Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point

by David Lipsky

Overview

New York Times Bestseller: A “fascinating, funny and tremendously well written” chronicle of daily life at the US Military Academy (Time).
 
In 1998, West Point made an unprecedented offer to Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky: Stay at the Academy as long as you like, go wherever you wish, talk to whomever you want, to discover why some of America’s most promising young people sacrifice so much to become cadets. Lipsky followed one cadet class into mess halls, barracks, classrooms, bars, and training exercises, from arrival through graduation. By telling their stories, he also examines the Academy as a reflection of our society: Are its principles of equality, patriotism, and honor quaint anachronisms or is it still, as Theodore Roosevelt called it, the most “absolutely American” institution?
 
During an eventful four years in West Point’s history, Lipsky witnesses the arrival of TVs and phones in dorm rooms, the end of hazing, and innumerable other shifts in policy and practice. He uncovers previously unreported scandals and poignantly evokes the aftermath of September 11, when cadets must prepare to become officers in wartime.
 
Lipsky also meets some extraordinary people: a former Eagle Scout who struggles with every facet of the program, from classwork to marching; a foul-mouthed party animal who hates the military and came to West Point to play football; a farm-raised kid who seems to be the perfect soldier, despite his affection for the early work of Georgia O’Keeffe; and an exquisitely turned-out female cadet who aspires to “a career in hair and nails” after the Army.
 
The result is, in the words of David Brooks in the New York Times Book Review, “a superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life I have read. . . . How teenagers get turned into leaders is not a simple story, but it is wonderfully told in this book.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547523750
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	399,162
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

David Lipsky’s books have been Time magazine and NPR Best Books of the Year as well as New York Times and USA Today bestsellers. He has received the National Magazine Award and the GLAAD Media Award, and his work has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing and The Best American Short Stories. Lipsky is the author of 5 books, including Three Thousand Dollars, The Art Fair, Absolutely American, and Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. In 2015, the latter became a motion picture directed by James Ponsoldt, starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg. Lipsky currently teaches at New York University.

Read an Excerpt

Absolutely American

Four Years at West Point

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By David Lipsky

Houghton Mifflin

Copyright © 2014 David Lipsky
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-547-52375-0

