Too-fat review: Absolutely American, by David Lipsky

[Tangledog]

This is only slightly edited from the entry in my personal book journal. I tell myself too much, and write rather dryly, so I can look at it in 10 years and know what I was talking about. -- Tangledog

The author, a Rolling Stone correspondent,originally intended to spend a few weeks at the Academy and write about it as he would any other college, but became fascinated with the place.

He follows a few cadets closely, and several others more briefly. The cadet Lipsky chooses to follow most thoroughly is a most unusual one: George Rash, so unpopular he doesn't even have a nickname (though with that name, maybe he doesn't need one), and always on the verge of getting "separated." George is a good enough engineering student, but he has trouble with the physical requirements of the training. More importantly, he lacks a certain quality: huah.

"There's a word you hear a lot at West Point: huah. (It's the word Al Pacino rode to an Oscar as the retired Infantry colonel in Scent of a Woman.) 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."

George resists many efforts to get him to leave, and even survives an honor hearing when he is accused of lying; but he graduates, and in the process becomes an odd legend.

Some cadets just bomb out of the whole process, out of dislike of the cloistering, physical or intellectual mismatches, or disciplinary problems. Others excel. And, usually, the ones who get through are the ones who you feel should get through. But not always. In the last fifty pages, we find that a few reasonably sympathetic cadets become more interested in their careers, and in pleasing "Higher," than in the soldiers they are supposed to be leading. Maybe they were that way all along, or else a taste of power got to them. The winnowing process isn't perfect (as we've seen in Vietnam and currently), and probably can't be.

There are vignettes about racial and sexual integration on campus, drugs, hazing (commanders as far back as Douglas MacArthur tried to get rid of it, though recent attempts have been more consistent and more successful), and West Point's various collisions with the mores of the outside world. In fact, most of the book is vignettes. But Lipsky bounces between his various subjects so ably that I consistently felt like I was getting a true picture of real people.

Lipsky closes his narrative in the wake of 9/11 and the burst of huah that followed.

Excellent, vivid writing, phenomenally easy to read, a goldmine of slang for those who are inquisitive about such things. One of my best of the year.