Absolutely American

by David Lipsky

  In the afternoon, there’s a barbeque for the Social Sciences Department, under a tent at the far end of the Plain. It was arranged weeks ago and would take weeks to reschedule, so the event goes ahead as planned. Smoke curls, beef sizzles, two fraternity-sized speaker cabinets woof out songs by Van Halen and the Grateful Dead. The barbecue rides on a thin edge of forgetting, on a willful, short-term amnesia. A cadet will swig Mountain Dew, smile, bend his neck to let the sun fall on his cheeks—and then a look of guilt will wince across his features. Colonel Tom Parker, the International Relations coordinator, watches cadets cross the grass to face the challenges of outdoor eating: how to take a bite of hamburger while balancing a soda and a plate. “These attacks are going to alter their generation of officers,” he says, “just as surely as Pearl Harbor altered the Army of the 1930s, and Vietnam altered the Army of its era.”

  At the far end of the tent, another officer tells a group of cadets how he drove to lower Manhattan and had a police friend escort him through the barricades, how he spent the night working the long quiet bucket lines at the towers. The Brooks Brothers store across the street had been painted over with one word, Morgue. When people grew exhausted, they collapsed onto café chairs that had blown out the backs of restaurants. In the buckets’ chunky dirt, he found an intact book, an unopened briefcase, a Palm Pilot. How when the rain came, it settled the dust.

  Cadets start forming up for the taps vigil a little after 2300; they glide into silent rows along the Plain. Civilians—families from town—watch from the side as the lines grow thicker and deeper. The cadets’ white shirts and hats take the light.

  By 2330, four thousand cadets stand at attention. They stare across the flat grass toward trees, hills, clouds. Among the civilians, a young man wears a flag over his shoulders, a young couple curl four hands around a red candle, an older woman lowers her head to her husband’s shoulder. The Plain lights snap off, and there’s just the glow from the uniforms and the night.

  For ten minutes there’s nothing. Because this is a way to commemorate loss: with an absence, with stillness, with nothing. A steady sprinkler noise of insects rises off the grass, treetops rustle like the sound of approaching water. A truck bumps down a distant road, dragging a hole through the quiet. The cadets stare out to where the sky ends behind the dark, bulky hills.

  The drill team fires a twenty-one-gun salute. Seven rifles, three shots apiece, each volley followed by a fluffy spreading echo. Then there’s the night with its chilly smells of granite and grass and powder. The first slow notes of a bugle, a mournful taps: up the scale, over the scale, down the scale.

  Then the cadet bagpipe team begins. Matthew MacSweeney is with them, playing “Amazing Grace,” with its frills and edges. Faraway music, crimped by sadness, to escort the week’s losses over the Plain.

  After a moment, the cadets sing the alma mater. The sound is close to breathing, the faintest way four thousand people can sing one song. Then the cadets file out—the snap and click of shoes, a rush of gray and white, faces going visible in the light from doorways—and the night is left alone with itself.

  A quarter hour later, Josh Rizzo is back in his room, staring at his hand. “I didn’t know if I was ready,” he says, “until this shit happened. I mean, I came here originally to play baseball. But I know now, I’m here to defend this nation. I have no fears, no qualms about going.” He runs his fingers over his ring. “It’s weird. When I first got this ring, I thought, ‘Look at this cool ring. I can get any job I want.’ Now I look at it and I think, ‘We are called.’ I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got to defend my home.”

  Guppies Never Quit

  The new G-4 TAC is named Rafael Paredes, a craggy-featured, dark-eyed man with a grin that pries open his face. Just before Major Vermeesch left to pitch his office two buildings over, for a year of desk service with the Academy, he gathered G-4 in the day room. “There’s good news, bad news,” Vermeesch said. “The good news is, you’re finally getting rid of me, if that’s how you wanna look at it. The bad news is, you’re gettin’ another Infantry TAC—that’ll make three in a row—Captain Rafael Paredes. A bit about him: he’s five foot six—he’s a little short guy—but don’t take that to mean he’s not big in spirit. He’s one of the most fired-up guys I’ve met in a long time. What I’m asking is, I want you to support him the same way you’ve supported me.”

