Honor and Duty (36 page)

“No,” he said. “I have Century Club classmates who claim, as a result, that I never really attended West Point.” The Club was for cadets who had served at least a hundred punishment tours.

He gave me four on a paper plate while cooking the others.

“Pig heaven, Good Deal, woof-woof,” I said. “Thank you, sir.” I had half of one in my mouth when he said, “Want me to say grace?”

All meals at the Academy were preceded by prayer from the Poop Deck, the high medieval balcony where the Supe and the First Captain had lunch, and could watch over the Corps with the same stately ease as the watching warriors on the massive mural of Great Battles. I never prayed before we ate contraband popcorn or boodle in barracks. Lorbus always did, and Arch always crossed himself.

I forced the food into one cheek, cleared my throat, put my head down, and closed my eyes.

“God, thank you for the fellowship of Christian men. For your gifts, for your love, for your forgiveness of our inadequacies and our forgiveness of others, for giving us here at West Point the opportunity to learn how to serve, for the food you place before us, let us use it to your purposes. In your Son’s name, Amen.”

“Amn.” I began chewing again. I remembered Mr. Armentrot on R-Day, skulls shaven, necks in, stomachs empty, small bites and chew six times, on imaginary food. Armentrot was in Vietnam.

He grinned at my hoggish appreciation. “
C’est magnifique!
Am I a chef, or what?”

“Yr a shf,” I garbled. I swallowed. “Have to invite you over to barracks for soup, sir.”

“Soup?” he said.

“Sir, we make real good soup, using mess kits and coffee heating coils. Start with a base of chicken broth from kosher stores in the City, stored in our boots. Add vegetables which dates bring in, salami from the laundry bag. Cut them up with Gerber jungle knives on the reverse side of the desk blotter padded with a laundry shirt board. Add one tin of C-rats ‘beef and rocks’—beef and potatoes—with the cream, salt, pepper, and sugar from the accessory pack—bring to simmer and serve in java cups.”

“Obviously,” he said, “I graduated too early.”

I smiled so hard it surprised me.

“I feel a little like Fagin,” he said, “collecting urchins and giving them leadership.” He ate with greater dignity than I, which, on analysis, was saying little. “Define leadership.”

I swallowed. “Influencing the behavior of others toward an organizational goal.” He wanted to influence me toward good grades.

“I want to influence you toward conscious behavior,” he said.

I lifted my eyebrows in surprise, while still chewing, which was like my dismounting the high bar and landing on my feet.

“If you don’t study, it’s for a reason. And if you do study, it’s also for a reason, either of which is understood by you.”

This was an astonishing proposition. Why would I need to understand the reasons for anything? At West Point, we did not ask why, since the question was irrelevant. At West Point, one must simply function, perform, execute, and obey. We were performers, not logicians.

“What’s the big deal with conscious behavior, sir?”

“Ah, always begin with basics. If you’re conscious, you can be accountable. Ethics flows from accountability. I learned that from my father and my sisters. I learned it from my mother.

“Even though the Academy emphasizes a variety of rote behaviors, we’re really urging you to think, to understand.”

“What did your father teach you, sir?” I asked, blinking when I realized the gravity of the inquiry. I was being impertinent.

He looked at me. “What did your father teach
you?
”

Fathers.
Lin tsun
, tremblingly obey. “To obey. To be respectful. To work hard. To be American. To admire West Point. I’d never really thought about it before, sir. This is the first time I’ve ever said this.”

Major Schwarzhedd passed me another Tab. “My dad taught me to honor the concept of a calling. He was a servant.”

“A servant?” I said.

“He didn’t live for his advancement. He served my mother, my sisters, me—his men, his president, the Army, the nation.”

I took a breath. “Sir, did your father like you?”

Schwarzhedd smiled. “A childhood chum of mine, back in New Jersey, came from a strict religious family. When he was little, his father lined up the kids and told them to remember two things. ‘One, fear and obey God, and me. Two, I am not your friend.’

