Honor and Duty (10 page)

I ate as always—as if the building were on fire and I would never see food again. I was done, pointedly ignoring Duke Troth, and nodding at Sonny and Mike as I left. I appreciated them; they had not laughed at me.

The hotel bustled with young men befriending each other. I walked across the vast area of Cavalry Field and thought about Christine, Jack Peeve, and Toussaint LaRue. It struck me that the people I was closest to had come from very different streets, and had never met each other. My father had never met
Tony, Barney, or Pinoy. He had never seen a bout, a game, a swim match.

Later, alone, I ate the huge dinner I had previewed, my last civilian meal. I passed through the heavily flagged lobby now filled with boys who had become friends, and stepped into the late dusk of a warm New York summer night. I looked up at the building—five stories of gray towered stone. From its promontory and high ramp I saw the Hudson and the quiet little winding road that had led to the future of thousands of young men and influenced the course of world history. To the north, up the banks of the Hudson, below the forested mountains that rustled softly like rippling velvet in the hot summer wind, lay the school that Washington had conceived, Jefferson had authorized, Benedict Arnold had betrayed, and Sylvanus Thayer had made in his own image. The catalog said that Thayer—West Point Class of 1808 and “Father of the Military Academy”—was founder of the Thayer Academic System, wherein every cadet is examined in every course, every day, six days a week. To honor this excess, the academic system, the biggest road, the only hotel, the main academic hall, and a major statue were named after him. It simplified navigation.

What am I doing here? Like I was one of these angular-faced white guys who looked like models for heroic statuary. I didn’t belong here; anyone could see that. I was going to be arrested for fraud. I had the wrong face. I was ugly, wrong in color and culture. I wasn’t smart enough. A school in the mountains and the clouds, to do the right thing. I, a boy who always did wrong, who was without honor, in a school commemorated to it. I felt alone. I wondered if I could do West Point all by myself.

Mike Benjamin joined me. “Dad’s a colonel. He brought me here when I was a kid.” He was my height, but his shoulders and chest pushed him over two hundred pounds. He reminded me of a famous actor, but in the dark, humid air and under the weight of history, I couldn’t remember which one. He spoke rapidly, constantly moving, cracking his knuckles, full of nervous, muscular energy.

“There,” he said. “Hundred years ago, when they heard about Fort Sumter, Southern cadets marched down the road, past this knoll, waving to the Northern cadets. A dry, dusty day. Knowing they’d kill each other later. The young, nameless lieutenants.”

“Why’d your father want you to come here?” I asked.

“Best school in the world.” He looked at the river. “Grampa was an immigrant. Can’t believe I’m here.” He looked at the road. “Like the Southern cadets couldn’t believe they were leaving.”

I knew what he meant; my father looked up to West Point as he would at the heavens. No, it was higher. That’s why I’m here.

“How hard do you think this is going to be?” I asked.

“Damn hard. One of Dad’s best friends came here and flunked Plebe math. And he was real smart.” He pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “Always wanted to try this.” He lit up, inhaled, and blew it out. “Jesus!” he said, clearing his throat. “Man, that’s bad! Want one? Why’d you
really
want to come here? We all had free education, scholarships. Lots of them.”

A school in the mountains and the clouds. Honor. I cleared my throat, as if I were choking on smoke. I hadn’t applied to any other college. It was here or the Army. “I wanted to leave home.”

He looked at me carefully. “Not sure this is going to be better. Going to be a career officer,” he said. “Used to a ration of crap a day. Dad got me ready. This’ll be more than homework.”

I wasn’t any good at homework. Edna revered it and I accordingly equated it with immorality. I defied her by reading novels instead of studying. If I couldn’t figure a lesson intuitively, I dropped it, before the insanity god showed up. Putting out in sports, for class projects, had to be what would count at West Point. That was the only way I was going to make it.

“Don’t you think if a guy learns fast, it’ll be enough?”

