Honor and Duty

by Gus Lee

  He stopped. I was barely breathing. He turned to me.

  “You speak English like American. You American. Look big and strong, good sergeant, paratrooper. American schooling. Edna teach English. Manners. Now, you go college, finish. Study, your choice. You have children—speak English. Do good. Have good life.”

  Study, your choice. He faced me, and wiped the water from the wings on my chest. Blood Wings. Then, slowly, he held my shoulders. He had only held me like this when I was very small and he was angry. He shook me, like Pearl had, begging me to open my heart.

  “You know, is true. I cannot hold anger for you anymore. You are my son. I am proud of you. I always proud.”

  I couldn’t say anything. I was crying.

  “Is all right, Kai,” he said. “I wanted West Point too much, for me. Was my dream. How can you have dream when Father in your shoes, try take your heart? Your future clear, without me say where you go.

  “American father not decide if son life good enough for him! That is goo dai, old ways, ancient times. You American! I American.”

  “Janie’s American,” I whispered.

  He patted my shoulder, his eyes moist.

  “I think of my father,” he said. “How things did not work for him. How many sadness he have. Long time ago. World turn against him, blame him for everything. He not bad man.”

  He looked away from me as a large, single tear ran down his cheek. DIs always carry Kleenex, and I wiped away the tear.

  He pretended that this had not happened. My father surveyed the sky, the old soldier knowing its portents, smelling the air, tactically measuring visibility, wind, and moisture, judging the distance between East and West. He glanced at me and looked, his eyes seeing someone behind me, behind himself.

  “Perhaps I was honorable son to my father. Maybe I wrong, all many years. You know—I save my family. Everyone! I bring them to America. All children alive. All children smart.”

  I wasn’t smart. “Janie most of all,” I said. “She’ll be the doctor, the scholar. The one you’ll be proudest of. And Megan’s a great, a popular schoolteacher, the highest honor.

  And Jennifer’s the smartest, the wisest. Right, Dad?”

  He looked down at the ground and sighed, exhaling old pains that would not die.

  Take command, Dad.

  He nodded imperceptibly, Chinese talk, secret, subtle, but clear. Right, he had meant, silently. Janie most of all and Megan is a great teacher, Jennifer the wise one. My daughters.

  He turned away from me for a while. The sound of nearby traffic on Lombard seemed to be from another world. The air was clean with hints of the sea. No cars honked. I smelled of ocean mist.

  Then he said, “You are good brother, stand up for sister. You do right thing.” He nodded, too sad to speak.

  “You forgive me, Father?” I asked, my voice not mine.

  “I will tell you now, Ding Kai, you American now. This honors me. Then we get better. Know more. Learn.”

  It was a Chinese answer, full of courtesy.

  I smiled, my hands in my pockets in the cool night air. It was a beautiful evening. I touched the matchbook. I remembered Pearl’s phone numbers. I remembered leaving her and I closed my eyes with the pain that I had never felt that day, but had been festering in me for a year. Please remember me, Pearl. Please forgive me. Ding Kai loves you.

  “Hey, you guys aren’t going to jump, are you?” came a concerned voice from a man on the dark street below.

  My father looked down at him, then grabbed my arm, making me open my eyes.

  “No,” he called. “We not jumping. We climbing up American ladder!”

  To Amazing Grace and

  To the USMA Class of 1968, who will always honor

  DONALD ROBERT COLGLAZIER

  JOHN THOMAS MARTIN III

  JAMES DEAN KELLY

  RICHARD MELVIN MASON

  DAVID LEE ALEXANDER

  HENRY MERSHON SPENGLER III

  KENNETH PAUL KNITT

  PETER MICHAEL CONNOR

  JAMES JOHN STETTLER

  LOUIS JOHN SPEIDEL

  WILLIAM FRANCIS REICHERT

  DENNY LAYTON JOHNSON

  DOUGLAS TERRELL WHELESS

  DONALD FRANCIS VANCOOK, JR.

  DAVID THORNTON MADDUX

  WILLIAM FORSSELL ERICSON II

  WILLIAM FRANCIS LITTLE III

  ROY WILLIAM MASE

  JOHN EDWARD DARLING, JR.

