by Gus Lee
Kai, I’m in love with Lynn Lichtenstein, the brilliant girl who was in Frankfurt and Ft. Sam Houston when my dad was assigned there. She’s read Mann and Cather and likes to stay up late, talking. To put it in your terms, she looks like Elizabeth Taylor. She’s mature and doesn’t eat off my plate.
I got a letter from Pearl Yee, asking for your address. Apparently, she addressed a letter to “Kai Ting, U.S. Army, Ord, California” and it was returned. Can I give her your address? Or, better yet, why not write her? I know you’re in numbnuts land, and that you’re stupid in math, but don’t be crazy, too. She’s very fond of you. Hang in there, Mike
In the letter was a photo of Pearl and me at a formal hop. I was in uniform India, the all-white snow machine. She wore stunning black with white high-heeled pumps. We looked terrific. Later, I meant to put it with the picture of Mah-mee, but somehow I had lost it in the dunes.
39
THE CORPS
June 5, 1968
I drove the rented Fairlane through Highland Falls while a radio commentator said that if Bobby Kennedy won the California primary tonight, he was expected to become President of the United States. He was against the war in Vietnam, but when he spoke about Martin Luther King and his own slain brother, I felt as if I were listening to Toussaint LaRue.
I drove up to the guard kiosk at Thayer Gate. The MP smiled when he saw we were the same rank, and gave me a visitor’s card for the dash. He kept staring at me.
“Used to be a cadet,” I said, and he nodded.
“Thought so, Sergeant Ting. Welcome back. It’s a beautiful day.” He saluted me, and I returned it. “Thank you,” I said.
The Thayer Hotel looked tall and proud, its massive chest out and flags flying in the warm breeze. Mike Benjamin and I had stood at the driving turnabout, looking upriver, talking about omens on the night before R-Day.
Cavalry Field was filled with Firstie cars—Corvette Sting Rays, T-Birds, Bonnevilles, Firebirds, and Cougars. The payments would make them poor for years. After having no freedom, Firsties bought highly prestigious sports cars. I thought of my old Chevy, embarrassed. It was a jalopy, a junk heap.
I followed Thayer Road as it bent around the bright, sparkling river. I had walked up this road, swinging my bag, on the most beautiful morning of my life, four years ago.
I felt pain in my eyes, pain everywhere, my ears ringing, my chest constricted. There was no curb and I couldn’t pull over, driving blindly, hoping I wouldn’t hit anyone. I fought for control against my rebellious body. My heart surged wildly as I approached the Cadet Hilton, scaring me. Is this what a heart attack feels like? Here, before Admin, was a curb, and I stopped. To my left was the Cadet Hilton. A-3 country. I remembered them all.
Hi, guys, I whispered. I hear you. I feel you.
I drove on, surprised to see that Washington Hall’s face had been altered, huge additions connected to it, and that Thayer Monument had been moved. The timeless Academy, changing.
I hadn’t been able to answer any of my classmates’ letters. They told me the news and tried to understate the glory and relief of First Class year and the pain of losing faculty and Grads in Vietnam. I was unable to write. Writing reminded me of my failures. I had thrown away my journal.
I drove around the cannon to Washington Road. The Ford’s engine idled in a warm wind as my mind flooded with unchained memories. The three years here seemed like the sum of my life. Endeavor, Wisdom, Patria, Providence, Faith, Love, Hope, the school in the mountains and the clouds, with Clint Bestier’s brass buried beneath Sedgwick’s spurs, and the little scar in the old concrete of Central Area marking the place where I had stood.
I spent the morning wandering through the cemetery, communing with others who had left the Academy only in the physical sense. Custer, last man in his class. Ed White, the astronaut. Marco Matteo Fideli, who sang to God. I felt strangely comfortable with the dead. I stopped at one plain white stone. It was new, for Robert Arvin, Class of 1965, our First Captain, killed in action in Vietnam, 1 October 1967. He had been a giant, our King of Beasts, ordering us to change clothes while inviting us into the military order of the Academy. The tablet was too small, the air too warm, too kind, too soft, for this view. I remembered the snowy January morning when we watched Marco’s widow bid farewell.
