by David Lipsky
George slumps out of the captain’s office, no longer debating the pluses and minuses of Goathood; he’s wondering how he could possibly come up with $250,000. “I don’t know that many people my age who can afford that kind of debt,” he says, walking to his room. “Unless they’re rich. Or they got really, really lucky on day trading.”
Throughout the year, TACs are counselors, role models, disciplinarians. In the weeks before graduation, they assume a final role: tailors. The firsties have received their Army uniforms, and TACs are subject-matter experts on how the uniforms ought to be worn. Cadets flicker through the day room one by one; Captain Paredes checks inseams, approves collars and buttons. “Looks good, looks sharp,” he’ll say. “The dimple in the tie,” he explains solemnly to Huck, “is the sign of the well-dressed man.” Then he teaches the cadet how to create one. “It’s supposed to be the four-in-hand, what I’m showing you is the full half Windsor. Try that on your own now, huah.”
George’s last APFT is scheduled for the same afternoon as his uniform check. With two hours left, George buttons the shirt, knots the tie, pins on his branch insignia. It’s the uniform he’s worked four years to wear; if he fails his run, he won’t get to put it on again. He clicks down the hallway to the day room. Cadets greet him cheerfully. “You look pretty spiffy, George—for a no-account butter bar.” He stands at attention before the TAC, fists balled at his sides. Both men avoid what ought to be the only topic. What they discuss instead is shirt size.
“OK,” Captain Paredes says. “This is very loose. This shirt is, what, eighteen–thirty-five? You want to try seventeen and a half.” He hangs a few fingers inside George’s collar. “Look at this: I should barely be able to get one finger in here.”
He moves down to George’s arm. “Just checking the sleeve length. Looks good.” He slaps George on the stomach. “How’s it feel here?”
“Pretty good, sir,” George says. “I did just eat a large meal.”
Back in barracks, George hangs up the uniform and changes into gym alpha. He sits and waits for the clock to tick around to his APFT. As he walks the halls, cadets give him the eye and a nod. “George, good luck.”
After forty-seven months, the Army has finally caught up to George Rash. Cadets who turn twenty-two at West Point receive an APFT gift. George now has sixteen and a half minutes to complete the two-mile course. It’s a gorgeous spring afternoon. Winds cool, sun high. George admires the conditions on a practical level. “I could’ve waited and taken this two weeks from now,” he says. “But the weather’s so beautiful, I’m probably not gonna get a better chance. Either way,” he says, “it’s my last APFT. Fly or die.”
George steps downhill toward Gillis. There’s the advice Jake Bergman yelled at him plebe year: “You never quit. You don’t ever give them the chance to end your career. You never let them make that decision for you. Never.” There’s also the musclehead’s old game plan: coast through the push-ups and sit-ups, conserve everything for the track. George enters the mats and echoes of the field house. It’s crowded, a hundred cross-legged cadets fanning themselves with their APFT cards. “This is a record retest,” the Department of Physical Education’s Major Cuppett announces. “If you fail today, I will send up a packet, signed by the Master of the Sword, recommending separation from the Academy. This is your one shot. You will be tested on pushups. You will be tested on the sit-ups. Then the two-mile run: this is a test of fitness and endurance. Troops, don’t fail this test.”
Push-ups come first. George removes his glasses, a passing DPE officer recognizes him by his neck and back, wishes him luck. George cuts off at fifty. Then he curls and grunts through sixty sit-ups, stopping with nearly a minute left. Another DPE officer wishes him the best on the rest of the exam.
George shifts to the final station. Cadets waiting for the run tug their bodies through an alphabet of stretches. “Last event,” the DPE captain says. “OK, raise your hands if this is your final APFT.” Arms go up, George’s hand joins the thicket. “For most of you,” the captain says, “this event should be the easiest. Now, I’ll need to collect your scoring cards. George, please hand me that guy over there’s card.” Every officer at Gillis—a homey, frightening touch—knows him now.