“Heck no,” he said. “Sure you don’t want a smoke? You oughta try it. It’s absolutely the pits.”

The members of the West Point Class of 1968 came from every state of the Union. We averaged six feet in height and 700 on the verbal and math portions of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Three out of four members of the class had been student body presidents
and
varsity team captains, weighted toward football, the classic corporate American blood sport; half had been Eagle Scouts. I thought all the tall, broad-shouldered, straight-nosed blond guys with good grades in America had come. Most were Protestants from middle-class homes with good skin and smooth consciences who had been the pride of
their high schools. We began as a thousand car-crazy, nonvoting, rock-and-rolling, high-achieving, clean-cut children of World War II veterans who still missed John F. Kennedy and Ritchie Valens, had not yet welcomed the Beatles and the British Invasion, wondering if we would make any West Point varsity teams, and ready to protect America against all comers.

I did not fit the profile. I believed in protecting the Republic and had scored 700s in English aptitude, but I had a high 500 in math—an ominously low figure for a rigorous engineering college. I had been a class officer. An inch below six feet, I was a steady playmaking junior varsity basketball guard and a boxer. I was superstitiously Taoist and remotely Christian, ethnically Chinese, culturally quasi-Negro, trained to the table etiquette of Main Line Philadelphia, and blessed with a linguistic bouillabaisse of Shanghainese, Mandarin, and Spanish, African, and European English. I was physically strong, socially inept, intellectually underdeveloped, spiritually muddled, and politically untested. My father had come from wealth, but we were now of the economic underclass. I possessed a troubled conscience, hoped I was growing in height, and was clueless about girls. Actually, I knew a lot about girls; I had read Jane Austen and Jade Snow Wong and seen the Sears ads. I just didn’t know what to do about them.

I was behind the American social curve. I had never dated, driven a car, been to a dance, a sock hop, a party, or played a record player. I was a Chinese colored boy with a Pennsylvanian Puritan upbringing who was
fan toong
, an overeater of Kwangtung food, who always wanted to be accepted, and would always have trouble finding people who were similarly situated. I was one of thirty members of the Class of 1968 who were something other than Western European Caucasoid. We were a small subgroup of Negroes, Hispanics, Orientals, and foreign cadets from the governments of the Philippines and Argentina.

“How do you feel about being here?” Mike asked.

His question snapped me out of my thoughts. What a weird question, especially out loud. What do feelings have to do with it.
Ji hui
, inauspicious talk. I didn’t know. It was an honor to be accepted at one of the world’s most famous schools. My parents wanted me to be a West Pointer more than anything, causing me to doubt my own wishes. I had to honor my parents but had resisted them in my secret heart. I defied my mother by not being studious, and had committed capital
crimes. I angered my father and was not a good son. Uncle Shim was in misery because I was here. I loved a girl who would never miss me. I hadn’t said goodbye to Toussaint. In view of this, my feelings mattered not at all.

“Duke makes me think I should’ve taken Yale or Stanford.”

“How come?” I asked.

“He’s a bigot who knows the score. I thought being an Army brat meant I knew the Army. But a guy who’s actually
been
in the Army, getting ready to be a cadet for a year, has a big jump.”

“You can take him; he won’t pick on you. He’s not a fighter.”

“Sure I can take him, but the hell he won’t. He won’t do it alone—he’s forming a mob. And I’m a Jew.” He smiled. “So’s everyone in my family. You’re not exactly small, and he went after you without even thinking. So he’s crazy, and has a plan. You see him, trying to pick a team in there at lunch? He looked at us—a Jew, a Chinese, and an Italian—and said ‘Drop dead.’ Bad omen.”

Yu chao.
“You superstitious?” I fingered Tony’s rosary.

“Mom is. Thinks God saved Dad in the war, but will take me if there’s another one. Wants me to be a Yale doctor. Says there’ll be an omen soon about West Point. I have a very bad feeling about that guy Troth.” He studied the cigarette, squinting at the smoke.
Command Decision
,
It Happened One Night
,
Gone With the Wind.

