Honor and Duty (57 page)

“Ya bring a tear to me eye,” I said in the worst brogue imaginable. “Ya make me so hoppy I want y’all to give me thirty push-ups. Count ’em out loud now, lads. Call ’em out to Mr. Fideli, sweetly, now.”

I knocked. Farren said, “Yo.” He had packed the bag he had dropped on the Area on R-Day. He was gathering unused bandit soup ingredients.

“Farren, I’m here to say I’m sorry,” I said.

He didn’t look at me, waiting for me to leave, his face red. “Do me a favor,” he said. “If something really shitty happens to you, so bad you can’t laugh, call me. Like havin’ your leg ripped off by a frag or gettin’ gorked by a booby trap. Somethin’ so bad you can’t do your standard-issue happy-shit routine. Look me up, hear? Tell me about it. I’ll laugh my
fuckin’ guts out.” He hurled the rest of the food into the waste-basket, knocking it over, all the contents spilling onto the floor. He liked the noise as the kosher soup cans rolled against the bunks. “Get the fuck outa my room.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked. “You didn’t believe that crap you handed me about doing it for your classmates.”

He looked toward the rifle rack. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“Yeah, I heard you,” I said. “You crap on the Code, screw your classmates, lie to Plebes, break into buildings, steal exams, and set Sonny and Big Bus up as cheaters. You follow a guy who used to beat up our smaller classmates, barters women, almost kills Sonny, and points a gun at someone trying to follow the Code—and you’re pissed at me?”

“Hey, I was against the guns. I had nothin’ to do with the bus. I was one of the guys against it.”

“Yeah, you did a
great
job of being against it. What the
hell
was I thinking about? I’m not apologizing to
you.
Screw you!” I walked out, slammed the door, and drove a fist into it, splintering his nameplate. His paper tag waffled to the floor. I threw open the door.

“Come and get it, McWhiff,” I said, trembling with anger.

Farren looked at me with fear and hate. “Damn, you are seriously nuts. Troth was right about you.”

Troth. I ran toward Fourth Regiment. Three years of eating his crap was enough. I was going to take him down.

“Hey, Kai,” said someone.

I raced up the stairs and Plebes recognized me and almost herniated themselves in an effort to get out of my road. I ran to the room that Sonny had wired for sound and I turned the knob and kicked it in like a Beast squad leader drawing attention, the door banging hollowly as I stepped in with a good stance with no one to stop me. All three beds had been rolled, and rifles placed in armory; the room was ghostly vacant. I looked at the door. There were no name tags where, not long ago, one of them had said in crisp black letters, “TROTH, LD 68.” My chest heaved. I had adrenaline and rage and no one to fight but his memory.

Clint, Deke, and I walked to the north sally port, where our grades were posted, and our section assignments changed, to conform to our new class standings in each course.

“You’re outa the basement in English,” Deke said to Clint. “And you’re in ninth section in solids,” he said to me. We
were trying to pretend that the world had not changed, that the specter of Honor expulsions was not clouding all we did and all we said.

We recorded our other section assignments. I remained in the bottom in Juice and in the upper five sections in econ, Spanish, social sciences, psych, and English. Clint was two sections from the bottom in Juice. Deke was rock steady in the upper ten sections in all courses. Sonny and Mike were in the first section in everything, and I smiled for them, wondering how two guys so close to being number one in the class could so consciously avoid competing for the honor. K’ung Fu-tzu had said that men of genius gather naturally but can never agree. West Point proved him wrong.

“I’m staying a starman so I can get into med school,” Mike had said. Sonny was tutoring everyone in the regiment and still got to bed by nine-thirty most nights. “Early to bed, early to bed” was one of his mottoes. Sonny refused to be daunted by the hearings. He continued, through February and March, to operate as if it were normal for the class to be undergoing hardship and attrition.

“Kai, hearts after class?” asked Arch en route to Bartlett the next day.

“You’re on. Say, eleven-fifteen.”

Plebes saluted as Deke and I approached the Hilton after thermo. Neither Airborne Rat nor Venus was on the window-sill.

Clint’s rack was stripped, the mattress rolled on its wire springs. No shoes under the bed, and only two laundry bags hanging from the bedposts instead of three. Clint’s desk was empty. Clint’s rifle was gone from the gun rack.

Deke unrolled the mattress and sat heavily on Clint’s bunk, dropping his books. “Oh, man,” he said. “He’s gone.”

I opened the wardrobe where Mike Benjamin had resided during Major Szeden’s search, the night I thought Clint was asleep. On an empty hanger was Airborne Rat’s little parachute.

Had Clint cheated directly or tolerated the cheating in others? I had suspected that the voice we heard on Sonny’s black-box receiver saying “screw ’em in the ear” was Duke’s, and that the voice urging clean speech was Clint’s. I might never know.

