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'Absolutely American': Culture War at West Point

By DAVID BROOKS

David Lipsky is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, where he has more or less covered the younger generation beat. He'd written stories from about 35 college campuses and done various features on hot young actors and media executives, and was, like most young people, entirely cut off from military life. The Army was the one profession his father absolutely refused to let him consider, and, as he says, ''I never liked the military at all as a kid.''

But he was asked by Rolling Stone's publisher, Jann Wenner, to visit West Point to do a short piece on life there. He resisted the assignment, but finally agreed to spend a few weeks, and the weeks turned to months and finally to years. The result is ''Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point,'' a superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life I have read.

Sometime during his stay, he realized that ''of all the young people I'd met, the West Point cadets -- although they were grand, epic complainers -- were the happiest.'' The academy, he found, was ''a place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybody -- or at least most people -- looked out for each other. A place where people -- intelligent, talented people -- said honestly that money wasn't what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings and about trying to make themselves better.''

Lipsky obviously came to admire West Point, but this book is not a whitewash or a sales brochure. It essentially describes a contest between two competing values systems. There is first the pure huah value system of the military, emphasizing discipline, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, courage and controlled but savage violence. Then there is the value system of society at large (and of Rolling Stone in particular), emphasizing freedom, self-expression, pleasure and commerce.

The story is interesting because West Point is not a reactionary bastion of chivalry amid a sea of hedonism. The cadets want their MP3 players, their PlayStations and their casual sex just like every other group of young people. The administrators want the military to be seen as a profession, just like medicine and the law. And yet as worldly as it has become, West Point also teaches young people to be willing to die for the sake of others, which is not on the curriculum in the Ivy League, or almost anywhere else. The military is still a calling as much as a job. And the interplay between military chivalry and worldly ambition is constantly in flux, shaping every facet of life.

Lipsky follows several cadets and faculty members through their years at the academy, and their stories are the most powerful parts of this book. One of his heroes is Lt. Col. Hank Keirsey, a career officer who is, as Lipsky's tale begins, chief of military training. Big, loud and barrel-chested -- physical charisma means a great deal at West Point -- Keirsey tells inspiring war stories. His phrases permeate the atmosphere. Soldiers aren't physically fit, they are ''steely-eyed and flat-bellied.'' Cadets don't just jog, they ''run like scalded apes.''

He gives the inspiring speeches at the climactic moments of cadet life:

''We don't know what division will go to the frontier of freedom here. But I can guarantee you this: this class will move out, will go into the ranks of the Army. And somewhere, in some disputed barricade along the frontier, you will meet your destiny. And you will stack this nation's enemies like cordwood.''

He is, in other words, the personification of huah, which is the romantic warrior code of George S. Patton put into verbal form. As Lipsky writes: ''Huah is an all-purpose expression. Want to describe a cadet who's very gung-ho, you call them huah. Understand instructions, say huah. Agree with what another cadet just said, murmur huah. Impressed by someone else's accomplishment, a soft, reflective huah.''

Cadets revere Keirsey; one collects a used cigar of his and puts it into a Ziploc bag just so he will have a souvenir of the great man. But in an army trying to be both Sparta and Athens, Keirsey is a problem. One fall while Lipsky is on campus one of Keirsey's subordinates, Dan Dent, produces a parody PowerPoint presentation slide headlined, ''Class of 2000 Homo Factor Report,'' a crude stab at humor.

The slide made it into the e-mail circles, and before long there was talk of court-martial for the instructor. Keirsey decided it was his duty to take responsibility for his subordinate, both as a matter of loyalty and because he thought his stature was such that he could take the hit without being tossed out of the Army. He was wrong. Keirsey was relieved of command of military training and dismissed from the Army.

Lipsky concludes: ''For me, what Hank Keirsey did for Dan Dent was one of the clearest examples I have of West Point values. When I tell civilian friends Keirsey's story, I have to go over it twice, because they keep asking, 'Wait, didn't the other guy make the slide?' A leader takes care of his soldiers. He puts their concerns ahead of his own.''

Keirsey's real problem is that he couldn't be bicultural; he was too much the gung-ho warrior and did not embrace the modernizing ethos, which would have made his superiors more charitably disposed toward him. Another of Lipsky's heroes is George Rash. Unlike Keirsey, Rash is something of a goofball. He has no military bearing. He talks too much, he's always looking around when he should be staring straight ahead, he does not project that surplus of manly charisma that military people call leadership. He is anti-huah.

When we first meet Rash he is about to be tossed out of West Point because he can't meet the minimum standards for the two-mile run. He scrapes by but then almost quits because he can't take the rigors of the long marches. He becomes known on campus as the universal loser. Cadets sneer at him. Administrators decide that there is no way this man can be permitted to graduate. ''If he makes it through, the credibility of this place will be seriously impacted,'' one sergeant tells Lipsky.

Rash is under constant pressure to resign from the academy. A few more times he is almost expelled, or separated, as they say, for failing the physical requirements. He is hauled before a disciplinary committee on an alleged honors violation. He is allowed to bring a friend for support. Rash has no close friends, but he scrapes by and is acquitted.

In his third year administrators ask him to quit. They tell him he will be loathed everywhere he goes in the Army by officers who prey on the physically weak. ''That's reality. This is not your niche,'' one says. In his fourth year, just before graduation, his captain calls him into his office and tells him that he's going to recommend Rash be expelled from the academy and forced to repay the $250,000 the government spent educating him. Rash slumps in his chair.

But in the end he does not quit -- he has absorbed that much of the West Point ethos -- and he is not separated. At graduation, where he finishes second from the bottom of his class, his fellow soldiers look at him with a mixture of bewilderment and awe. Through some mixture of obliviousness and stubbornness he has endured hardships and setbacks none of them have faced.

Lipsky has many other stories of this sort, of men and women caught between the unique rigors of military service and the normal urges and vicissitudes of being young, hormonal and American. There are romances, career perplexities, lost souls and cruel expulsions. Lipsky is a fine reporter and observer, and his weakness for similes aside, an elegant writer. The book must have been extremely hard to organize. And yet it reads with a novelistic flow.

When we saw members of the Army's Third Infantry Division roaring toward Baghdad, we saw among them young officers who believed in their organization, who were idealistic about service to the nation and who are, from all appearances, extremely good at what they do. It turns out that how teenagers get turned into leaders is not a simple story, but it is wonderfully told in this book.

David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a contributing editor at Newsweek.