by David Lipsky
In December, Army takes Navy, 29–22. Mark Thompson patrols the sidelines wearing his white earpiece. President Bush watches from inside a scrum of Secret Service agents, visits both locker rooms. Huck Finn snaps the ball for the Black Knights’ final punt; as he jogs onto the field, it hits him that he’s playing his last down of big-time football.
A few days later, the Taliban surrender their last stronghold, Kandahar. The Grant Hall TVs function as a kind of West Point crisis index. You can pinpoint the moment the Academy returns to normal when a cadet puts down his sandwich, flips the channel, and the regular sports programming resumes. “Now it’s like, ‘Go back to daily life,’” Ryan says. “We’ve become such a fast society—we take things in, forget ’em just as quick.” Civilian friends, however, learn that there’s still a contribution they can make to the war effort, by hard-charging the mall at Christmas. This strikes Captain Paredes as “so . . . weird. Go shopping, like nothing has happened. You don’t want to forget there are guys out there fighting. So I try to get my cadets to remember their mission.”
During a January class, the TAC reminds the firsties they’ve only got five months left; it’s time to start thinking like lieutenants. The change won’t come by magic, he says, and uses the old Academy joke: there won’t be any officer fairy-dust sprinkled on their shoulders at graduation. People expect to see them do great things; the work is not going to be easy. The firsties are back in the cadet mindset, complaining to him about papers due. “Guess what? You’re in the big leagues now, guys. People don’t go to a circus to a watch a guy juggle three balls. They go to see a guy juggle freakin’ chainsaws on fire.” That’s what Captain Paredes intends to say. At the moment of decision, his tongue stumbles: “You don’t go to the circus to see a guy with three balls.” The cadets chuckle, raise their hands to say Yes sir, they would.
The CPD board reports back to Captain Paredes: Scott Mellon has been found unfit for duty. Their recommendation is for immediate separation, but Scott is still on post, awaiting final orders. The TAC visits his room. “On a daily basis,” Captain Paredes says, “telling him, ‘Scott, what do you wanna do? Hey, this is what the board decided. You’re not fit. You have to ask yourself, “Did I meet the qualifications for the mission?”’”
The TAC also consults with colonels and the doctors from CPD. “We had a meeting with all the doctors; the colonel said, ‘Hey, just tell ’em what you wanna do. You want to see Mellon out of here, right?’ ‘Yes sir’—he knew how I felt.” Captain Paredes continues, “And I said, ‘I’m not gonna tell Scott he’s a pack of shit and he should get ready to go—not until we get the stuff. Because he’s going to fight me every step of the way.’ And then the psychiatrist goes, ‘I agree with him. Scott’s going to say, “Ha, I knew you were out to get me.”’ And so the colonel says, ‘Oh, yes, you’re right, good point.’”
Then, in early February, a rumor sweeps G-4. Scott Mellon, packing weapons, had planned to revenge himself on Captain Paredes. What really happened is simpler. Scott has been at West Point three and half years; he’s taking dismissal hard. He tells his CPD therapist—as he later jokes to Huck Finn—that he’s so depressed about it, the one thing keeping him from killing himself is he’d like to kill Captain Paredes more. Conversations at the CPD are not protected by the standard client-doctor confidentiality. The doctor phones Captain Paredes. “Scott Mellon has got homicidal ideations about you.” (For the TAC, it’s just another in his life’s string of challenges: “Initially, I thought to myself, ‘Tell him to bring it on.’”) The rest develops by word of mouth. Scott likes to spend some evenings target-shooting with friends at an indoor range; another cadet overhears Scott talk about saving time by not leaving the weapons off post but stowing them in the trunk of his car. “You can have a weapon on post for four days before you have to register and store it with them,” Scott says. The cadet goes to Captain Paredes’s office.
