The Long Gray Line. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1989 by James Fallows

Atkinson's other question probes why the professional military lost America's respect. There is no doubt, after reading the book, that the military was one of the big victims of the Vietnam war. No other group of classmates in

the country can have suffered as high a casualty rate, physical and spiritual, as the West Pointers did. But Atkinson also shows (rather than says) that the roots of many of the military's failures reached deep into the West Point tradition. Almost everything that proved to be wrong with the military's ethics in Vietnam had some connection with the values instilled at West Point. The obsession with numerical ratings and class standing is almost impossible for outsiders to believe. (Even years after graduation, members of the class were seated at football games in order of their class standing as cadets. One of the few members of 66 who stayed in the Army and became a distinguished career military leader had been near the bottom of the class, in constant danger of flunking out. In the Academy's records he is permanently listed as #529-66-the 529th-ranking member of the class. Most of those near the top of the class-rank list left the Army as soon as they could.) It's not hard to see the connection between this emphasis on numerical ratings and the body-count obsession in Vietnam-and the broader connection to the careerist emphasis of the post-Vietnam military, in which officers tried to max" their performance ratings by making no waves and pleasing the boss.

The intense hazing of new cadets, which theoretically increases their fortitude as individuals and their solidarity as a class, seems mainly to have made each year's victims eager to take revenge on the following year's class. The honor code taught at West Point clearly had an ennobling effect on some; but most of the stories Atkinson tells are of cadets trying to meet the letter rather than the spirit of the military's rules. One of the most striking illustrations, which Atkin- son passes over without comment (but which Buckley pounced on in his angry review) concerns what the cadets did immediately after graduation. They'd devoted themselves to military service, they'd heard about risk and sacrifice, their country was involved in a war-whose casualties were mounting but which was not yet as completely divisive as it would be in 1968-yet on graduation fewer than one-fifth of them volunteered to go to Vietnam. The majority applied for graduate school, specialized training, and so on. In the end, of course, most of the class members served in Vietnam and many of them suffered and died there. Still, their initial decision seems an incongruous application of "Duty, Honor, Country." (Of course, from the perspective of almost any other American university in 1966, the surprise is that as many as one-fifth were willing to volunteer.)

To answer the questions Atkinson's book raises, someone should start chronicling today's West Point cadets, seeing how they respond to circumstances entirely different from those of a generation ago: Now there are women in the corps; the Pentagon is more worried about getting into "another Vietnam" than most civilians are; there's a volunteer army whose morale often reflects its knowledge that it has been hired to do jobs its "betters" refuse to do; and the world-strategic situation virtually guarantees the U.S.'s steady retreat from its overseas bases. Someone should eventually tell that story as masterfully as Atkinson has told his.