  By September, cadets see their new TAC barreling across North Area every afternoon. He’ll plant himself in front of anybody—hulks, high-pockets, beanpoles—tilt his neck back, apply corrections. “I may be five-six,” Paredes says, “but my ego’s six-two.”

  The captain began pushing the Fighting Guppies onto a wartime footing even before September 11. He never posts a leadership philosophy—“I’m not big on a whole laundry list of rules,” he says. But it’s unnecessary, since nearly everything the TAC says is leadership philosophy. “We pamper cadets so much here—too many privileges, not enough responsibilities, spoon-feed the answers we want—that we spoil ’em.” Staring through his window at some foul weather, he’ll explain, “Taking care of soldiers is not necessarily keeping ’em warm and giving ’em food. It’s giving ’em good training. Let’s say there’s rain. If you’re just sitting around with your thumb up your ass, the only training effect you get is learning that being wet sucks, and a dirty thumb. But you could be out practicing battle drill in the rain.” He shakes his head. “I tell my guys we’re gonna stretch the threshold of pain a little bit, and sometimes that’s gonna suck.” He goes on, “We’re not gonna train for a kick in the ‘nads. But we are gonna try to be a little harder for a while. Leadership is a hard business.”

  Like many evangelists, Captain Paredes came to faith the rough way. As a young officer, he flew to a hot landing zone in the Mogadishu of Black Hawk Down, where he received an education in contrasts: smashed buildings, fine white beaches, starving locals, soldiers strolling the base in Teva sandals and shorts. Then he spotted the bandaged heads, the Joes on crutches: taking it easy is a bad habit, relaxing can get you hurt.

  But for the firsties, kicking back is part of what the final year is all about. (Firsties, for example, are the only cadets allowed homey civilian touches like fridges and carpeting. Paredes’s Health and Welfare inspection also uncovers a bunch of contraband George Foreman grills, which get confiscated.) The Corporation’s early line on Paredes goes, “The new TAC is . . . a little more involved that we’re used to. But we’ll break him in.” Firsties make pilgrimages to his office to explain that his approach isn’t what they’re used to; the captain’s aggressive demeanor could put other cadets—not them—off. Paredes patiently hears them out. “Tough shit,” he says. “I don’t give a crap. Hey, suck it up.” He grins. “I tell ’em there’s a speech from The Princess Bride: ‘Get used to disappointment.’ I’ll tell you what. The standards have not changed. Maybe the enforcement of the standards has changed. There’s a new sheriff in town.”

  The captain has marched through so many challenges in his own life that what’s left is a self-made man’s impatience. He grew up in civil war El Salvador—crackdowns, assassinations, roving death squads like the Mano Blanco (a folded black sheet in your mailbox containing the white outline of a hand was a message that meant change, leave or die). What he’s learned is that any obstacle you encounter, push it aside; that just leaves the shoving muscles stronger. He’d like to pass on this spirit to his cadets, so he changes the external things a TAC can. There’s nothing to be done about the company’s amiable, domesticated name. (When Paredes graduated West Point in 1991, G-4 had a scrappier handle, the Gladiators.) So he moves on to the company motto. He avoids saying “Go Guppies”—“It’s kind of queer-sounding,” he says—and combines it with the slogan from an old battalion: “Never quit.” “So what I say now is, ‘Guppies never quit.’ I’ve got about half the company using it. I’m trying to instill the warrior spirit.”

  Then he turns his sights on two potential G-4 quitters, Scott Mellon
and George Rash, the old roommates of last resort. He pores over their statistics like a baseball manager composing his roster. “George,” he says. “We should’ve pulled the trigger on him a long time ago.” Scott Mellon is a dicier issue. “He’s super smart,” Paredes says, turning to his computer. “He’s got like a one-forty IQ—maybe he’s too smart for his own good.” Scott’s away message is a G-4 favorite, a sentence he copied from a classroom evaluation. “Motivating: IMPROVE. Cadet Mellon sets a poor example for his classmates in demonstrating how little he can do and still get by.” Scott has sized up West Point like a physics problem, calculating the minimum energy expenditure necessary to achieve graduation, the maximum result. Paredes pulls up records that chart Scott Mellon’s decline. “He dropped from a three-point-six GPA to a two-point-four last year. I can’t let people squeak by and graduate.”