  ROBERT GEORGE MACDONALD

  JEFFREY RANDAL RIEK

  ERNEST WILLIAM FLOWERS II

  DON RENAY WORKMAN

  HARRY ELLIS HAYES

  DONALD JOHN DARMODY

  JAMES ALFRED GAISER

  MICHAEL ANTHONY DIBENEDETTO, JR.

  KENNETH THADDEST CUMMINGS

  DAVID LEE SACKETT

  RICHARD ASPINALL HAWLEY, JR.

  To Companies H, 1st Regiment, and A, 3rd Regiment, U.S. Corps of Cadets: Jim Adams, Jim Altemose, Jon Anderson, Tim Balliet, Jim Beahm, Tony Cerne, Steve Childers, Bruce Erion, Jim Forquerean, Jon Gardner, Jim Higgins, Bob Hunt, Barry Hittner, Fred Klein, Jim Llewellyn, Bob Lorbeer, Marvin Markley, Mike Murphy, Steve Murphy, Tom Pence, Mike Peters, Lew Robertson, Lou Speer, Jon Stolp, Art Torres, and George Williams, who stayed the course and served. And to all the Immortals, with a Present Arms to Danny Guigan, David Bue, Paul Coulter, and Bobby J.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Diane, Jena, and Eric, for everything.

  To my father, Tsung-chi Lee: to my sisters, Lee Hause, Ying Lee Kelley, and Dr. Ming Zhu, M.D., and John, Lars, Max, Sara, Anna, and Eva; Lon-Lon, Jane, and Lulu; to the memory of my mothers, Da-tsien and Edith.

  To Toussaint Maceo Streat; Charles Alex Murray; Lawrence Anthony Rapisarda; Robert Carl Lorbeer; Michael Warren Bain; Professor George Kagiwada, Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis; Professor Kwang-Ching Liu, Department of History, University of California, Davis, with deep appreciation for his teaching and for Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 1990); to my Christian covenant brothers Frank Ramirez, Barry Shiller, Paul Benchener, and Paul Gustaf Watermulder; and to the wonderful family of the First Presbyterian Church of Burlingame.

  With thanks to Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng for their translation of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo: From the Soil; to sister Amy Tan; to the Molly Giles Flying Circus and Tahoe Cabin Crew; to Pinoy Punsalong; to Daisy Tan; to Herbert M. Rosenthal, Mark T. Harris, and Diane C. Yu; to the faculty and staff of the U.S. Military Academy, with particular thanks to H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Robert Yerks, Pennell Joseph Hickey, Wallace William Noll, John “Buzz” Calabro, and Ray Aalbue; to my editor Ash Green and my publishers Sonny Mehta and Leona Nevler; to my peerless agent Jane Dystel of Acton, Dystel, Leone & Jaffe, New York; to Miriam Goderich; to Steven Douglas Childers and Arthur Frank Torres; to Monina Ramos; to the Boys and Girls Club of North San Mateo; to Valerie Rice of North Utilities; to Kevin Bourke; and to the Corps, which will weather all changes, and always be there for the protection of the Republic.

  ABBREVIATIONS AND GLOSSARY

  AAA: Army Athletic Association, a voluntary alumni group which supports Academic intercollegiate sports; often confused with an unrelated organization

  AI: additional instruction, for those who require extra class time in course work; used lyrically to describe individually focused hazing upon shit magnets

  Airborne: training and operations for parachute-trained infantry. Training graduates receive a silver emblem of a parachute bracketed by wings. Opposite of “leg” infantry—those without airborne qualification

  All Right: abbreviated official statement on a cadet’s Honor that all persons in a room are authorized, wherever they may be; also used as a social declaration to describe an excellent situation, often accompanied by a thumbs-up

  animal night: slang for eating without the benefit of utensils; customarily reserved for Mulligan stew, beef ragout, and ravioli or spaghetti dinners, and induced by the same conditions
that precipitate RFs

  AO: area of operation, short for tactical area of operation; also used to describe an individual’s personal living space within cramped barracks

  AOT: summer Army Orientation Training for Second Classmen serving with actual Army units, such as at Fort Carson, Colorado

  Area: space in the middle quadrangle of Central Barracks. Walking the Area takes place here.

