Honor and Duty (15 page)

“FIFTH FLOOR, POST! CLEAN UP YOUR ROOMS! FOURTH FLOOR, POST! DRINK WATER! THIRD FLOOR, POST! SECOND AND FIRST FLOORS, POST!”

We were in our room. I looked at my Timex. It was 3:34
A.M.
; 12:34 in California. I kept drinking water from my green cup.

Bestier pointed at his cot. “Our pal here: the rack.” Flat, like our spirits; sallow, like our hopes; institutionally Spartan, like West Point, the International Center for Quick Dieting,
Clothing Abuse, and Sleep Deprivation. I had slept in the rack for three hours, but felt none of its benefits.

“It’s a goddamned nightmare,” said Mersey.

I hadn’t experienced my normal, recurring nightmare about murder in the ’hood. I had dreamed about Ben-Hur’s mother and sister. The hazing was unbelievable, but I was enduring it with a thousand other guys. This wasn’t the result of an angry woman’s hate; Thayer and George Washington were testing me, seeing if I was fit, if I could change clothes, and other things, with sufficient skill to be allowed to stay. It was the test of my life.

“This nightmare only lasts a year,” said Bestier.

I could do that. I used to imagine running away on an S.P. freight, asking Toos where trains came from while he wondered where they were headed. I had made good my escape, believing that anywhere would be an improvement. Today had been a test of that proposition. “Man, I’m glad you’re here,” I said to Bestier.

“Aw,
crap
,” said Mersey, “
I
’m not. This
sucks!
”

Bestier laughed, and so did McCloud, too loudly. Then Mersey.

“Still sucks,” he said. “These fuckin’ rituals eat it big.”

“The
li
, the rituals,
Hausheng
,” said Uncle Shim, “are to honor your
gahng
and
lun
, bonds and relationships. You must adhere to the teachings of the Master K’ung, who said,
‘k’e ji fu li.’
Subdue the self, and honor the rituals. Do the correct thing.”

Mr. Alsop had said, “the Honor Code. It is the way.”

To him, I had repeated, I owed all that I was, and all that I would ever be.

9

Second Detail, Beast Barracks, August 20, 1964

“Six goddamned weeks. Gotta get
outa
here!” cried Mersey.

I wanted to help. “What would your dad say?”

“Who gives a shit? What’d
your
dad say if
you
quit?”

I shook my head. It’d be easier to report my death.

“I don’t give a crap!” he cried. “It’s
my
life.
He’s
not here! ‘My son, West Point cadet’—bragging at the country club while we got guys trying to kill themselves by drinking Brasso. You thought that guy was nuts for attacking Sowerby.
Shit!
I know how he coulda done it!
I
could’ve killed him!
Easy
, see?”

Last week, the first class had taught us the Spirit of the Bayonet. We used the M-14 like a medieval multipurpose halberd, stabbing and slashing with the blade, clubbing and bashing with the rifle butt, lunging with the grace permitted by a twelve-pound pointed club in the horizontal butt-stroke series, the high parry, and the straight-armed thrust, none of which was useful without a throat-stripping roar as we dismembered the imaginary enemy. I did not feel like d’Artagnan. Then one of our classmates had gone nuts and attacked Mr. Sowerby with his bayonet. He had been butt-stroked, clubbed, hospitalized, arrested, and separated from Beast.

“WHAT’S THE SPIRIT OF THE BAYONET?” Sowerby had screamed.

“TO KILL, SIR!” we had cried back.

“And the jodies, singing while we march,” spat Mersey. “What crap. ‘Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them, we are Fourth, Mighty Mighty Fourth,’ ” he mimicked in a high voice. “Bullshit!” Mersey paced, a POW in his own army. “That goddamned
asshole
O’Ware—he’s a goddamn
sadist!
If he orders another shower formation, I’ll kill him!”

