Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

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  “Dress Gray will not be read happily at either West Point or the Pentagon, but it will, you may depend on it, be read.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “The first unsentimental novel about the [military] academy … gripping, hard to put down.”

  —Women’s Wear Daily

  “A frightening novel about ‘a secret cult headquartered on the Hudson behind a stone facade’ … the author mounts an attack on his alma mater with brilliance and fury.”

  —Newsday

  “The long gray line is going to be sputtering on this one.”

  —Middletown Times-Herald Record

  “Absorbing. A compelling portrait of the military academy.”

  —New York Times

  Dress Gray

  Lucian K. Truscott IV

  This book is dedicated to

  David Hall Vaught

  Robert Lorne Leslie

  Richard Lee Swick

  Cadèts, Officers, Gentlemen, Friends

  * * *

  BOOK I

  * * *

  May 25, 1968

  1

  Ry Slaight was walking punishment tours on Central Area when they told him. Each cadet told another as they passed, marching at attention, M-14 rifles upon their shoulders. Area regulations required silence, so the news swept across the area like a hot wind, a ripple of whispered air, until it reached Slaight, who was marching in and out of a tiny piece of shade down at the western end of the area, near the stoops on either side of the First Class Sally Port, a vaulted passageway through the barracks.

  “They found a body up in Lake Popolopen this morning,” said a voice. The cadet talked out of the side of his mouth, eyes straight to the front. It was hard to tell who spoke.

  “They know who it is?” asked Slaight, who had about-faced and was marching alongside the guy who had whispered the news.

  “Some plebe,” said the cadet matter-of-factly. “Don’t know his name.”

  “When. What happened,” said Slaight. It was a command, not a question, and his head swiveled sharply toward the other cadet as he spoke. The cadet glanced at Slaight, then focused again on the pavement in front of him. It was the way on the area: straight to the front at all times. The sun was bright, and it caught Slaight’s black patent-leather visor, reflecting a white spot of light on the stone wall of the stoops ahead. The cadet could not see Slaight’s eyes, but he could see Slaight’s left hand, clenched tightly in a fist. They halted, executed a slow, simultaneous about-face, taking their time. It was a leisure due them because they were cows. Juniors. Upperclassmen. Even walking punishment tours on the area, cows were cool. They marched north across the area.

  “Found him this morning, floating,” the cadet whispered. “Don’t know what time. Early, I think. They say it was an accident.” Slaight marched a few steps, about-faced on the iron storm drain at mid-area, and marched south. He wanted to be alone.

  This was Slaight’s third month of May spent walking punishment tours on the area in as many years. It wasn’t that he was a dullard. Slaight just seemed to attract unwanted attention from the officers who ran the Tactical Department the way the cadet uniform attracted stares on the street in New York City. The Tactical Department was West Point’s expanded Dean of Students, an elaborate system of command which supervised every aspect of cadet life outside the classroom. It began with the tactical officers, thirty-two of them, majors, each of whom commanded a company of 160 cadets. Then there were four regimental commanders, colonels, each of whom commanded eight cadet companies. At the top was the commandant of cadets, a brigadier general, a position which was traditionally a key step on the ladder of army success. Many former commandants went on to become Chief of Staff, top dog at the Pentagon.

  It seemed odd to him, but Slaight had always felt a peculiar sense of comfort, of well-being, when dealing with the Tactical Department, despite the fact that three times his encounters with officer superiors had landed him with slugs, assignments of twenty or more punishment tours on the area. The TD was both a father and a mother to the Corps of Cadets. It scolded and punished cadets, guiding them through four years of academy life with Pavlovian precision. Slaight often mused that if he had gone to a civilian college, he’d have been kicked out by now. At West Point, breaking the rules was expected of cadets. It was part of playing the game, the eternal struggle between cadet and academy, the artificial give-and-take of the system which defined one’s identity at the United States Military Academy.

  Slaight knew the area. It was punishment as punishment should be, and he hated it. But after some fifty hours walking the area, Slaight had come to admire the concept of walking the area. It was time meant to be wasted, good time, weekend time, and it was time lost to the cadet punished. Gone. Forever. Slaight derived no small amount of satisfaction from the private notion that he used the area. It was like reading a book, he decided. Only thing was, what you read on the area had to be your own mind.

  Slaight walked alone in and out of his small piece of shade, his eyes adjusting and readjusting to the hot late-May sun beating down on the area, turning the fifty-by hundred-yard rectangle of concrete between the barracks into a stone oven. There were many styles for walking the area. Some guys walked in little informal groups, a few yards apart, as if the company of others afforded quiet solace. Some guys walked slowly, trying to cover as little ground as possible in each three-hour stint on the concrete. Others rushed from one side of the barracks to the other, as if their speed would hurry the clock along. Some guys cruised the area, covering every inch of the hot rectangle, like they were establishing territorial imperative over the ground they walked. Slaight always walked the same strip of ground, down near the sally port, loosely following a series of cracks in the concrete which had been patched with tar in a pattern he found … interesting … nonlinear. And so he always walked a slightly crooked path, stepping to the left and right of the tarred cracks, but never on them. Slaight’s area style had nothing to do with his politics, which were conservative, and everything to do with his sense of himself, which struggled somewhere in the mucky, ill-defined area inhabited by twenty-one-year-olds.