“Guys,” the captain continues, “when you are running the course, a lot of you might feel the need the get rid of some stuff that’s in your stomachs. Huah, that’s OK, I don’t mind that. You’re giving it all you’ve got, lactic acid is a byproduct. But please, please, don’t do it near the finish line. Come across the line. Wait till fifty yards past the line. Because people behind you would greatly appreciate it if you do not throw up on the line. Huah? OK, you have exactly three minutes to complete your final stretches.” George clicks his neck, pulls back his ankles; four hard years come down to this.
Outside, the officers announce, “OK, move over to the starting line. By our clock, you have one minute.” George murmurs to himself, “I need to do it now.” The officers call the numbers: “Five, four, three, two, one. Go.”
Fifteen minutes and twenty-six seconds later, when George Rash has beaten both his new senior’s run standard and his plebe-year time, I ask how he feels. He smiles, wipes his forehead, answers with two words. “Damn good.”
A few moments later he adds proudly, “That’s my second-best time ever. No, wait, no. It’s not my second best, but it’s a high score. It’s right up there.”
Wherever he walks—across the Plain, through G-4—cadets stop him, ask how it went, slap him on the back. Higher declines Captain Paredes’s advice to separate George. As regimental XO, it falls on Major Vermeesch to make the call to his replacement, to explain the administration’s position. “George met the standard. And that’s all you can say. It’s the standard, and you can’t dispute it.”
A day later, George rides up to the big PX to purchase the smaller shirt size Captain Paredes suggested. He knows he’s going to graduate. “It’s been a long four years. I took a bumpier path, but I got there. It’s the path I had to take.” I ask George how it feels to be leaving. I say it’s been a strange year. I mean: the September attacks, graduating into a war, the new TAC, Scott Mellon getting separated, George nearly being separated himself.
George considers it, nods. “Yes it has,” he says. “Very mild winter, very cool spring.” He thinks some more, adds, “On average.”
Once an Eagle
A few weeks before graduation, Huck Finn gets offered a free-agent contract to snap punts and field goals with the New York Giants. The nod comes while he’s spending a weekend on Long Island. The NFL draft just concluded an hour before. “We’ve got you the deal,” the sports agent says. “We just need to hear that you’re not going into the Army.”
It’s the kind of large news that requires heavy telephone work for ballast. The agent calls Huck’s coach, Huck’s coach calls Huck, the agent calls again, Huck calls the coach. (“I’m going ninety miles a minute,” Huck says. Fuhball is what brought him into the Army; it astonishes him to think that it will be taking him out of the Army too.) The agent calls back with specific instructions, “All we need now is confirmation from a West Point general, and you’re suiting up for the Giants.”
Huck goes at things straight ahead, freestyle; he gets hold of the commandant’s number from information—“Eric T. Olson,” he says, “General, West Point, New York”—phones him Sunday evening at 1900. The general invites him to come by the house. When Huck arrives it’s after 2200, the commandant is dressed in pajamas and offers Huck a dish of ice cream. (“I said ‘No, thank you,’” Huck says. “So he fixes himself a dish, sits down to it cool as can be.”) They discuss the matter, the general grows quiet for a few moments. Huck says, “So what the Giants need now is a general’s phone number, somebody who knows how the whole deal works with this thing.” The comm says, “Well, I can tell you right now there’s nobody here to talk to like that, because the current policy is two years active duty if you’re going into the professional leagu
es.” So Huck drives over and wakes up the football coach.
It isn’t just the salary that’s attractive, though it is a whopping figure: the league minimum, Huck learns, is $800,000 a year. Repeating the number to friends doesn’t make it any more believable; he finally has to break the sum down to a per-play basis—“it’s something like, uh, $25,000 a snap,” Huck says—which helps turn things easier to picture. Sandhurst aside, football has provided every high point of his life. He still plans on serving as an officer; what he bargains for is a year. “Just one season, then I’ll go do my Army shit. That’d be damn cool, if you ask me—to say I played for a season in the NFL.” The coach tells Huck to arrange a graduate assistant’s slot for the next academic year. Usually, the spots go to lieutenants with pressing reasons for sticking close to West Point—an injury, an ailing local relative, a fiancée finishing college at an area school.