Ferret-faced Mr. O’Ware had become Norman Bates in cadet gray, the psycho motel clerk authorized to carry knives and make raiding parties on the guests. He relished pain, found our hurting parts and spiked them with lye and malice. He was the only cadre who hazed from the side, screaming sour spittle into our cheeks. He was still not a candidate for dental hygiene poster boy. He was the sort who would chop off your foot and then write you up for limping at parade. He called Stew “Spazzed-Little-Girl-Emotional-Crap-Your-Pants-Douchebag Puke Mersey.” He required recitations of the Definitions of Leather and Concrete, the Days, MacArthur’s Message from the Far East, and Battalion Orders. Perhaps Einstein could have spouted errorless poop; we couldn’t. Mersey was being ground down. We tried helping, but he fought us instead.

O’Ware liked shower formations. They began on the top floor, in a bathrobe with a towel folded on the extended left forearm and a soap dish in the left hand. We looked like failed English butlers with bad haircuts, working for tyrannical lords. We sweated pennies to the wall with our backs. The more you sweated, the more floors you descended, until, drenched with your own sweat, you reached the sinks for a ten-second cold shower. Refreshed, you could retire for three hours’ sleep before reveille. I was beginning to have dreams about sleeping.

O’Ware called Clint Bestier “Gary Cooper” and called me “Mars-man.” He called Pee Wee McCloud “Goofy Gomer Pyle.” He ordered me to report to his room two hours after taps on evenings not blessed with clothing or shower formations. Without an alarm clock, I fought narcotic sleepfulness, trying to stay awake.

His door was open and I stood in it while he wrote in a log at his desk. His roommate was Mr. Spillaney, whose snoring sounded like the bellows of hell. The desk lamp placed deep, haunting shadows on Mr. O’Ware’s face. It was like looking at Lucifer.

“Fishfaced douchebag hunchback,” he whispered, “your mother have any children who lived? Don’t like your looks.” I wondered if he had paid copyright fees to my mother for the last remark. I wondered what a “douchebag” was.

“Rack your ugly, flat-face neck in, cretin,” he hissed. “Your type doesn’t have emotion. Gimme the Definition of Duty. I’ll
kick your yellow ass out of the Academy if you wake up Mr. Spike.”

“Sir, the Definition of Duty,” I whispered. “ ‘Duty may be defined as the sense of obligation which motivates one to do, to the best of his ability, what is expected of him in a certain position or station. This, sir, is the Definition of Duty.”

“Your duty is to suffer, shithead.” He asked other questions, as the mood affected him, without looking at me. “Think you can muck it through West Point?” He laughed at me. “I don’t think so.”

“Gonna get him,” Mersey said. He was playing with his bayonet.

“Put it down,” said Bestier. “In the fall, you can call him out. Plebes can challenge upperclassmen to box. The problem is, when you beat him, you have to box his classmates.”

Mersey smiled, for the first time in Beast. “No shit? He’s
mine.
And I was starting to think there was nothing good here.”

Once, I had held my fists up to my mother. Uncle Shim would say that boxing an elder would be very
jing ji
, taboo, and violate the
Wu-lun
, the Five Personal Relationships. I fought when I had to; here, I only had to know the poop. As hungry as I was, this was better than home, for suffering had a purpose and hunger made me feel noble. I was with Washington’s ragtag army at Valley Forge, in the middle of summer, proving my patriotism as a measure of self. There was no honor in fighting your mother.

“Stew,” I said, “it’s like we’re trying to do what Kennedy asked—doing something for our country, something bigger than just … college. It’s home, now.” Bestier nodded.

“You stupid shit,” said Mersey. “You think
this
is
home?
Mother screw! You musta come from a fuckin’
prison
to think
that!
”

I felt like arguing, but Beast was better than living with Edna. A cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal. “Yeah,” I said.

“You guys know what my best friend is doing this summer?” Mersey said, trying to make up.

“Yup,” Bestier said. “Getting laid. You already said that.”