  The barracks hummed, crackled with Saturday afternoon cadet life. Stereos clashed from window to window. Up on the rooftops, sun bathers peered over stone battlements and called encouragement to guys they knew on the area. Down in the sinks, the basement shower rooms and locker rooms, electric shavers purred and water splashed, and a lonely, echoed voice could be heard from the 13th Division, singing a song by The Association. Through the sally port, the cadet mess hall clanked and chugged, and Spanish voices of waiters yelled across the massive, gymnasium-sized south wing as tables were set for the evening meal. Veal cutlets. Slaight could smell it. Three years had trained his nose. Veal cutlets and lima beans and mashed potatoes.

  Slaight knew it wouldn’t take long for the name of the dead cadet to emerge from the ooze which was the eternal undercurrent of rumor, speculation, and false hope just beneath the surface of the United States Military Academy. Death was part of the undertow, infrequently discussed but forever back there in the rear of the mind, among the theorems and axioms of applied science, the chaotic patchwork of textures of military tactics and strategy. Knowledge of death was not learned but absorbed in
such a way that it was part of the unspoken tongue, the code among cadets. It was one of those shared things which set them apart, death was. They imagined they faced it every day, and in a way, they did. Vietnam waited. It would not go away.

  Perversely, they did not want it to, not a war, not the war, the only shooting war since Korea, not the year before Slaight and his classmates graduated. West Point in the spring of 1968 was probably the only place in America where the war in Vietnam was a “good deal,” the accelerator pedal of army success, the escalator of army promotions. The war had kicked everything at the academy into high gear, put an edge on the experience of being a cadet which had been missing three years previously when Slaight entered West Point as a plebe. The war made the air at West Point dry with tension. It was like the centerfold in Playboy. The academy opened naturally to the page which sold the place. War was the reason West Point existed. Everything else was filler.

  They liked to think that war was their reward, the currency they were paid, cadets did. War was the object of their ambition, the thing they were supposed to lust after the way Harvard and Yale guys were supposed to lust after jobs with big corporations, admissions to law schools, graduate degrees. War was said to be the final measure of the man. Officers at the academy frequently likened the war to sex. As intercourse was necessary to propagate the species, war was necessary to thin it out. Hell, as long as there had been men, there had been wars. Two thousand years of recorded history couldn’t be wrong. Military Academy doctrine decreed that war cleared the senses of civilization, established those who counted, brought things like “politics” and “international relations” to a head. Peace, if followed, was merely afterglow. This was a vision of the world with which cadets were comfortable because they were not yet acquainted with dead bodies.

  “Guy’s name is David Hand,” a voice reported. “Drowned. Been dead a couple of days. Grim scene, they say.”

  Slaight stopped marching the area, removed his hat, and with the coarse wool sleeve of his dress coat, wiped his forehead. He knew David Hand.

  He had come to West Point from New Orleans the year before like he had nothing to lose. There was something about the kid that said he had the place figured out. This was not the way plebes were supposed to act. Slaight, who had been his squad leader during the first month of Beast Barracks, knew it. David Hand knew it. Slaight knew that David Hand knew. It brought them close together.

  In any military unit, especially one as small and tightly knit as a squad—eleven men—there exists a glue between men so tight, so intimate, so intense, it has traditionally remained unknown outside the confines of military life. The language has had difficulty expanding to contain the unmentionable. In recent years, an intellectual term has been in use to describe such behavior: male bonding. But the language of West Point barracks life has always been far more succinct. For years, West Pointers have referred to their roommates as wives. Slaight thought the term … wives … had its roots in the shared experience of plebes. Being a plebe, he thought, was like being a woman for a year.

  Plebe year at West Point had often been compared unfairly to pledging a college fraternity. True, there is something of the atmosphere of a fraternity about the whole of West Point life—jocularity, playfulness, hilarity in the face of shared hardship. But to be a West Point plebe is to capitulate oneself to a system so foreign, so completely absorbing, and so totally dominating that the similarity between plebe and pledge ends with the letter “p.” Plebe year was the thing which ultimately drew the distinction between West Pointer and all others. For plebe year imbued in the cadet heart an incendiary mix of pride and shame which each man would hold forever secret by a tacit pact as old as the academy itself.

  David Hand had been inordinately skilled at the thousand little details of plebe life. No one could shine shoes better than he. His uniforms fit as if they had been custom-tailored, while most plebes looked like Cadet Sad Sacks. He could “spout poop,” recite the myriad memorizations of plebe knowledge with an ease of delivery which skirted the edges of boredom. He was always on time, while his classmates fumbled through each day as if blindfolded. David Hand had seemed comfortable as a plebe. He retained an odd aloofness, when all the unwritten rules said he should have been soaked in humility.