  ASP: assigned study problem, a shared-work take-home assignment; also the reptile that killed Cleopatra

  BA: bare ass—bare area of the human derriere; used as a noun in conjunction with modifiers such as “mountain,” “atomic,” and “nuclear,” when the BA is pointed at someone like a weapon, en masse, using geometric or military formations; also, bare-assed, the adjective, to describe someone who is so exposed

  B-ache: bellyache, as a verb; to complain, which, at the Academy, achieved an art form

  Big Dick: a risk exercise at mess hall tables, in which diners flip knives to win more, or lose all, of dessert, premised on the business principles that finance nation-states

  Black Hat: cadre of the Airborne School; major aficionados of push-ups, shouting, singing while running, and the defeat of acrophobia by compelling frightened men to collide repeatedly with the earth

  Blue Book: Manual of Regulations, USCC, which guides the conduct of the Corps; so called because of its blue binder; filled, in the 1960s, largely with interpolations into interpolations, unto the third and fourth generation of interpolations, upon which the IRS based its code and interpretations

  boodle: food, particularly that found in cadet rooms—and usually sweets from Boodlers, small cadet cafes in the Weapons Room and the First Class Club that dispensed ice cream and cookies. Food hogs, however, considered all food “boodle.”

  BJ: before June—describing a lack of military respect in a Plebe’s conduct with upperclassmen. In June, Plebes are “recognized” as being part of the upper classes, and can then comport themselves according to a far lower standard of human behavior.

  BP: barracks policeman, a civilian building janitor

  brace: correct position of military attention for a Plebe, executed by compressing the neck inward toward the spine and producing waves of wrinkles in the neck ideally equal to the age of the Plebe, to be maintained whenever outdoors or in the presence of an upperclassman

  brat: for “Army brat”—child of an Army family

  brown boy: a homely but warm comforter issued to each cadet. “Brown boy defilade” means to establish a defensive tactical position: to sleep under deep covers, eyes and mind closed to the sensate assault of the system.

  Buckner: military training camp for Third Classmen’s two-month military skills summer, on the USMA Military Reservation; emphasis on platoon tactics, patrolling, and physical fitness; named after General Simon Bolivar Buckner, CG, X Army Corps, a former Commandant of Cadets, killed at Okinawa

  Bugle Notes: the “Plebe bible”—filled with poop for recitation and containing general information about the Academy

  butt: a remaining fraction or portion of a whole: e.g., the four hours before midnight are a butt of a day

  CIB: Combat Infantryman’s Badge, a prized award for serving in the Infantry in combat, denoted by a musket mounted in the center of a blue rectangular field, with a silver oak wreath bracketing the rectangle from behind. Stars are added to the top center of the wreath for successive awards.

  civvies: civilian clothes

  CG: commanding general

  CO: commanding officer

  Code: shorthand for the Honor Code: “a cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do”

  cold: perfect and without error, as in “cold max”

  Corps Squad: USMA intercollegiate team

  Cow: a Second Classman, equivalent to a college junior attending night school with two full-time jobs and four children, one of whom is a well-armed juvenile delinquent. Cows are the maternal figures of the Corps, with the strongest personal leadership responsibility of the upper classes. They and Plebes are traditionally the spooniest members of the Corps.

  C-rats: C-rations—canned food for field use—individually packaged meals of high caloric and questionable nutritional value, renowned for haute cuisine savoriness. Hot picks included hard and lard (ham and beans); cows and rocks (sliced beef and potatoes); lard and balls (beans and meatballs in tomato sauce). Nutritional supplements included fudge bricks, pound cake, and peaches. Accessory packs included coffee, creamer, sugar, salt and pepper, cigarettes, and toilet paper.

  crimes against humanity: see EE 304

  crot: slang for Plebe; derived from the original Academy French-language primer, designed to allow cadets to read later the seminal military engineering texts, which were authored by Vauban, de Gribeauval, Montalembert, and Carnot. “Monsieur Ducrot” was the central illustrative character in that primer, making him one of the most despised mythical characters in the American-woodsmen, monolingual Corps of Cadets. New cadets on R-Day were traditionally greeted with, “Here, at last, is Mr. Ducrot,” and subjected to all of the repressed frustration generated by studying the French tongue. Eventually, the name was Americanized and, like the new cadet himself, shortened, its background forgotten.