“But think of it!” he exhorted. “He’s
getting laid.
”

“Don’t wanna think about it,” said Pee Wee McCloud, his nearly invisible eyebrows rising, then falling into a frown.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “In ten days the Corps returns, we join our regular companies, and we might get some
food.
”

“You’re havin’ a cow over
food
,” said Mersey, “while our pals are gettin’ nookie and havin’ a blast at Beach Boys concerts, seein’ Ann-Margret in
Viva Las Vegas.
We’re shinin’ shoes and yakkin’ about
food!
This crap started in
July
—while everyone we know is havin’ the
best
goddamned summer in their lives! Does this
suck
or not?”

“It sucks,” said Pee Wee slowly, nodding his big head.

Bestier smiled. “I eat this up,” he said. “I wanted to come here so bad, I don’t sweat this stuff.”

“Yeah, fine, eat it up,” said Stew. “You’re
nuts.
You look at each other? We’re
disappearing.
I couldn’t
compete
right now. You were big,” he said to me. “Now you’re a skinny Chinaman!”

I put down my shoeshine rag. “That’s not a good word.”

“So what the hell do I call you?” he asked.

“ ‘Kai’ is good. So’s ‘Ting,’ or ‘American.’ ‘Chinese’ is good. ‘Chinese-American,’ that’s okay. That other word, that’s
not
good.”

Silence. I had emphasized my difference to them.

“Hey,” said Pee Wee, grinning at me. “What about ‘crot’? Or ‘doo-willie’? Or ‘bean-head.’ Or ‘dumb john crot willie smackhead’?”

I had written Christine four exotically long letters, describing the flight across America, the skyscrapers and taxis in New York, and the trip up the Hudson. “I have a roommate who looks like Gary Cooper, another who resembles Ernest Borgnine but sounds like Goofy, and one who cackles while sharpening his bayonet as he considers murdering the upperclassmen.” In my last letter, I had said that I needed to hear from her, about anything.

I had pledged undying love, forever, to Christine Anne Carlson, the most beautiful girl in the world. I used to pine for
her while we ate lunch together. Her blondness reminded me of every idealized actress in Hollywood. I knew her birthday, the name of her cat and her older brother, that her father worked for
The San Francisco Chronicle
, and that Mrs. Carlson was glamorous and was active in church and community.

Christine was a National Merit Scholar who was accepted at Stanford but picked Cal. Indifferent to cliques, she preferred girlfriends to boyfriends. She turned hallways dark with smoke when she burned cookies in home economics, worked on the school paper, loved literature and drama, starred in school plays, and sang.

I breathed her name, a sound that scraped at the roof of heaven and conjured mystic powers of creation and storm. If I said her name for two minutes, I would hyperventilate, and the constellations would come out at high noon.

“ ’At’s a lotta crap,” said Tony Barraza. “Yur mind quits
before
that. Ya get giddy thinkin’ ’bout her. It’s stoopid.”

“But Tony, I told you—she’s like
Grace Kelly.
Beautiful! She’s
beyond beautiful.
You oughta see her with the sun on her hair and her eyes. And she’s smart. You’re always saying
I’m
smart. She’s a hundred times smarter’n I am.”

“Kid, that’s obvious. Friggin’ spit bucket knows ya got no brains. Take it back, sayin’ yur smart. Yur punch-drunk. Rattle on like yur shacked up an’ she’s already been givin’ ya—”

“Antonio Barraza, don’t you
dare
complete that sentence,” said Barney Lewis, chief of instruction.

“Right—sorry, Barney. Look, kid. Do me a big friggin’ favor. Lemme give youse the good word: let off on this
dame
crap. Trust me. Ya ain’t built fer it. Ya got a face like mine.” He winced, his craggy, boulderlike head, reshaped with blows and laced with ring scars, cracked open as he laughed. His false teeth, yellowed over the years, slipped a bit.

Tony was the perennial favorite of the Y secretaries. Built like a tall Rocky Marciano and armed with a Burt Lancaster smile, he was dark and brooding, square jawed, broad shouldered, and uncured, a challenge for any single woman interested in the impossible. Tony gave me hope; he had neither wife nor family, riches nor gold, and somehow he was loved and well fed.