  The two cadets have climbed and panted their way to firstie year. Another TAC might leave commissioning them up to the Academy. Paredes makes them both platoon leaders—they’ll be responsible for thirty cadets, one of the most challenging senior-year assignments, the same job Jake Bergman ducked two years ago. If either cadet cracks, well, he can object about Paredes on his way out the gates. “Show me what you can handle,” Paredes tells the two cadets. “I’m going to put a lot of pressure on you guys. Prove to me that you can do this job.”

  There won’t be any Guppies squeaking by. In the fall, two G-4 plebes fall in love, embark on a mini, Bonnie-and-Clyde crime spree—boosting car keys, credit cards, money, checks. A colonel commiserates with the new TAC. “This is too bad,” the colonel says. “You didn’t come to West Point to kick cadets out, to put people in jail.”

  Paredes considers it for a few seconds. “As a matter of fact, sir,” he replies, “I did. I came here to keep bad people out of the Army.”

  Branch Night

  Firstie-year September is about the showroom hush of picking your branch. The Army word for practicing is rehearsing—that way, even the most hectic situation shapes up as a performance question of hitting your mark. In a way, firsties have been rehearsing this moment since the day they accepted their slots at West Point: “What would I do if it really came down to it—if the country sent the class to war?” The kind of what-if scenarios civilian friends test on each other over beers, after gun-and-chase movies, the firsties are facing now.

  For the person Huck Finn has spent a year and a half becoming, the answer is obvious: Infantry, idiot sticks. In the weeks before branch selection, he’s more agitated than he’s been since yuk year. Everything that should be a relief—an article, some officer’s advice—is just more sand in the mouth. He stamps around post, eyes hard beneath his brows. At football practice—everyone hitting tougher—all he wants is to get back to barracks, watch more CNN. In class, he’s thinking about Afghanistan and pictures in the morning newspaper. The Sunday after the attacks, he heads for chapel. A man in a flag necktie takes the pulpit, raises a Bible above his head. “This has been a week like no other,” the man says. “And I just want to remind you that, uh, this story right here? At the end, we win. OK? I promise, if you read all the way to the end, we win. We serve a mighty God.” Religion has that soothing power to fold even the most disruptive colors into the comfort of an overall design, but it’s not working on Huck.

  His roommate’s return from New York is more agitation. Rizzo tells about funerals and the odor hanging between the buildings of his neighborhood. “Riz says the wind blows straight across the river from Ground Zero into Brooklyn. He says it smells like dead people.”

  Nine days after the attacks, Riz and Huck watch shoulder to shoulder as President Bush addresses a joint session of Congress. There are moments when the commander in chief seems to be staring past the elected heads, down through the cables of the broadcast equipment, right at the firstie class. Huck keeps half an eye on Riz. For days, every time the eleventh comes up, Riz has pulled the same long face he wore all that Tuesday. But when the president mentions bringing justice to enemies, Riz brightens, mutters, “Yeah, hell yeah.” Then the president turns to the lens, says, “And tonight, a few miles from the damaged Pentagon, I have a message for our military: Be ready.” Josh jumps out of his chair, you can hear whoops and shouts from the windows of West Point.

  Huck e-mails his parents that he’s fixed on Infantry. There’s no response. He e-mails again a few days later, adds an op-ed he grabbed online, some analyst making stabs about the Infantry’s role. His mother finally writes back: Quit sending your dad stuff, he’s a wreck thinking about you in the Army, are you kidding with this? “She’s like, ‘Cut out mailing that shit, ah’ight?’”

  Huck is settled on it. “My class joined a peacetime army—we were gonna protect the Somalis, defend the Kosovars, hand around food. Now we’re defending the U.S.A., and that’s a fucking great feeling.” Huck’s grandfather fought in World War II, bumping over clouds and flak as a ball turret gunner. He got shot down over Austria—smoke, parachute, ground, capture—spent thirteen months in a POW camp that was liberated by General Patton. (Patton himself inspected Will Finn’s Red Cross meal package, seven days’ rations for seven people. “Well, damn, son,” the general said, “that ain’t enough.”) Huck’s dad was Field Artillery in Vietnam, loading guns with shells as big around as dinner plates. “Every Finn man goes to war,” Huck says, “and I never expected I’d get to carry on the tradition. Now I’ll have a chance to tell my children I defended the Constitution like my old man did.” A frown clots his face. “Only thing that scares me is, I got that typical post-teenage thought that nothing’s gonna happen to me, but I couldn’t imagine anything worse than me saying to some kid, ‘Go stand over there,’ and he gets shot. I’m a frickin’ emotional kid—I don’t know how I’d handle it.” So Huck spends off-hours compiling advice about combat: “Officers who can talk about Iraq.” It’s not always helpful. “They tell a story about Desert Storm, it’s about kicking somebody’s ass, because that’s basically what happened.” When he wakes up, he runs through maneuvers and hand signals in his room. “I wanna get geared up as best as I can. I want to be trained.”