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Preface I came to love, really love, road marching. It’s called a suck or a haze at West Point, but I think the cadets aren’t being fair to it. There’s something wonderful about being in a column of marching people: the gravel popping under soles, the leather flexing in boots, the kind of saddle-top sounds as the ruck (what a backpack gets called in the Army) frames settle. Occasionally someone, out of sheer misery, sighing Oooh, or just blowing out air, which in the general silence is like a whale breaching and then slipping back under the surface. You can watch a leaf float down from a tree or stare at the guy’s rifle in front of you. The boiling down of life to its basic questions: Can you do this? What kind of person are you, and what can you make yourself finish? Can you hang with the rest of us? Those questions don’t get asked much, in the civilian world.
One night I got stuck with a West Point company that was spending the entire evening on patrol in the woods. They had brought ponchos in their rucks and I hadn’t. It was about two in the morning when the rain started. A nice earth-smelling drizzle at first. Then it became a pretty hard, thundery storm. I’d never noticed that rain makes different noises on different articles of clothing: a kind of spreading, sinking hiss into a shirt, a loud spattery ploink! on jeans. One of the cadets offered me his poncho, but of course you couldn’t accept it. In the dark, I found my way to two trees that had grown so close together that their upper branches formed a canopy. I obviously wasn’t going to sleep, so I marched back and forth all night under this umbrella, rain dripping into my ears and down over my lips. Then, in the morning, at five, everyone shook themselves off and we marched again.
I never liked the military at all as a kid. My father told us it was the one profession we couldn’t pursue: if my brother or I joined up, he promised to hire strong guys to come break our legs. In his eyes, compared to the military, hired leg-breaking was an act of kindness. So when Rolling Stone magazine first assigned me to write about the United States Military Academy, I fought it. And I mean fought hard, as hard as you can fight Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann Wenner, who can be firm and cajoling in a kind of (at least to a writer) irresistible way. When I gave in, and traveled to West Point, I was followed by members of the Academy’s Public Affairs Office. They chose the people I could speak with, they sat in on the interviews. I saw my way out; I was thrilled and relieved. I said I could not do the story under those circumstances, and I left. A few days later the colonel who oversees the daily management of West Point—Joe Adamczyk, a thin, steely man the cadets nicknamed Skeletor—called back to say it was fine. There would be no one picking out ideal cadets for me to interview, no one escorting me, no doors closed. I could have the run of the place. “We have nothing of which we should be ashamed,” he said.
So that was the first step toward my love of road marching. Very different from my original idea of the Army. And there was no avoiding the story anymore.
It had all seemed so foreign, a kind of dense green forest. Slowly, the trees parted a little, enough for me to step inside, and then I could feel the basic goodness of the place. As I listened to the cadets and understood how they were living, I had a strange, funny thought. Not only was the Army not the awful thing my father had imagined, it was the sort of America he always pictured when he explained (this would happen every four years, during an election cycle) his best hopes for the country. A place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybody—or at least most people—looked out for each other. A place where people—intelligent, talented people—said honestly that money wasn’t what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings and about trying to make themselves better.
One reason Rolling Stone wanted me on the story was that I’d become a kind of young-person specialist. You specialize at a magazine. On news stories, I mainly covered universities and students. I must have traveled to about thirty-five colleges in the five years before I first went to West Point. From tiny places like Wisconsin’s obscure, homemade- feeling Beloit to a thirty-thousand-student factory like the University of Georgia at Athens to places like Harvard and Yale that made me feel like maybe I wasn’t changing my socks often enough. I’d also written about young TV actors and the young rich and young media executives, people who had every reason to be consistently delighted. And of all the young people I’d met, the West Point cadets—althoughh they are grand, epic complainers— were the happiest. That was probably step two on the path toward my love of road marching.
Herrrrre’s three: My friends had reached the phase, in their early thirties, when things slow down and you can relax and look around yourself again for maybe the first time since college. Before that, life is like sticking your head out the window of a fast-moving car: everything is rushing at you, flattening back your skin, your eyes are blinking and you can barely overhear your own thoughts. Most of those thoughts are “Will I find a job?” and “Can I find a partner?” and “What kind of life am I going to have?” By the early thirties, this stuff had quieted down, and my friends were thinking, “OK, I’ve found a life.” And then the second part hit: “Is this the life I want? Does the job I’m doing matter to anyone else?” It was right at this time that the Army and the Academy dawned on me, and I saw what it meant to live as a group, to share experiences, and to have that sense that other people were honestly looking out for you. And I have to say, that looked pretty good to me too.
And so, a road march. Everyone dressed the same. Everyone with a clear assignment: You will depart from this first point and you will arrive at this second point, and it will be clear to you when you have accomplished this. It will be difficult (in the Army, they say challenging). In place of the anxiety that comes from jobs that involve only the brain, the pleasure of a task that would engage the entire body. When cadets faltered, other cadets would softly encourage them. “Come on. You can do this. I know you can do this.” The sound of the boots and the smell of the road and the sun on the leaves and this soft, encouraging undertone. When cadets fell, other cadets would move forward, lift them up. I remember, during my first road marches, feeling simply blessed.

