls out, “Warrior tough!” and a hundred voices cheer back, Warrior proud, cadets grinning like they’ve just spotted General Christman. Afternoons, when he visits the yuks’ quarters, their eyes dart from boots to bed, as if they’re squaring up to Colonel Adamcyzk. He approaches a sweaty yuk on a road march. “Having fun yet?” Ryan asks. “I just want to die,” the yuk says, tossing away his rifle in frustration. (Ryan scoops up the weapon: “Well, I’ll take it if you don’t want it.”) Then the yuk recognizes his commander, straightens and knocks out the remainder of the march, Ryan rolling by his side like Keirsey. “You’re not getting ready to die on me again, are you?”

  One of Ryan’s command duties is organizing Buckner’s celebration of the Fourth of July. Independence Day touches Army people in the same way Oscar night hits residents of Los Angeles; everybody walks taller, for one day the community’s values and the nation’s are the same. The detail work falls to Ryan’s regimental training sergeant, a cow named Mary Tobin—five feet seven inches of staring TEDs, hair conked and pinned back tight. Mary arranges schedules, speakers, music. Like many cadets, Mary arrived at the Academy with clear driving instructions, then wandered off the main road. Her mother is not the kind of West Point mom who sat out the 1960s. She marched through Tennessee with Martin Luther King, stood her ground at whites-only diners, waited out the hours in southern jails, tried to join the Black Panthers—scouted around for forms to fill out—the year the organization collapsed. Stories passed from parents to children can harden into convictions. At her Atlanta high school, Mary Tobin was named the Student Most Likely to Restart the Black Panther Party.

  “I had all these wild views about the government,” Mary explains, testing the speaker system at the Bucker parade ground. “Plots against the black man. I was so angry and militant for so long—there was just no way in the world I’d ever join the military. My mother told me about Vietnam, how they sent all the black people to the front line, where they got shot.” But Mary had joined the high school JROTC, risen to command. When she was a senior, her mentor summoned Mary and Mrs. Tobin to his office. “If your daughter wants to go to West Point,” he said, “I’ve got her a scholarship.” Mary’s mother snapped back, “Well, she’s not going into the military, so you can just give that scholarship to somebody else.”

  Mary arrived at the Academy with a plan. “I was going to infiltrate the United States Army, make my way to the top, bring in my own people through the side door and overthrow everything.” Instead, during three years, the Army has infiltrated Mary. What she hoped to find elsewhere turned out to have been waiting here. “It’s a beautiful place, where color’s not a factor; it’s all about getting a job done.” She laughs. “So now you start getting impatient with regular people, worrying they don’t understand. Instead of wanting to bring t
hem inside, you want to protect it, you’re like, ‘No, you stay outside.’”

  The festivities kick off at 0645. Mary calls cadence as the staff marches down the hill, Ryan taking over at the end: “Staff, halt.” The eight Buckner companies collect on the cement ground. A thousand yuks in running gear; shirts catch the breeze, air carrying the summer smells of lake, gravel and pine. A cadet delivers the national anthem a cappella, with the moody pauses of a blues number, a story about a hard night that happened long ago. Everyone listens for the final two lines, with their stir and contradictions: a land where people want to be free, brave and back at home all at the same time. Ryan reads the prepared statement from the secretary of the Army. “‘That our experiment in democracy has weathered the storms of history, to see yet another birthday, is a sign and a testament to the bravery of all those who have served on point for the nation.’” Ryan is dressed in gym alpha, because West Point celebrates July Fourth with a three-mile Independence Run. “ ‘Soldiers have made today’s celebration of independence possible. We thank you, and we salute you.’”

  Ryan stares out at the one thousand yuks watching him. “Warrior tough!” he calls. The roar comes back: Warrior proud!

  Ryan misses Betty Simbert, who’s flown to Korea on CTLT, working with a Military Intelligence unit. When she finishes up, she’ll go to South Africa, to serve at a nonprofit. “It’s a weird, cool experience,” Betty says; a paradox. “I got discrimination on both sides. From some of the whites because of the color of my skin. And then from blacks because I don’t speak, like, Zulu. And when I say ‘I’m African American,’ they’re insulted. They ask, ‘Well, what part of Africa are you from?’ I say, ‘Well—Africa.’ They say, ‘Look. Then you’re not African. You’re an American. End of story.’”