  When Army plays at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, the Finns fly over from Baton Rouge. Before the game, Huck visits their hotel room. His father is in a chair, curtain drawn, no TV. He asks Huck quietly, “Have you decided what you’re going to do about your branch?” Huck wanted to say—and didn’t—that he’d been telling and telling him. He understood his father needed to hear the news from his face. Huck says Infantry, and his dad thinks for a minute. “All right, that’s your decision,” he says. “Go with it. Do what you have to do.”

  For three years, George Rash has harbored a climate-controlled dream: Ordnance, the single largest Army branch. Predictable hours, behind the scenes and behind the lines, maintaining ammunition, filling out forms under strong lighting. “I like tinkering around with stuff,” George says. “Heck, I’d rather push papers than fill somebody with holes. I don’t find going out and killing someone to be that much fun. I can do it, and will do it if I have to. But I’m not going to go out and deliberately look for somebody to shoot—communists or terrorists or whatever. As a person, I’d prefer to run an Ordnance shop and repair stuff.” It’s also a favor to his feet. “If you’re dropped in, you basically drive everywhere.”

  But by the end of cow year, Ordnance had become the kind of warm dream you have to shake out of your head the minute you awake. George’s rotten class standing (“I’m down near one thousand,” he says, “out of one thousand”) guarantees he’ll tote a weapon. The Academy likes to promise each cadet a top-three branch choice. But it also follows the 80-20 rule: only 20 percent of each class is allowed a noncombat choice. If a whole class decides on support branches, Signal or Finance or Transpo or Ordnance, the bottom half get the saddle-up call whether they want it or not; they’re force-branched to preserve the Academy’s 80-20 combat-support ratio. This system could lead to what everybody has feared: George Rash in th
e Infantry. “Unless eighty percent of my male classmates pick combat arms of their own free will,” he says, “I am going combat arms.” So George prepares the best he can, by cutting weight and hanging around with huah cadets. “I’m hopin’ some of it might rub off.”

  Pulling on his BDUs for Branch Night, George is hoping for Field Artillery; he could live with Combat Engineers, mine-clearing and bridge-building, it would put his aeronautical engineering major to good use. So long as he doesn’t open his envelope tonight and find the scary brass X, idiot sticks.

  Branch Night is mid-November—post crisp and dark, the moon reporting for duty early. G-4 falls in with the rest of the firstie class on the concrete apron of the Plain. A G-4 cow named Sam Kim strolls outside to slap Huck’s back and wish him luck; Huck is too nervous to do anything but nod. His problem is the reverse of George’s: he’s so low in the class (the first two years sink his class standing like rocks) that Infantry might close out before it ever reaches “Finn.” “If he gets it,” Rizzo promises Sam, “you’ll hear it all the way up here.” Riz’s heart is set on Field Artillery; he wants a part of the military action, and the branch’s essential, royal pounding and smashing role in combat is there in it’s motto: “King of battle.” “My grandpa did it in Korea,” Riz says, smoothing down his uniform pocket. “He got in a fight where he was firing his howitzers straight up in the air, because the enemy was so close. He asked me, ‘Why don’t you go for something not really right in combat?’ I told him no, that’s where I want to be.”

  Jasmine Rose stands a few boots away. She’s hoping for Signal—stringing up phone lines, handling computers and other communications. “I always liked it since Buckner,” Jasmine says. “The first thing that drew me, they said every time Signal goes out in the field, they’re in an air-conditioned van, it keeps the equipment cool. Which isn’t always true, but I was like, ‘Wow, that’s great, field air-conditioning.’”