The magazine originally treated the assignment, when it began in 1998, as a journalistic public service. That summer, the West Point superintendent, a three-star general, had parked with some other military leaders at the sort of big roadside welcome center that features a TCBY and a Great American Pretzel Company (so that even rest stops offer the channel-surfing pleasures of a mall) and where there is usually one restaurant with sit-down service. The superintendent was wearing his green class-B uniform, and so were the hungry officers in his party. The hostess looked him up and down, from polished shoes to epaulets, then she smiled and thanked him for the selfless work he was doing as a member of the Parks Department. The superintendent wondered if maybe the gap between the civilian and military worlds hadn’t become too large. A few weeks later, the superintendent and the commandant arrived at the Rolling Stone offices in their full uniforms, marching past black-and-white photographs of Eric Clapton and framed guitars. The initial idea was for me to spend a few weeks on post, follow around a bunch of plebes, write something short. I ended up staying most of the year.
When that time was over, I didn’t believe the story was fully told. I decided to rent a house in Highland Falls, and stayed until the plebe class graduated four years later—the only time West Point has let a writer in for such an extended tour of hanging out. I saw cadets in combat with themselves, unlearning many of the skills and instincts that had brought them to West Point; I saw some cadets thriving; I saw lots of suffering (academic, physical, homesickness); I saw spot meanness and acts of great generosity. My friends were full of questions: What kinds of people still wanted such a regimented life? Why would cadets willingly put themselves through it? Didn’t they realize the way they were living was out-of-date? Those were questions I set out to answer. But I mostly wanted to give people the experience of spending forty-seven months at the United States Military Academy, an experience that only around sixty thousand people have had since the place got up and running two centuries ago. I learned how to read a uniform and how to tie many types of knots. I learned that soldiers are people—that when I flip on the news and there’s some officer in a helmet standing before a tank, I’m looking at someone a lot like myself, who’s lived through most of the same events I have, eats the same drive-through, can trace the same internal map of favorite movie dialogue and TV scenes, but who has made the decision to put on a uniform and serve in the nation’s military.
I’ve changed the names of several cadets, mostly at their request, including people involved in an honor hearing and three cadets who endured various hardships—a consuming relationship, loss of rank, separation from the Academy. Scott Mellon, Kim Wilkins, Loryn Winter, Nick Calabanos, Mrs. Como, Virginia Whistler and James Edgar are fictitious names—real people under a verbal false nose and eyeglasses. Otherwise, the names and nicknames in this book are the cadets’ real ones. I followed the men and women of one company, G-4, from the months they arrived at West Point until the day they graduated; this is their story.

Copyright © 2003 by David Lipsky. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Absolutely American by David Lipsky. Copyright © 2014 David Lipsky. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents Preface xi Part One THE FIRST YEAR • 1 Part Two THE SECOND YEAR • 81 Part Three THE THIRD YEAR • 139 Part Four THE FOURTH YEAR • 243 Bibliography 313 Acknowledgments 315

Editorial Reviews

…Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point, a superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life I have read. Lipsky follows several cadets and faculty members through their years at the academy, and their stories are the most powerful parts of this book. — David Brooks

The New York Times

In 1998, the commandants at West Point offered the author, a Rolling Stone reporter, unfettered access to their students. The result is a sunny portrait of a group of young men and women who, as one of them says, "don't quite fit in." Lipsky touches on some recent, controversial attempts at modernizing the academy -- such as a ban on hazing and the promotion of "consideration of others" (which in the context of the Army could, in an "extreme instance," mean jumping on a grenade to save the lives of your fellow-soldiers) -- but he is more effective as a chronicler of personality than of politics. A cadet defaces his uniform to protest softening standards; a bodybuilder worries that his future wife, following him from post to post, won't have a career; a football star fears life after graduation, wondering, "Can I think for myself?" Though initially ill-disposed toward the military, Lipsky eventually found that "of all the young people I'd met, the West Point cadets -- although they are grand, epic complainers -- were the happiest."