“And I knew that I couldn’t approach him like, ‘Hey, where are the weapons?’” the TAC says. “So I said, ‘Hey, let’s talk abut this. What do you usually hunt for?’” Scott tells him squirrels. “‘OK, what kind of weapons do you use?’ Y’know—I started asking all these questions. Then, ‘Oh, where are your weapons at?’ He says, ‘Sir, they’re off post.’ I told him, ‘Tomorrow by 1700, I want you to register those weapons.’” There’s no further communication from Scott. The TAC e-mails him, and Scott burrows back into the rules again, sends “a soliloquy” about his Second Amendment rights. Next morning Captain Paredes gets a warrant, calls Scott down to his office, tells him they’re going to search his car. Scott looks at him. “You’re right, sir,” he says. “You’ve got me.” They walk to the lot, look together at the .22 and .30-30 deer rifle locked in his trunk. A week later, Scott Mellon is erased from the Academy landscape. The day he leaves, Captain Paredes gathers his cadets, assures the company that Scott has left West Point to find the medical help he needs. The day before, the TAC had to visit the cadet in his room and ask for the return of his West Point ring.
A year later, during the run-up to the second Iraq war, Scott Mellon is studying at a civilian college. He’s surprised to find himself missing West Point. “I’m living at home with my parents, and I dress like a dork,” Scott reports. “I almost wish I still had a uniform, because at least I knew how to wear that.” He passes the ROTC cadets on his campus, sees the jacked-up gear, has to hold off from stopping and making corrections. “It’s really strange,” Scott says, “because I hated West Point the whole time I was there, but now I feel guilty that I didn’t graduate. Before I got there, I wanted to be in the Army; while I was there, I hated the Army; and now I feel really guilty about not being in the Army. Especially with the whole Iraq thing. The unit I would have been with is in southern Turkey right now.”
Morning Star
Two years after leaving the Army, Hank Keirsey is standing at the Garrison station waiting for the Manhattan train. A kid is there in civvies, but the signs of cadetness are obvious: pressed chinos, newly mowed hair, casually correct bearing. Keirsey rumbles to his side, just as he approached hundreds of cadets on hundreds of West Point afternoons. “What’re you looking at?” he asks.
The Garrison station sits a river’s width away from the Academy. The platform offers a fine view: the Academy docks, pleasure boats bobbing; the hilly, climbing road; sturdy gray buildings growing out of the cliffside.
“Sir, I’m staring at that hill. It doesn’t look so steep from here, but that hill has smoked me innumerable times.” He turns to Keirsey. He sees a coat and tie, a small beard: a civilian in his middle forties. “You see, sir, I’m a cadet at West Point. And some of us there, we run that hill every day.”
Keirsey’s eyes sparkle. “Really,” he says in his oak voice, “I hear they push you guys pretty hard in that outfit.”
“Yes sir, they work us pretty good,” the cadet says. “It’s rough right now, because we’re in this phase folks call Gray Period. Gray buildings and weather, plus, on top of it, we wear gray uniforms.”
“I see,” Keirsey says. You can tell how much it would mean for him to be recognized. Then he goes ahead and uncorks the old Keirsey vintage. “You pick a branch yet?”
“I’ll do that next year, sir.”
“Next year? Well, you look like an infantryman to me. You look hard. You’ve got the shoulders.”
Keirsey steps a few feet away. He’s been gone four semesters, he’s no longer a figure in anyone’s sky. “I guess I’m in disguise.” He shrugs his own bearish shoulders. “That’s the way I like it.”
After two decades under idiot sticks, Hank’s first civilian action was to declare a shaving moratorium. In the Army, facial hair is as forbidden as drugs or racial bias. “And you shave so long, you end up wondering about what the hell would come out of your face. So with this facial hair, I am entering the cocoon of civilization and will slowly emerge as a proper civilian.” That first spring, Hank purchased an airy, long-decked house set back in th
e woods. He fixed it up, settled into the hermit’s life of exile. He called the place a hooch, congratulated his big Labradors military-style. “Good dog—defecating outside the perimeter.” When Kathy and Hank showed up for weekend officer parties—meat cross-hatching on the grill, fists wrapped around beers—a strange reserve clamped his tongue. Sure, the other guests were all wearing civilian clothes too. But come Monday, they’d have uniforms to climb back into. He didn’t; this was Keirsey’s uniform.
The change fell hard on Kathy: it was a forced excursion through foreign parts of the world she never planned to visit. She grew up in an Army household. “The military is the only way I’ve ever known,” she says. “I liked my family, I liked Hank. I never wanted to not be in the military. That was the one part that really bothered me. I looked at my husband and I said, ‘Honey, we’re going to become damn civilians.’” Hank rolled out of bed each morning at 0530—the body clock never quite gets relieved—to the same unanswered question: What do you do after the stands clear, the groundkeepers pull out the tarpaulin, you close your jersey in the locker?