I didn’t play hearts. A lot of us gathered in our room. We
looked like modern art, immobilized by shock. I poured Java and reread
To Kill a Mockingbird
, staying in the room, no longer liking the library, where so much of the interregimental cheating had occurred. I felt as if I should stay near Clint’s bunk, out of loyalty. I wanted to read something that had given me joy, but I turned the pages and felt nothing. I saw Clint dancing with Pearl at the last hop. I saw him training Para-Rat to jump from the top bunk, his chute billowing, slapping his forehead as he wrestled with the Bard. Exhausted, I turned in early. When I put my head on the pillow, something crinkled. Inside the pillowcase was a letter.

I called Pee Wee’s company. The CQ told me that Mr. McCloud had been separated from the Corps and had left. No, he said, there were neither forwarding address nor notes for anyone. Again, I crossed over to East Barracks. Pee Wee’s bunkies were on bunks, silent and stunned, looking, I imagined, like Deke, Bob, and me.

I got the storage-room keys from the CQ and verified that my service footlocker had been forced open. My father’s cherished
Colt .38 super automatic and shoulder holster were gone. In its place was the blue shield with the golden helmet of Athena with the sword rampant affixed, a name tag with “Bestier,” and the collar and epaulet insignia of a West Point Second Classman.

Major Schwarzhedd and I walked from the mess hall across the Plain to his Q. Each of us carried a block of ice from the kitchen.

“Mr. Bestier’s tragedy is not your doing,” said the major. “He’s blaming you for what he alone could dictate.”

“Feels bad, sir. Two of them were Beast roommates. Both of them sons of generals. I keep feeling I did it.”

“That’s understandable. Hard moral stands demand an extreme price. Consider the alternative. A cheating culture.” He shook his head, his mouth turned down. “Intolerable.”

“Sir, you ever feel you’re split? I mean, with half of you feeling things, and the other half thinking, and they don’t fit? My mind says I did the right thing. But inside, it feels wrong.”

“The dissonance between heart and mind, thought and impulse. It’s the struggle between a leader and a careerist. Did you protect your men by doing what you did?”

I thought of my Plebes. “Yes, sir.”

“Listen to your own answer. Think of this—did you enjoy taking down Duke Troth?”

I nodded. It felt good to push Troth around that poker table, knowing that Sonny was going to be avenged. I had enjoyed getting inside Gabriel Fors’s guard, slipping punches and reshaping his face. Guilt had made me shake his hand after the fight.

Ironically, it was my recognition of him that made him think I was different from Duke. Recognizing him had allowed him to tell the truth, while hazing had only alienated him from Honor. The whole damn thing worked because I opened my hand instead of keeping it closed. I didn’t understand; Gabe Fors had shown up at the Poker Society on his own.

“Harder than you can imagine to win, Kai. We’re not supposed to really win. We triumph as part of a team, part of a community, bending sail under good winds for high causes. We try to stop ourselves just short of a great personal win, because the high-profile winners are often selfish people. And we know that, and don’t want to be that. We taste blood, master the violence of battle, and like it. Then what?

“Good to worry about winning and gloating. Good to be concerned about enjoying victory—knowing your win is ashes in the mouth to the loser, his home burned, crops destroyed, family exposed to death and economic rapine, children left to wander across a burned earth. All this unspeakable misery, to stop war and to delay the next. God’s greatest paradox. Here we train you to kill and educate you to love peace. To love your men, and then send them up a hill to die.

“Look at Trophy Point. Beautiful and barbaric. Battle Monument, for the dead. Made up of melted-down enemy cannon. Trophy Point’s salted with cannon, grounded in the earth, muzzles down. Imagine if those were your guns, taking from your dead Redlegs. Wellington was right. The only thing worse than defeat is victory. What would Confucian scholars think of what you did?” he asked.

“K’e ji fu li,”
I said.

“Ah, yes,” he said, as we entered the coolness of the BOQ and unloaded the ice. “Subdue self, honor the rites. Well, Mr. Ting, you honored them well. You deserve a reward. Want a soda?”

35

Thayer Hall April 1967

Major Sewell asked us to compare Napoleon’s “morale to guns” to the Communist “anti-imperialism to foreign weapons” ratios. I argued that the Chinese Civil War and the Philippine Hukbalahaps proved that nationalism could defeat superior arms. Armed with popular support, the People’s Liberation Army defeated my father’s better-equipped army. Without popular support, the Huks lost to Magsaysay. Most of the class disagreed, believing that nationalism was but one of many ingredients in the counterinsurgency soup. But I had read Lacoutre, Fall, Truong, and Buttinger. I was right.