The New Yorker

This superb group portrait of the corps of cadets at West Point focuses on the four years of Company G-4, "the Fighting Guppies." Entering in 1999, just after hazing was abolished, its cadets graduated into the post-September 11 world. They include all sorts and conditions of people, as well as, these days, both sexes (women are 14% of the corps of cadets) and varied class, ethnic and national backgrounds. Rolling Stone reporter Lipsky (The Art Fair) focuses on cadets like George Rash, repeatedly passing the physical fitness tests by the skin of his teeth if at all, but finding support and comradeship that eventually brings him to graduation into the Engineers. Then there is "Huck" Finn, a hulking football player whom no one would suspect of leadership qualities until he leads his team to victory in a military-skills competition. Dan Herzog graduates just as G-4 enters and spends four years wrestling with what he wants out of the army (not broken romances), and Col. Henry Keirsey is forced out of the army for backing a subordinate who made a non-PC joke. Lipsky is evenhanded with the Keirsey affair and with other controversial aspects of both the military in general and West Point in particular, even if his prose occasionally lapses into infelicitous journalese. Ultimately, he came to respect and know the people he was following, future officers of the U.S. Army in a world at war. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Lipsky, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, was assigned a story about the U.S. Military Academy and became so interested he stayed for four years. This extremely in-depth examination of cadet life explores the history of the academy, the intense physical and intellectual regimen, and the academy as a reflection of our society. Clearly there is, as there has been for 200 years, a role in this country for a professional military, and the academy must develop its curriculum, ethos, and lifestyle as an institution both within and separate from American society. Lipsky had unprecedented access and spent considerable time with students and faculty, unsupervised by the academy. He stayed from 1998 to 2002, an extremely turbulent period that saw the end of hazing, allowing television and telephones in the dorm rooms, changes in training and attitude by the faculty, and the life-changing events of 9/11. While generally sympathetic, Lipsky does not hesitate to report problems that arise, paying attention to the students who fail for academic, physical, or moral shortcomings or simply opt out. Written in a style and vernacular that will be more familiar to readers of the magazine than to scholarly works, this is essentially a popular, though serious, study. Highly recommended for most libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/03.]-Edwin B. Burgess, Combined Arms Research Lib., Ft. Leavenworth, KS Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A superb description of modern military culture and one of the most gripping accounts of university life. . . . Powerful. . . . Wonderfully told.” –The New York Times Book Review

"David Lipsky's up close and personal account of life at West Point is a national service. It takes the reader deep inside one of America's most important institutions.”—Tom Brokaw

“Addictive . . . a story that could inspire even nonmilitary buffs to follow the cadets’ careers like those of their favorite sports heroes.” –Newsweek

“A fascinating, funny and tremendously well written account of life on the Long Gray Line. Take a good look: this is the face America turns to most of the world, and until now it’s one that most of us have never seen."—Time

“Immesely rich. . . . A genuinely evocative and wonderfully detailed portrait of an absolutely American institution.” –Newsday
“Wonderfully engaging, a surprisingly nuanced portrait of these cadets.”—The Atlanta Journal-Consitution

"Duty, Honor, Casual Sex: Plain American hedonism is powerful at West Point, David Lipsky found, but so are discipline and self-sacrifice . . . A superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life I have read. This book must have been extremely hard to organize, and yet it reads with a novelistic flow. How teenagers get turned into leaders is not a simple story, but it is wonderfully told in this book." –David Brooks, The New York Times Book Review

“A labour of love. While Lipsky’s friends back home wrestled with nagging, existential questions, he steeped himself in the demanding yet salubrious routines of cadet life, reveling in the youngsters’ comaraderie and marveling at their commitment to the academy’s core values, “Duty, Honor, Country.” The result is an immensely rich collection of portraits of young men and women put under very adult pressure by an insitution that itself must constantly adapt to the society around it. Lipsky [establishes] a dramatic tension that holds for the next 300-plus pages. [A] genuinely evocative and wonderfully detailed portrait of an absolutely American institution.”–Newsday

“A fascinating, funny and tremendously well written account of life on the Long Gray Line. Lipsky approaches the cadets like an anthropologist stalking the elusive Yanomamo tribe, and with good reason: he’s in a weird, weird place. Take a good look: this is the face America turns to most of the world, and until now it’s one that most of us have never seen. A mesmerizing and powerfully human spectacle”–Time Magazine

“Masculinity has traditionally been associated with the military. Absolutely American, which vividly traces West Point cadets through their four years at the Academy, deals with both sexes and tells a lot about the changing definitions and conditions of masculinity and femininity in the new century.”–Elaine Showalter, The Washington Post Book World

“Illuminating. . .Lipsky has done a distinguished service to a proud school.”–Entertainment Weekly