Huck lines up a job with a sympathetic colonel in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership. (Huck is direct with the officer. “Sir, I want you to understand before you answer—I’m not asking to be a GA to help you out, I’m asking so I can play football.”) Then he arranges to report to Benning on February 3, after his pro season ends. Since it’s slightly larger than college size, he’s got to find an NFL football for practice; he’s got to memorize all new plays; he’s got to pile back on the twenty-five pounds he dropped for Sandhurst. He buys creampuffs to keep on his shelf, scans restaurant menus for carbohydrates and desserts. “Banana chimichanga?” he asks, pointing. “Lots of calories in there, right? Fill it up, throw some topping on that, load it with whipped cream big-time, straight fat to the face. And have y’all got any cheesecake?” All he needs now is for the supe to sign his GA form.
And then, a week later, Huck gets scheduled for a 1330 meeting in the comm’s office. The Giants’ coach telephones at 1300 to read him his football itinerary. Practice starts the day following graduation. “June 2,” the coach says, “here’s where you’re gonna be staying; here’s what you’re gonna be doing at Monday practice, Tuesday practice, Wednesday practice. We’re sending up the drills and the blocking moves. And stop worrying about the footballs—we’ll deliver a box of league-size balls in the morning.” A few minutes later, Huck is sitting in a stiff chair, listening to the comm tell him there won’t be any football.
“I wasn’t going to go, ‘Sir—but sir, please,’” Huck says. “Because this is the frickin’ Army. When they make up their mind, there’s no negotiation, it’s done.” Huck lists back to his room, places his last NFL business call. “To the agent,” he says. “Man was in shock.”
The cadet isn’t a grudge holder. The way the rule works, he can try the NFL again two years from now. “But I’m not planning on it at all,” Huck says, voice tired from phone calls to parents and friends back home. “Right now I’ve got Ranger school to think about, then Korea, then I intend on trying out for the Ranger regiment—high-speed stuff. That’s the shit I wanted Infantry for in the first place.” (Half a year later, Huck training at Fort Benning, the Giants will be knocked out of the playoffs because their long-snapper botches the snap on a field goal attempt, and Huck will receive e-mail from just about every person he knows.)
The NFL word speeds around the post. A few days later, when Huck is spending eight hours on the Area by order of Captain Paredes, a sergeant flags him down. “Hey, man,” the NCO asks, “aren’t you supposed to be a Giant?” A cadet—a bitter-looking yuk Huck doesn’t recognize—stops him on the Plain and just looks him over. “Wow,” the yuk finally says. “I realize I have no room anymore to ever complain about this place.”
As graduation stops being weeks away, and cadets start measuring the time in days and then hours, a fear sweeps the class. The firsties have grown so close, the notion of breaking apart and living separately is painful. It hits Huck hard; he started out hating West Point—spent years kicking back every way a cadet can—and now he doesn’t want to leave.
“No, I want to stay,” he says. “This shit’s fun. They feed us three hot meals a day, we get a nice bed every night, they even do our laundry.” Walking home from another hours formation, he throws his hands open wide. “I mean, what do I got to worry about in this place? And how the hell do I make it on the outside in the Army? I know I’ve learned how to fuckin’ keep my room real clean,” he says. “I know I can fold my shirts and my underwear and roll up my socks right. But can I think for myself? I guess I’ve learned to rely too much on other people—Captain Paredes is right about that shit. Officers keep asking everybody, ‘Are you all ready to get outta here?’ Well, no, I’m not. I wanna stay in, bro. I love it here.”
He lowers his big hands. “But then, every one of ’em are like, ‘You’re a whole lot more prepared than you think you are.’”