  Slaight, the squad leader, noticed there had always been something David Hand kept to himself, some private place neither Slaight nor the plebe system could reach. Slaight had admired him secretly for preserving a portion of himself which the academy would never touch. Slaight decided it took courage. For to withhold from West Point that which West Point considered it rightfully owned—namely oneself—violated the academy’s most sacred rule. In return for receiving the secret gift the academy had to offer, a special knowledge of the inner workings of power among men, one had to first surrender himself and become powerless. David Hand had refused to do this, and now he was dead.

  Ry Slaight placed his hat on his head, lifted his rifle from his right shoulder to his left, and walked the area. He looked over at the west face of the four-sided clock in the middle of the area. It was almost 5 P.M. His fifty-third hour on the area was almost over. He had seven hours left to walk. He studied the stone barracks surrounding him. Most of them had been built in 1850, in a style now called Military Gothic—basement, stoop, four stories, four rooms to a floor, toilets in the hall, flat roofs edged with battlements. They looked like tenements.

  He was trying not to think of David Hand. It was the fourth time in his life he had considered death up close. Each time it seemed to get worse. There was too much he knew about David Hand, the plebe. Most intriguingly, there was too much he didn’t know about him for Slaight to simply forget David Hand. Now he was dead, and Slaight knew there were things he’d never know about the guy. It bothered him, gnawed at him, being so curious about a dead man. So Slaight, walking the area from one side of Central Area to the other and back again and again, resolved to look into meditation, which he imagined was about the business of not thinking. Maybe he’d order a book about it, the next time there was a Marboro ad in the New York Times. That was what he usually did when he was curious about something: order a book. But he’d have to do a little digging to satisfy his curiosity about David Hand, dead by drowning at nineteen.

  2

  Across Thayer Road from Central Area, in a high-ceilinged office on the third floor of the Academic Headquarters Building, Major General Axel W. Rylander, superintendent of the Military Academy, picked up a telephone and punched a button:

  “Get me Hedges,” he said, referring to Brigadier General Charles Sherrill Hedges, the commandant of cadets. His secretary dialed the four-digit number for the commandant’s office, located about one hundred yards away across the street in the Brigade Headquarters Building, at the southeast corner of Central Area. The call was answered by the commandant’s secretary. The two women, as intermediaries for their respective bosses, spoke to each other frequently. They chatted for a moment before they put the call through. Then Hedges’ secretary punched a button:

  “General, it’s the supe on line two.” Hedges replaced a pair of binoculars in its black leather case, straightened his uniform jacket, and mentally counted to ten. He picked up the phone.

  “General Hedges,” he said, knowing the voice on the other end of the phone would be that of the superintendent’s secretary, Mrs. Moore.

  “One moment, General,” said Mrs. Moore.

  Hedges winced at the sound of the woman’s voice. He had no patience for the formalities of secretaries and intercoms and buzzers and waiting. That was why he purposefully omitted the word “sir” when he picked up the phone. General Hedges. He liked the sound of it. It was like saying yeah?, thumbing his nose at the waiting, the wasted time. Hedges had a thing about wasted time. Back in Nam, up in his C & C ship, his command and control helicopter, when he grabbed the mike and punched into the battalion radio net on the ground, he wanted to be talking to the lieutenant or captain in command of that unit he w
as looking down on. It wasn’t just policy, it was the gospel. His commanders never used their RTOs, radio-telephone operators, to relay messages.

  Once he had relieved a platoon leader because the lieutenant had not personally responded on the radio to the C & C ship. He told the lieutenant’s RTO to put the platoon sergeant on. He told the sergeant to tell the eltee he was finished. He didn’t want to see him back at base camp. He didn’t want to see him anywhere. That eltee better hie himself on down to Division and start looking for a desk to hide behind … the sergeant was yessir—yessir—yessiring up a storm, breaking radio procedure, but he didn’t give a good goddamn, he was too pissed at that lieutenant to go wasting any more time on the sergeant….

  And now Hedges was waiting again. Waiting for the superintendent to come on the line. Seemed like he spent half his time waiting for the superintendent on the telephone. He wondered what in hell Rylander had done on the radio in Nam when he was a division commander. He tapped the eraser end of a pencil on the desk. The telephone seemed to burn his ear with silence. He was on hold.

  What was he doing wondering what Rylander had done in Nam? He’d heard enough about the almighty 1st Cavalry Division to know what kind of commander Rylander had been in Nam. He was old-school, one of those grandstanding SOBs who never got the hang of the fact that Vietnam wasn’t Normandy and the gooks weren’t Nazis. He’d been up there in II Corps with his almighty cav troopers, making huge sweeps, divisional maneuvers so grandiose every VC worth his rice knew a week in advance what the 1st Cav was doing, where they’d strike next. But he was all over the television, even made the cover of Life. Big color picture of Rylander with a gold scarf around his neck and a pair of mirrored sunglasses on, looking out across a bunch of hills that were probably crawling with VC and NVA regulars. And all kinds of quotes from Rylander about the “new enemy,” turning the 1st Cav into a “new concept” of a “fighting unit.” He sounded like one of those eggheads in the Pentagon, spewing garbage out of some field manual.