He maintained military fitness, assigning his muscles different tasks like squads. An hour of roadwork each day for the legs, an hour on dumbbells for the arms. He hunted his dogs through the woods, tracking deer and fowl. He explained to Kathy why meat taken in action always tastes better than food captured at the grocery. “Take beef,” he said. “That cow grows up thinking, ‘The farmer is my buddy. He’s always feeding me, he’s always watering me, making sure I’m warm in the winter, cool in the summer. Here he comes now, what’s he got in his hand? Wait a second, I had this whole deal entirely wrong.’ That last instant of betrayal is what you can taste in every darn cut of beef. Deer, on the other hand, is meat that’s never been lied to.”
Army celebrity has about the same transfer value as fame in Japan. But there were people who knew about Hank. He delivered motivational addresses to unions and clubs, felt the old fire kindling in his chest. After that, he founded a business, teaching Army-style teambuilding to Manhattan executives—city-faced people who’d never shimmied across a rope bridge or rappelled a cliff. They stared at trees as if curious to see where they plugged in, and turned shy around Hank, like he was a 3-D effect stalking off a movie screen. (They appeared just as foreign to Keirsey. “You kind of gaze into their eyes,” he says, “not sure what you’re supposed to be looking for. And these guys don’t seem to want to make eyeball-to-eyeball contact.”)
Business often called him to the city, to shake the hand, close the deal. Manhattan never felt quite right to him. It was all clutter and gridlock, people living too close to and too far from each other at the same time. Opening doors on Wall Street, Hank became just another guy with a product to pitch. You never had to market yourself in the Army: your résumé was the patches and badges on your uniform, where you’ve been, what you’ve done, how hard you pushed yourself, how much it mattered. Not having to sell yourself—to hear true things turn suddenly false in your mouth—is a great ease on the heart. When they did buy Hank’s service (“We are all very jazzed about doing this”), business guys often wanted to exchange some kind of trinket. Hank grew a wardrobe of shorts and logo sweatshirts.
When Hank got home, Kathy would ask, “How’d you do?”
“Excellent,” he’d say, tossing his car keys on the counter. “I got a new hat.”
The September attacks blasted Keirsey out of the commuting life. “I imagine it’s the same as it was for guys after Pearl Harbor,” he says. “You want to enlist immediately, get back in, do what you can do.” Hank found himself in isolated terrain, another consumer of Army news—just when his neighbors felt their TVs turn participatory, as news became a show that could extend a big deadly hand. Some retired Army friends had partnered up with an international security outfit called Morning Star. “Our profession,” the British Morning Star brochure reassures, “is your company’s peace of mind. We offer specialised advice, training and experienced personnel. Our goal is to enable your organisation to operate safely in inhospitable environments.” The firm’s operatives are mostly ex-SAS—Special Air Service, the English equivalent of the Rangers. Morning Star’s Washington headquarters “is two guys working out of their closet, basically,” Keirsey says. He asks the firm to find him an assignment in the Middle East, where he knows the action is going to shift.
In February, there’s a kind of on-the-job, inhospitable-environment audition. Morning Star’s D.C. men fly him down to Washington, fix him with a visa, a digital camera, an international cell phone, then spend the afternoon combing bookstores for the relevant Lonely Planet guide. “They couldn’t find it,” Hank chuckles, “so I got a little brief from these two guys in their closet.” A day later, he squints off the tarmac in Africa. His mission is to evaluate politics, security and stability in the large coastal city where an American firm plans to locate a refinery. “I’m reconning for extreme circumstances—if everything went into a Uganda scenario where people started eating each other, machetes come down off the wall, how are this company’s employees gonna respond, where are they gonna go?”
He’s entered into a strange shadow world—like the ghosts you get on bad TV reception—with no staff, no uniform, no weapons; and he’s happier than he’s been in two years. “It’s a kick,” he says, “like going into any other operation.” The old situational awareness comes back, the tightness in the belly and the sharpened eyes. He noses around consulates, police stations, docksides and landing strips, taking notes, snapping photos. When local troops and police give him trouble, he takes their picture, shows them their likeness captured in the back of his camera. They smile and wave him along.