I walked along the edge of the cemetery and saw Major Maher’s quarters. I crossed the street. His wife’s name was Ann; the boy … Shawn. The nameplate said “MAJ F. Carson.” Chase Maher had returned for a second tour in Southeast Asia.
After marching in three hundred reviews and inspections, I was about to see my first live West Point parade as an observer. Graduation Parade was the granddad of them all, with its peaking emotion, particularized music, its passage amidst an ecstatic crowd. I stood at the crest of Battle Monument, where Third Regiment would center. I was going to look for the faces of my brothers.
I had been there an hour before the first of some thirty thousand family, faculty, and tourists arrived. As the morning sun rose above the hill and splashed the deep, lush green of the marching plain and the surrounding forests in sparkles of light, the massed gray-and-white battalions appeared to “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
The Corps looked magnificent, marching out to the tune “The Girl I Left Behind Me” with aching precision in four full regiments, eight battalions, thirty-six companies, with bright yellow guidons fluttering in the river wind. The sun caught the rifle receivers, the drawn sabers, the rims of tar buckets, the guidon trucks, as if each of the thirty-three hundred cadets were one body. I coached them, seeing one rifle muzzle too high in Third Regiment, one Firstie slowed by a beer too many at Snuffy’s. I knew them all from a wounded heart. They were perfect. The crowd watched them openmouthed. Parents helplessly cheered and I stopped breathing, watching them, memorizing them, recognizing the companies by their individual traits, loving this display of what we could do.
The band played “Army Blue” and the Class of 1968 formed front and center, abandoning their old companies to the hoots of their friends, who only now realized how much they would be missed. I saw the new squad leaders—Spanner, McFee, Parthes, Quint, Schmidt, Zerl, Caleb, and Irkson. Schmidt was overweight. I wanted to wave.
Applause from tens of thousands filled the air as the First Classmen stepped out, and cheers rang from the crowd of fathers.
I had trouble seeing. Then, I saw them all, one by one.
The platoon leaders—Big Bus Lorbus, Deke Schibsted, and Arch Torres. Company commander Chad Enders. The flankers—Jackson Hawk Latimer, Mason Meatball Rodgers, Tree Bartels. Spoon DeVries, Moon Shine, Rocket Scientist Ziegler, Curve Wrecker Glick, Moose Hoggatt, Buns Butte, Cold Max McSon, Pensive Hamblin, Buzz Patterson, and Handsome Hansen, all royal cards in a rich deck, glorious in gray, unchanged by the year, immortal, forever.
The other companies trooped the line. As the class formed for review, I saw Sonny Rappa and Mike Benjamin, Billy Bader, Alphabet Burkowski, and Miles Brodie, and my chest swelled and my heart sang for them, and I no longer minded that I was not out there. They were my classmates, and their honor, and their achievement, their completeness, were enough, on this beautiful day of unfettered joy, for me. I had been one of them. I was here for Clint Bestier, Pee Wee McCloud, Joey Rensler, Ravine Levine Mankoff, and Stew Mersey.
“Pass in Review!” cried Jack Anschutzel, First Captain of the Corps. The band played “the Thumper,” the official West Point march that stirred the collective heart of the Academy, and the companies passed the class and rendered eyes right. My classmates presented brilliant steel sabers to what was now the Corps of Cadets.
The Long Gray Line of the class was formed on the Plain. They would never be together like this again, standing before Washington Hall, driving the Academy with its wheels. I could hear Marco Fideli singing to me in his peerless voice.
The long gray line of us stretches
Through the years of a century told,
And the last man feels to his marr
ow
The grip of your far-off hold…
While we swear, as you did of yore,
Or living, or dying, to honor
The Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps!