“I don’t agree with that,” he said. “I don’t think parents can be peers with their kids. But the trust, the knowing, the affection that go with friendship—they should be in there.” He studied his large hands. “They have to be there.”

He looked at me while I mulled over his answer. “Your father trusted you?” I asked. “And really knew you?”

He nodded, his eyes on me but focused on the past. “I was blessed. The trick though, is to focus on what you can do for others—
not
on what others may not have done for you.”

What I can do for others. The papers riffled musically.

“Someone must’ve helped you,” he said. “Boys don’t end up at West Point under independent steam.”

“My mother—my stepmother—gave me English. My father gave me West Point as the objective. My boxing coach—who always said ‘Excuse my French’—gave me his time and his skills.” I sighed. “For ten years.” I realized that it was enough, that I had gotten more than most kids.

“Sir, my first friend gave me hope. When I’m in chapel, I think about the black Baptist church I used to go to—a Chinese kid in a sea of black faces, singing songs I didn’t understand.” I remembered that I used to cry to the sound of that congregation singing. I cleared my throat. “I really didn’t know how to fight back then. Or to talk.” I was talking too much. “I was just a kid. It’s sort of a mystery.”

“No mystery,” he said. He looked at me as if I were as normal a fixture in his Q as his books. “My best pal was Jewish. I celebrated Seder with him every Passover and could sing with him in Hebrew. When Dad was assigned to Paris, I learned French. Had friends from all over Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Ethiopia, survivors of the Holocaust. Each language, each new friendship, each cuisine—and some pretty amazing delicacies—opened a wider world for me. I saw the world as having all the colors, all the faiths, so many tongues, and all one face.

“When I reported to the Academy on R-Day in 1952, during the Korean War and in the wake of the cheating scandal, I had already seen a world larger than West Point.

“In Vietnam, I got to serve with selfless patriots fighting for their country.” He put his head down and his voice caught. “I saw courage to make the songs of Homer pale.” His eyes were moist. My heart pounded, caught between discomfort and wonder. Schwarzhedd, man of men, crying?

He raised his right forearm, shaking the watchband, making a noise like the small black ammunition links falling from the ejector in a chattering M-60 machine gun.

“Good men died for a noble cause, their sacrifices slandered by our countrymen who know no better.” His eyes narrowed in pain and wisdom. “My father taught me to know what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it. Leaders have to know that. People should know that.

“Cadets should consciously know why they’re here. A lot are here because their fathers sent them. This,” he said, waving
at the world outside his window, “is a whole lot of horse hooey to put up with for your father. Is that why you’re here?”

I put my head down, looking at my empty plate. Major Schwarzhedd filled it with the other franks.

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “I hate the engineering. But I really love it here, more than any place I’ve ever known. But somehow, my father always wants it more than I do.” I scratched my itching neck. I wanted a drink. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

“I never met your father. Dad told me that Colonel Ting’s son was in the Class of ’68. When I saw that you were part of Alonzo Smits’s pirate crew, I backed off.” He looked down. “I thought if I introduced myself, you’d be caught between conflicting loyalties, between Smits and me. If you needed to walk the dark side of Doctor Death, as he calls it, well, having the son of your father’s best friend trying to intercede would not have been instructive.”

“You know, sir, I went to his Q for most of Yearling year. Killed brain cells. But I was never really part of it.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Smits is a good man, but he’s an injured soul. He’s trying to heal the wrong way. Well, Dad told me a lot about your father. He’s obviously a very special man, using willpower to change from a Confucian to an American at the age of thirty-five.” The major stood, stretching his back. He was in obvious pain, and it was also obvious that he did not want to discuss it. I saw his tunic with the Purple Heart in a small armoire. “If I tried to even
understand
what it means to be a Buddhist or a Zoroastrian now, I don’t think I could do it.”

It struck me that Major Schwarzhedd might know more about my father than I did.