“Although confined to one geographic area, Absolutely American covers a vast sociological, political and psychological landscape. . .neither an institutional hagiography nor a scathing, Seymour Hersh-like exposé, [this] is an assiduously researched, evenhanded examination that focuses on the changing value systems of the institution and the people who experience those changes. Lipsky has written an important, insightful book on the current state of our premier military academy and on the intrepid first West Point class to enter the War on Terrorism.”–Houston Chronicle

“A sunny portrait of group of young men and women. . .[Lipsky] is effective as a chronicler of personality.”–The New Yorker

“Lipsky is fascinated by the rigors of the academy and how a divers group of young men and women struggle with its challenges. He achieves the impressive feat of writing from inside cadet culture.Unusually complete and perceptive. . Lipsky’s understanding of their lives is remarkable.”–Chicago Tribune

“Wonderfully engaging, a surprisingly nuanced portrait of these cadets.”–The Atlanta Journal-Consitution

“Most will be delighted to find a new twist on the subject of military education. This book shows that West Point thrives under resilient leadership and a class of future officers that is human, while still being moral, real and enthusiastic. In short, this book is "huah."–San Antonio Express-News

"A once-skeptical Rolling Stone writer spends four years watching teamwork, hard work and self-sacrifice gain meaning for fledgling Army officers, children of a society that glorifies consumerism, individualism and instant gratification."–Providence Journal-Bulletin

“Whether Lipsky is trudging through the woods with tired and hungry cadets or sitting in on barracks-room bull sessions, he marvels at the sense of duty he finds. Wonderfully upbeat. . .a charming book.”–St-Louis Post-Dispatch

“An unprecedentedly in-depth examination . . . [at a time] when all the lessons and discipline, which seemed anachronistic in the sunny days of peace, prove suddenly, vividly necessary.”–Men’s Journal

“A richly anecdotal portrait of West Point during one of the most dramatic transitional phases in its 200-year history.”–The Onion

"Superb"–Publisher's Weekly

“An exhaustive and very human account of West Point and its cadets.”–The New York Observer

“Freshman could learn a lot by reflecting on a book that suggests that the main problem with traditional American values is that we do such a poor job of living up to them. So could we all.”–Charlotte News & Observer

“Goes inside the walls of the academy to discover and portray the cadets and the officers who train them, giving civilians an up-close look at the real West Point experience. [Lipsky] captures the language, emotion, history and motivation of the extraordinary people he profiles. Illuminating. . .captivating and compelling.”–The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)

“[Lipsky] followed [the cadets] into mess halls, barracks, classrooms, bars and training exercises. He watched them do push-ups, polish their shoes, get drunk, cry, trhow up and grow up. Lipsky chronicles it all. . . [it] reads like a novel.”–Alabama Mobile Register

"Highly Recommended"–Library Journal (starred review).

“The latest, best, and I hope the last of its kind. Shows what West Point does. . .taking apathetic and uncommitted young people and developing them into talented, capable officers, sometimes in spite of themsleves…. Illuminates the real, human complexities of the Military Academy.”–Army Magazine

"Lipsky takes up the problems of maintaining West Point's unique culture—the military squared and cubed—in the face of a general culture that offers a host of temptations....Outstanding."–Booklist.

“[Told in a] breathless narrative fashion that routinely builds each anecdote to a climactic finale. This formula provides some of the most memorable passages in the book. These vignettes [can] sound like clichés, [but] the message here is that in an age of irony and cynicism, West Point proudly embracés such clichés, and Lipsky ear for dialogue and his eye for specific detail breath life into these chapters. Lipsky’s book stands out as the most accurate and engrossing look at West Point, warts and all, as it exists today.”–Pointer View

From the Publisher

A recent graduate from West Point, David Lipsky narrates his account of contemporary training for male and female officers in today’s U.S. Army. Both diction and an untrained voice add to the authenticity of Lipsky’s presentation. Personal stories of fellow cadets in their miseries doing sit-ups, push-ups, and coping with rigorous regulations give intimate insight into a painful maturation. The use of the present tense in the narrative gives the prose an unusual twist. No one will hear this title and think that the alma mater of Robert E. Lee and Douglas MacArthur will ever be the same again. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 04 - AudioFile