They were headed for Vietnam, and they would go, and serve, regardless of individual feelings, regardless of doubts, despite any other obligations or responsibilities. They would go because they believed in each other, and honored the bonds that tied them together like ligatures around the stems of their hearts. Many had come here out of duty to their fathers. Now they would go to Vietnam out of a larger and more defined and clearly selfless duty to an indifferent and hostile public, learned inside the old granite walls, on company tables and green-carpeted playing fields. They were not isolated souls, orbiting their memories, on the edge of Graduation Parades, free-floaters without ties, or bonds, or pledges, purposeless, useless. They were the servants of the Republic, its noble Guardians. They had taken the oath, and they wore the ring, and would go where the American government pointed, whether in wisdom or in ignorance. They were absolutely magnificent in gray and white, their plumes fluttering in the breeze, their glittering sabers saluting the Corps, the mountains, and the clouds.
“Mommy,” asked a little boy, “why is that man crying? Isn’t he a soldier?”
I couldn’t stay. I wiped my face, straightened my garrison cap, held my head high, hitched my trou, ground my molars, willed myself to walk like Toussaint, and marched off Thayer Road through the huge throng of chattering well-wishers flooding onto the Plain from the grandstands as the band joyously played “Garry Owens,” the tune imprinted upon me as a boy when I had watched The Long Gray Line.
I had planned to stay for the graduation exercise at Michie Stadium in the morning, and to hear the Chief of Staff, General Harold Johnson, deliver the address. But it was too artificial to try to hide from the entire Academy community and be a mouse in the corner, high in the stadium seats, to hear Jack announce “Class Dismissed” and watch seven hundred white cadet caps thrown in the air.
The Graduation Hop would take place tonight at the gymnasium, since Cullum was too small, and I smiled, knowing that Sonny and Barbara and Mike and Lynn would be together, dancing with the skill that Arch Torres had tried so desperately to impart to my two left feet. Many classmates were getting married—an act beyond my greatest courage or most reckless imagination.
I had to sidestep violently to avoid a small girl and boy running through the mob, and I smashed into a very hard object that shook me to my timbers.
“Excuse me!” the man said, reaching up to catch his cap.
“Pardon me, sir,” I said.
“Well, blast me! Kai Ting!”
“Jesus—Major Schwarzhedd! How are you, sir?” I presented arms, and he saluted me handsomely. He was glorious in his summer whites, his rock-hewn face full of light, his broad chest glittering in the colors of courage. He studied me, beaming, looking down while we shook hands, and he gently took his eyes away from mine when he noticed that mine were wet, that I was losing control. I had experienced an urge to hug him.
“Drill Sergeant Ting, Airborne Infantry. You look positively splendid. You’re in great shape. Damn, you look good!” His huge chest expanded, his teeth bright. I enjoyed reviewing his five banks of decorations, as if somehow they were mine as well. I had three ribbons. I basked in his brilliant smile.
A small coterie waited for him. Some waved, saying they would see him later.
“Don’t let me keep you, sir. I want to thank you for your letter of recommendation. It got me in.”
“That’s great.” He smiled. “One moment.” The major stepped over to his company. “Glenda Auden, Colonel Gordon, this is Sergeant Kai Ting, one of my men. Kai, this is Glenda Auden and Colonel Gordon.” He had said “one of my men.”
Glenda Auden warmly offered her hand, her smile as healing as the sight of the Corps. Colonel Gordon appeared to be from the cover of Esquire, muscular and sharply angled. I tried not to stare, but he had the Medal of Honor. He wore the ring and was black.
“I am very happy to meet you both—ma’am … sir,” I said, sharply saluting the colonel.
“Why don’t you head to the reception? I’ll meet you there,” Major Schwarzhedd said to them. “You’re avoiding everyone, aren’t you?” he asked me when they had gone.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Nice touch, coming covertly. Tackling me at Trophy Point.”
“Sir, it takes a special NCO to run over his superior and bust the crap out of himself at the same time.” I rotated my right arm.
“Let’s walk,” he said.
We strolled around the Plain and the Super’s Quarters and Battle Monument. I remember asking if he had a pinpoint return assignment in Vietnam, and that he had said no. I thought of Marco Fideli, Captain Mac, Bob Arvin, Dan Spillaney, and his fiancee, Glenda, and fear seized my guts. Not you, please, not you.
“Be sure to make it back, sir. We need you to come back.”