From his hotel room balcony he phones his son. J.D. is apprehensive, on the verge of Ranger school. As Hank stares over the baked, rotting town, he advises his son. “You cannot help but be amused if you try and remove yourself from your own unpleasant experience. And look at the other people suffering around you. You’ll never learn more about human character. So you develop poise and dignity in tough situations, just by being in tough situations.”
Hank’s job has its own eye-fucking qualities. Dusty streets unmarked by road signs—they’re pinched for use as roof shingles—French CNN murmuring above hotel bars, strange lizards and bats, sweating Europeans, Mad Max van drivers, year-old wrecks abandoned by the roadside, cat-eyed prostitutes, Muslims making the Hajj, sidewalk merchants offering to sell you shoes, snacks, water, animal hides, balancing the goods on their heads. Cabaret singers perform silky and perfect renditions of American pop; when Keirsey tries striking up a conversation, they know no English, they’ve memorized vowel patterns off the jukebox. And everywhere he finds a shifting backdrop of bulky men—with haircuts and experimental beards just like Hank’s—conducting spectral missions like his own. “You pick them out automatically from a mass of faces,” Hanks explains. “It’s quite obvious. Just as I’m quite obvious to them. Then we go up like dogs sniffing each other’s butt.” He’ll ask, “SAS?” They say yes, then ask, “U.S. Army? The Division?” “Yeah,” Keirsey answers, “once upon a time.”
At night, nobody ventures out on the roads—“that’s the bad time”—so Hank curls at a seat in the hotel bar. There are South Africans everywhere, expatriates working the oil rigs, servicing vending machines, checking livestock. As they grow comfortable, their talk turns to the kaffirs—blacks: they are slow, lazy, hopeless. Hank puts down his drink. “Wait a second,” he says, “that’s not true. I went into combat with a lot of African-American guys. These were fired-up men, excellent soldiers. They woulda given their lives for anybody in the unit, and I would’ve done anything for them.” There’s a buzz at the table, the South Africans deciding whether to let Keirsey in on the truth. Finally one of the men nods, drops his voice. “Over in America,” he says, “you got all of the good ones.”
In the spring, Keirsey earns the job he wanted. Morning Star will deploy him to the Persian Gulf. He’ll train local soldiers in an
ti-terrorism techniques. As the region braces for the war’s next phase, Keirsey will do his bit to make things a little safer when Americans like his son finally arrive. He packs in his early-morning bedroom, chill drawing in under the windows. “I’ll tell you what, there’s a tension in the belly,” he says. He pushes shirts and equipment—binos, compasses—into his duffel, along with lotion that will keep his hands from cracking in the desert. “Every time I used to deploy, I couldn’t sleep. Not worrying that your unit was gonna get waxed, but that you were not gonna be able to accomplish your mission.”
Kathy drives him to the airport; he’ll be away for a few months, and the separation feels normal. When something happens, the abnormal thing would be for Keirsey to stay home. As they cut through morning traffic, Hank grows quiet. At the curbside he hugs his wife tightly without saying anything. Then he pulls on his cap, shoulders his duffel and walks through the automatic doors, heading out on a solo deployment because two and a half years ago he did a brave thing. He has instructed Kathy not to wait around, but she edges the car forward, trying to keep her husband in sight as long as she can. “There’s his doggone hat,” she says. “Now he’s getting on the line.” A few minutes later she says, “He’s the only guy with a duffel.” Then she says, “Now I can’t see him anymore.”
A few weeks later he phones J.D., to congratulate him on finishing Ranger school. When J.D. asks how he’s doing, Hank jokes, “Just another day making the world safe for democracy”—what he always used to say in the Army. Then he thinks of the sort of kingdom he’s consulting in. “No, wait, correction—scratch that. Making the world safe for a dictatorship.”
Black Sheep
Last April, Huck Finn swigged Gatorade on North Area, watched the muddy survivors limp in from Sandhurst and guaranteed Mark Thompson he’d make the same walk next year. At West Point, promises cling to you like smoke; the only way to clear the air is by making good. In mid-January, Huck pushed into the day room for G-4’s first Sandhurst meeting. The team waiting there was an anxious-eyed herd of plebes and yuks. Huck was a football player—an ex–football player—and Sandhurst isn’t something football players do. “So who’s the squad leader?” Huck asked.