  dee: deficient—not maintaining minimum proficiency in a course; opposite of “pro,” proficient

  detail: cadre, or duty assignment, as in First Detail Beast, which manages New Cadet Barracks for July, and Second Detail Beast, which operates it for August

  DF: disposition form, a standardized Army memorandum form

  DX: delete/final—equipment item dropped from inventory because either destroyed, lost, or damaged beyond repair, which frequently occurred whenever cadets were brought into contact with equipment with moving parts

  DZ: drop zone: proposed target for an Airborne drop, usually several kilometers from where paratroopers actually land

  EE 304: Electrical Engineering 304, a Second Class, two-semester, seven-semester-hour lab course, also known as Juice. EE 304A is first, and 304B is second semester. According to unbiased accounts, EE 304 represented a new low in human learning and was generally recognized as the responsible agent for the collapse of Western morality in the latter half of the twentieth century.

  engineer: a hive—a good student in a school of good students

  ES&GS: Earth, Space, and Graphic Sciences; Plebe course in Everything Known to Anyone: geology, meteorology, astronomy, cartography, terrain science, formation of the universe, and drafting, conducted in narcotized sixth-floor classrooms atop Washington Hall after cadets have double-timed up the stairs. Course analysts at the University of California at Davis reviewed this class for a week before deciding that it matched nothing ever seen in any other university, awarding no transfer credit

  fall out: the military order allowing a Plebe to release his brace—to “let his neck out,” to let his chin “fall out” of a stiff, compressed bracing posture, somewhat akin to a person being released from hanging, fingernail removal, or wearing a jockstrap several sizes too small

  FD: full dress—a forty-four-brass-buttoned gray tunic with a high collar, gold braid, and tails designed to (a) make the wearer appear to be a member of an earlier century and (b) choke the wearer in several places at once

  find: to separate a cadet from the Corps for deficiency in studies or conduct. Separated cadets are “found.”

  Firstie: a First Classman, a cadet in his fourth year—academically equal to a doctoral candidate in class hours, socially equal to a monk in individual liberties, and penally equal to a medium-security inmate in recreational opportunities; responsible for running the Corps and normally so worn by the preceding three years that shaving, spit-shining, trou pressing, and the wearing of hats become forgotten skills

  4-F: Selective Service classification for a person medically disqualified from the draft and military service, a status highly desired by vast numbers of American males in the period 1964 to 1972

  frogme
n: slang for underwater commandos, now called Seals, but unaccountably under control of the Department of the Navy

  goat: a poor performer in academics; opposite of a hive or engineer

  gray hog: a passionate believer in the system and in West Point, and, accordingly, deemed suspect by those still in possession of rational faculties

  gross: significantly inadequate, extremely erroneous, blindingly dull, or startlingly below Academy standards; a favorite and conventional adjective and the companion of “puny”

  grub: the act of scavenging academic tenths, or credits, for higher grades or to avoid being found for being dee

  Hellcats: military band members tasked with sounding reveille with unrestrained vigor after the sounding of the cannon, and who are accordingly beloved by all cadets and remembered by them in their nighttime prayers and in their wills

  hive: a successful academic performer; a bright student who quickly understands and grasps academic principles; an engineer; also used as a verb to describe effort in academics

  Honor: the Code at West Point

  India: an all-white, brass-buttoned, high-collared cadet uniform for formal summer events, also known as the “snow suit” for making even the-most nefariously twisted cadet appear like a Sir Galahad

  IOBC: Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the Infantry and the Benning School for Boys

  IRP: “immediate response, please,” a vigorously shouted command offered to Plebes, encouraging them to not dally in their spoken answers to the upper classes

  jodie: a cadence-based song for troops during quick-time or double-time march, named for the proverbial boy back home who is dating the soldier’s girlfriend (“Your momma was there when you left / Your baby was there when you left / Jodie was there when you left / Sound off …”)