Cadets are changing. Eliel finds himself leafing through the old antiwar classic Johnny Got His Gun (“I don’t agree with it, and a lot of it is a shock, but it’s something you’ve got to expose yourself to”) and shifting his position on marijuana use. “Not for me—I’ll never do it—but for my friends, I think pot’s great, better for the system than beer.” Matt Kilgore finds himself worrying about his chosen field from an unforeseen angle. “My fiancée hasn’t wanted to really find out exactly what I do yet,” Matt says. “And she has yet to watch any movies like We Were Soldiers or Black Hawk Down, because she’s not ready for that either. But I was at her house Sunday, flipping around, we started watching Band of Brothers, the HBO series. And she saw the patch the guys have on their arms, which is the same patch I’m going to wear. She asked, ‘Isn’t that the 101st Airborne?’ Yep. And the scene was like some big artillery barrage, they were just getting the crap pounded out of them. She’s like, ‘Honey, what’s all that stuff?’ That’s artillery. She goes, ‘And what job is it you’re going to be doing again?’ I pointed and said, ‘I’m like the little guy jumping into the foxhole to get away from all that shit.’ And her mouth gets small and she goes, ‘Oh.’”
And the post is changing. Rumors about regulations and privileges work their way through next year’s firsties and cows. Tighter enforcement, tougher inspections, less time off post. The administration is even mounting a comeback for pinging—the fast-walking, tight-cornering stride that made plebes unmistakable in the Old Corps. “We all joke that we’re escaping from the Death Star,” Eliel says. “Just barely getting out in time. The pendulum has swung, this place is going back to spartan conditions.” Eliel looks out the window. “I think West Point has just been going through an identity crisis for the last five years, people turning from one idea to another. And now they know where they want to go.”
This new set of changes thrills officers on post. “I think we’ve been trying to anticipate what society wants from the Military Academy here,” one explains. “And I don’t think that’s even necessarily what society wanted.” For many of these soldiers, September 11 clarified exactly what society does want: technically competent and tactically superior leaders. “I think the supe and some others have started to look around and ask, ‘What happened? What have we done to this place?’ To Mom and Dad America—if their son or daughter is fortunate enough to come here, if they get that honor and privilege and all that—when those parents send ’em here, they don’t expect them to be immersed in the same kind of culture they just left.” The officer swallows. “It ought to be better than that. It ought to be special. And if it isn’t, then we might as well lock the gates, run the place as a museum, ship the cadets to Central Arizona State and train them in ROTC. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I know a hundred great ROTC officers. But there’s supposed to be something special about West Point.”
Grad Week sets out with long days and crisp mornings, roaring industrial fans blowing the heat down the corridors. By Wednesday, parents are everywhere, walking on either side of their children like cadet assembly kits. Families watch the parades, forming colorful rows on the bleachers; with their civilian backgrounds, the bright un
iforms and careful syncopation must make the same amount of ritual sense as Riverdance. For two years, Chrissi Cicerelle has never been far from her family; her sister Marie is now a yuk, and has been torturing Chrissi all week. “She keeps reminding me, ‘This is your last Monday. This is your last Tuesday. This could be your last sandwich in Grant Hall. This is your last walk back from Grant Hall on a Wednesday.’ But of course she’s right. Come Saturday, this will all be gone. And I’m scared to say goodbye to everybody, considering what’s going on right now. My friends in Infantry might well be in some kind of combat a year from now, and that terrifies me.”
Chrissi is thinking about herself in Quartermaster, too. “I’m gonna be responsible for forty men and women. And that just blows me away. I really do think this place prepares us—but the thought just blows my mind.” Chrissi is already staring down the line, to life after the Army. “I’ve decided what I’m kind of interested in is hair and makeup. I told my dad, he just threw his hands up. He’s like, ‘So you went to West Point and want to do hair.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ So I think there’s a school—there’s obviously beauty school, but that sounds so trivial. If I could, I’d like to go somewhere like Vidal Sassoon, or someplace else upscale, with a name that will carry me. I think it would be awesome.” And when she thinks about West Point, she’ll think about Mark Thompson. “Oh,” she says, “he was my West Point. He really was.”