He looked at me with private thoughts, smiling enigmatically. He said something in reply, but I cannot remember his words. I’m not sure how long we were together, nor can I recall all that he said. It was too overwhelming for me to be back at the Academy, this strange and powerful school, founded by ancient Honor, Polish engineers, revolutionary Englishmen, Irish songs of strong ale, and the first political Americans, on this brightest and warmest day of all days bright and warm, with this officer who possessed so many connections to my family and to my heart. I basked in the vitality of my gahng and lun to him. The bonds were beyond my measure. He told me to forgive myself. I inhaled the river air, appreciating every moment. Life was full and I had no wounds, no injuring past, my heart clean and pure.
Somewhere near the end of our time together, the major stopped. “Ever read Churchill’s Graduation Address to Sandhurst?”
“No, sir,” I said. Sandhurst, Great Britain’s West Point, was Churchill’s alma mater.
“Churchill was prime minister, and the world press awaited this eloquent man’s words, speaking to his old school, where his record had not been the best. Churchill took the podium. He said, crisply, ‘Never give up.’ Then he lowered his voice. ‘Never give up.’ Then he raised it: ‘NEVER … GIVE … UP!’ Then he sat down.”
The major put out his hand. We shook. “It’s a good world—much to be thankful for. Go into it for all that’s good. Don’t give up on yourself, and never give up on others,” he said. “Serve somewhere. And keep in touch.” He smiled and I memorized him.
As I drove down the hill from Washington Road, I passed the BOQ, where I had countered perfection in the company of the Saturday Night Poker Society, where Major Schwarzhedd had fed me, offered me his advice, and lent me his thoughts, trying to pour his immeasurable strength and abundant confidence into me.
I couldn’t run from my heart. It had helped to come here, to lend my small applause and heart-bursting admiration to the graduating First Classmen of the USMA Class of 1968. I was proud to know them, proud to have been one of their brothers.
When I drove out Thayer Gate, I wanted to stop and look back, but the heavy press of festive traffic propelled me forward.
I entered La Guardia with a light step, my boots striking the hard floors, pleased with the possibility that I did not have to be sad for all my days. I remembered Schwarzhedd’s smiling face, and it lent strength to my stride and lift to my heart. He thought that I had a future. When he spoke of forgiving myself, I had looked at the river and thought about Pearl. He had said “serve somewhere,” and I had thought of Bobby Kennedy.
I could extend leave; Sergeant Seeger could cover my platoon for another day. I closed my eyes and remembered Pearl’s Manhattan and Southampton phone numbers. My heart surged with an upbeat rhythm and I smiled from inward pleasure. I licked my lips, imagining her voice. I knew somehow that she would forgive me. I was putting a dime into the phone when I heard a woman crying. Clusters of men shook heads while other women sobbed. I wa
nted to ask what had happened, but the airport had seemed to come to a stop, full of shocked people. Someone said “Kennedy.”
I stepped outside. The redcaps and the cabdrivers, most of them black, were weeping with greater force than the passengers in the terminal.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Oh, man,” said one. “He won the primary and they shot him dead. They shot Bobby Kennedy in L.A.” He looked at my uniform. “He died for you, man.”
On the plane to Travis I realized that I had left the phone dangling, the number undialed. Bobby Kennedy had been shot on the day my class had graduated from West Point.
Kennedy was a man beloved by the many-hued colored people of America. But I knew little else about him. So I couldn’t understand why I felt like I had been shot, or that his death had been personal to me, my momentarily promising future ended abruptly, once again.
40
HONOR AND DUTY
San Francisco, June 14, 1968
I reread the letter Uncle Shim had written nearly a year ago.
August 30, 1967
Dear Haushusheng,
Thank you for your letter.
Indeed, I have sad news for you. You remember what your sister Janie said to me, when I discovered her in Canada. She said your father was not her father, her sisters were not her sisters, her brother not her brother. I am so sorry, young Ting, to tell you that your father has an equal bitterness in his heart.
He and I had dinner last night, at Johnny Kan’s. I asked him if he had heard from you. He said nothing. So I said to him, “K.F., is the boy going to the war in Champa, in Vietnam?” I thought this would produce an answer. It did not.