He grunted in pain. “How could you hold to ‘submission of self and honoring ritual,’
and
to individual ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’? It would be war, Sherman’s kind of war. I know about war, now. I did it for a year.” He contemplated the view. “Imagine your father, fighting a war of values, every day.”

I saw him sitting in his chair, reading books in English, forcing them into the lobes of his mind. He had given me to Edna to make me American, make or break. He had pointed me to the Academy to give me true American citizenship. I lacked his willpower, his drive, his skills, his confidence.

I looked at Major H. Norman Schwarzhedd as he tried to
stretch an obviously wretched back. I liked this man. I admired him. I wanted to be like him.

A realization came to me and I scrunched my eyes shut and lowered my face as I measured the truth of it.

For all the
gahng
and
shiao
, the math and Confucius, the hunger and hard times, I just wanted my dad to like me.

23

New York, October 1966

I had three life goals: to study solids; to give up on Christine, who was dating others; and to bench-press three hundred pounds.

“What’s your max?” asked Duke Troth.

The last time I had spoken to him, at Smits’s BOQ six months ago, I had considered killing him. “Two-eighty-five,” I said.

“Put up two-ninety. I’ll spot,” he said.

We loaded the forty-fives, twenty-fives, fives, and two-and-a-half plates. I lay flat, loading up on oxygen. I had already worked out. I wondered if he’d drop the bar on me.

I lifted and lowered it slowly so it would not bounce, and pressed upward. My shoulders complained under the load as I kept my back flat. The plates rattled against the collars as my arms shook. The first four inches above the chest represented the most difficult lift zone, and I cleared it, my face feeling red. Just before I straightened my arms, everything I had in my arms quit, and I could go no further. Duke helped me finish the press.

“Umph,” I gasped, “thanks for the spot.”

“Didn’t lift an ounce.”

“Bull,” I breathed, “I was stuck.”

“Anyone asks me, you benched two-ninety clean.”

I stood up. “Hope no one asks you.”

“You’re not one of them Honor freaks, are you?” he asked.

I breathed deeply. “What brings you to Iron City?”

“Want you to join our study group,” he said.

“English? Social sciences? Psych? Tactics?”

“Juice,” he said.

I chuckled. “Duke, goats are supposed to study with hives, not other goats. What good could I do you in Juice?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a way to schmooz. You’ve dropped outa the Society.” His ice-cold eyes looked perfectly sincere. I studied his strong, hard, adult face. My own face was hardening with time. I picked up the eighty-pound bell and did tricep presses.

“Can’t figure you,” I gasped. “Being in a goats’ Juice group’d be like eating crepes at a dump.” I thought of that April night, when Schwarzhedd appeared and Smits and Troth announced themselves as bigots. “Which, on occasion,” I said, “I have done with you.”

“Tonight, fourth-floor reading room, after call to quarters,” he said. “Good group. Sonny Rappa’s our smart man.”

I had trouble imagining them together. I didn’t like it. He was forming a team. “Thanks, but I don’t study Juice that much.”

Juice depended on integral and differential calculus, whose intricacies I had barely learned and instantly forgotten in the previous academic years. Calculus employed sentences without English. It was a dark art, described in graphs rampant with round and sharp-edge squiggles, ancient totems of thunder dragons and small symbols of Egyptian hieroglyphs, black lines which took erratic perpendicular turns, boxes within rectangles filled with vicious glyphs, nonsensical gates, and legends with arrows which pointed to incomprehension. So much for studying more.

That left Christine. I had seen her for Christmas and summer leave. Her opposition to the military, and my commitment to it, had hardened like an old and treasured wound equal to the scarring of her physical rejection of me. I still loved her, devastated by the pain of being separated. Last spring, we had met in New York for six glorious days of sightseeing and restauranting. I spent all my money and had to borrow some from Deke and Arch. We stayed in separate rooms in the Manhattan Hotel. She kissed me passionately when she arrived, and when she left I watched her plane lift off from La Guardia and knew that there was to be no romance between us. I had been given
my chance, and she had said no, but I did not know how to end it in my heart.