The Long Gray Line. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1989 by James Fallows

Duty honor country. And coffins and grad school.

People will read this book for different reasons: soldiers for its military atmosphere, Vietnam veterans for its evocation of the war, perhaps even today's college-age readers for an idea of what America looked and felt like before they were born. It should have a special meaning for journalists. In the years since Atkinson's subjects, the cadets in the West Point class of 1966, graduated from the academy, the journalistic environment in America has changed almost as much as the military system. Atkinson's book is a reminder of one old verity that is often left out of the theorizing about the modern duties of the press. It shows that there can be tremendous power in simply telling a story-establishing characters, making the readers care about them, showing what happens next.

The writers who pioneered the standards and styles for today's nonfiction-David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, Robert Caro, Gay Talese-have varying approaches and ambitions, but all of them understand that the first step in putting their message across is to get the reader interested in the story. Atkinson's approach is different from any of theirs, and in a way more modest. He concentrates on the story itself-"saga" is probably a better word, considering the scope of this book-without the underlying political argument that connects the anecdotes in The Best and the Brightest or The Reckoning. But Atkinson is a truly gifted storyteller, and the material he turns up is so rich that it suggests a number of messages on its own.

It's hard to illustrate the narrative power of the book through brief quotations, since its emotional impact is cumulative. As in a good novel, the characters grow more and more interesting as we watch them succeed, fail, mature, and die. In a splenetic, contrarian review for The New York Times Book Review, a former Vietnam correspondent named Tom Buckley alleged that this was a shapeless, boring heap of anecdotage. I'd be amazed if more than one reader in a thousand agrees. Three pages into the book, Atkinson gives a sample of his skill in setting scenes. His cadets have come back to West Point in 1986 for their 20th reunion. Nearly all of them have left the Army; 30 of their classmates (of the 579 who graduated) have died in Vietnam. They have gathered at the academy gravesite, and then mustered for the traditional procession of graduates across the parade field known as the Plain:

"As the Hellcats' drum and bugle corps played When Johnny Comes Marching Home' at a somber tempo, the graduates glided four abreast onto the sun-washed Plain. Led by a member of 22, the long gray line stretched for two hundred yards from oldest to youngest-'39, 56, '61, 66, '71, 76, 81. As they neared the waiting corps of cadets, the grads grew miraculously younger. Silver heads darkened, ebbing hairlines filled in, paunches flattened, stoops straightened, crow's feet pulled taut.

"Ten thousand spectators cheered."

Later, Atkinson shows us one of the characters leaning on a chain-link fence at an air base in California, shortly before departing for Vietnam:

"Less than fifty yards away, baggage handlers loaded a stack of shiny aluminum crates onto the nearest C-141. Jack could see hundreds of the boxes; one by one they glided up a black conveyer belt to disappear into the belly of the plane. Ammunition? he wondered. No, that didn't make any sense; they wouldn't ship ammo in aluminum containers. Perhaps they were missile boxes, Sparrows or Shrikes for the Phantoms at Ton Son Nhut. If so, they weren't very heavy; the baggage handlers hoisted the crates onto the belts with ease.

"Suddenly it struck him: coffins. Empty coffins. No-frills, government-issue, aluminum creels for the dead, bound for another load of mothers' sons in the mortuary at Bien Hoa."

Atkinson was lucky, if that term can be applied to what is obviously the result of many years of hard work, in choosing the group he portrays. The cadets in his class, who were juniors in high school when John Kennedy took office, entered the academy during a burst of nationalistic idealism. Douglas MacArthur had given his famous "Duty, Honor, Country" speech at West Point just before their arrival. Americans were not yet dying in Vietnam. The mood still had not completely turned by the time they graduated in 1966. But four years later, when most members of the class had finished their minimum service requirement, a full third of them resigned their commissions. (In the 1950s, about a tenth of each class resigned after four years.) By 1975, when Americans left Vietnam, only a handful of the cadets were still in the service, and the class had lost as high a proportion of its members in combat as the graduates of the late 1930s had in World War II.

Atkinson might have built an even starker historical drama if he had focused on the class not of 1966 but of 1968, which entered the academy while idealism was still high and came out into complete chaos. But it's easy to understand why Atkinson wanted to stay with this set of characters. Two members of the class of 1966 played major roles in the struggle over the Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington: one helped organize the effort to build it, the other led the "black gash of shame" camp. After graduation, a number of Atkinson's cadets received Ranger training from Charles Beckwith, who in 1980 organized the doomed rescue mission to Iran. One member of the class survived combat in Vietnam, only to die 10 years after graduation in the horrific "poplar tree" episode in Korea. (When American and South Korean soldiers started pruning a tree that was obscuring their view across the De-militarized Zone, North Korean soldiers suddenly appeared and hacked the two Americans to death with axes.) Other characters in the book figured in the West Point cheating scandals, the investigation of the My Lai massacre, even the recent Wedtech racketeering case.