“Anyone ever say you look like Clark Gable?”

“Girls do. You’re part Chinese, aren’t you?”

“Hundred percent.”

“No kidding? You don’t look it. Why think of actors?”

Edna’s crusade to drive me from the house had led me to the YMCA, many of the churches, and most of the movie houses in San Francisco. Armed with free Y movie passes and glasses, I entered a world where good guys carried guns and won every ninety minutes. I emulated Burt Lancaster, who smiled and walked and shot guns the way I wanted to. I adored Grace Kelly, whom Christine Carlson so closely resembled, and it was simple to love them both. In
David Copperfield
,
The Bad Seed
, and the Dead End Kids, I recognized life.

“Movies are like truth,” I said solemnly.

Mike laughed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Anyway, the trick here isn’t going to be drama. The key is not standing out.”

“Oh,” I said, gulping. “Hey, what kind of omen do you expect?”

“Communists are going to make a move,” he said.

“Berlin or Prague!” I cried. “This time we’ll fight, not like Budapest—Ike’s big mistake. Won’t be Indochina; we’re too smart to get sucked up like the French.” I said that in three seconds. What I didn’t say was: Please, no more wars with Asians.

“It’ll be Laos and Vietnam,” he said. “But Eisenhower’s screwup was opposing Israel at the Suez.” He studied his smoke. “So how come you don’t know how you feel about being here? Proud? Bad? Here ’cause of your dad? Scared shitless? Or dream come true?”

“Yes,” I said.

I thought that making the right decisions on the battlefield might be my special skill. I made good basketball decisions, finding the open man and filling the lanes, so I was hopeful. My possession of this knowledge was a secret. I hoped someday it would be forced from me, resulting in the salvation of the Free World. I would be successful, famous. But if I said that now, or even thought it with any clarity,
ji hui
would bleed me.

Saving the nation seemed easier than living with my family. I thought of Uncle Shim teaching me that the sole reason for living, the only justification for my mother’s pain of birth and the cost of children, was to benefit the clan. I was not a good member of my family, and had tried not to think what others thought of me, fearful of the conclusions they ought to reach.

Now I had a new start. I had been invited to merge directly into the white tapestry of American history. I could pretend to be a person who had never known privation of spirit, stomach, heart, or neighborhood, who had never sinned, made bad decisions, produced bad thoughts of
ji hui
, or caused others to die. I could pretend to be happy, a boy who knew how to smile without outer cause. For once, on this special day, I wondered how others saw me.

The stars began to emerge in a darkening sky. It was eight, a propitious hour. The Eight Immortals, the Eight Ch’ing Banner Armies, the Eight Breezes, the eight Academy candidates. I had been born on the eighth of August, double-eight, double luck.

“Why’d you ask about how I feel?” I asked Mike.

“My gramma says: ‘Know your feelings, make wise decisions.’ ”

I didn’t have grandparents. “Feelings have nothing to do with it,” I said. “I think feelings can screw things up. Like, how can you
think
if you try to figure out how you
feel?
And if you figure it out, who
cares?
What if you feel
bad
about something? It doesn’t matter.” I took a deep breath.

“I
had
to come here,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Mike. “You can give up thinking like that. We’re out of high school. The diplomas make us adults. We don’t have to do
anything
we don’t want to do.”

I looked up the road, toward the Academy. I was an adult. In the morning, I would experience what grown-ups get—respect. I would be a West Point new cadet. I would thrust out my chest like Guan Yu, forget that my mother criticized all I did, and start a new life.

“Mike, it’ll be great,” I said.

“It’ll probably be hard,” he said, putting his hand out.

We shook. I didn’t care. I had made a friend, and felt I was about to enter the script of a very good movie, a Clark Gable film, in which the good guys couldn’t help but win. I had arrived in America.

7