My Share of the Task(6)

                Normally focused on daily requirements, West Point in 1972 felt estranged from the society it was meant to serve. A decade of fighting in Vietnam and a series of scandals like My Lai had degraded the military’s credibility with the country, and as cadets we were periodically reminded that we were out of step with the views, values, and lifestyles of many of our generation. On Saturday, October 21, we traveled to New Brunswick, New Jersey, for the Rutgers football game. We then were bused into Manhattan and allowed our first few hours of freedom since R-Day, but required to remain dressed in our distinctive gray cadet uniforms. Walking near Times Square, a friend and I heard a loud, long honk and looked up to see a forearm and middle finger poking out through a half-opened window of the passing car. As visible symbols, soldiers often receive praise or condemnation, and both reactions feel curiously undeserved. Yet the gap between us and American society was palpable—and disturbing.

                Cadets were not alone in feeling alienated. At the end of his tenure as superintendent of West Point in 1974, General William A. Knowlton invoked the academy’s historical role as an eighteenth-century fort when explaining to his successor that as superintendent he had spent four years defending “a stockade surrounded by attacking Indians.” West Point was training officers for an army that had lost its moral footing in the eyes of its country. And it was commissioning officers into an army that valued the ideals its graduates infused into the force but also thought some of those graduates were “prima donnas and spoiled brats,” in the words of Army chief of staff General Creighton Abrams, who had overseen the drawdown in Vietnam.

                If West Point felt like a penal colony, the feeling forged close bonds among cadets. My roommate for the second “detail” in the winter (we rotated rooms and roommates three times a year), and one of my best friends for four years, was Arthur Ken Liepold. It was hard to miss Kenny, and I noticed him early during Beast Barracks. He was an offensive tackle with an expansive frame, kind eyes, and dimples that appeared when he smiled and laughed, which he did a lot.

                Like most people, I was drawn to Kenny because he did not take anything or anyone at West Point too seriously, and did not suffer kindly those who did. His legendary devotion to friends, easygoing charisma, and disarming humor were antidotes to the rigor and pomp of West Point.

                Another friend I made early was Rick Bifulco. Stocky and quick, Bifulco was a star lacrosse player from Long Island but was built like a boxer from Brooklyn. He excelled in math and engineering but had a wickedly quick wit and a mischievous streak. Success in academics and athletics came easily to Rick, but from the beginning it was clear he valued the intangibles of camaraderie more than anything else. Rick, Kenny, and I became an unlikely but close trio for all four years.


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                All three of us were on hand for the historic mess hall rally-turned-riot of November 3, 1972, the night before the Army football team played Air Force at Michie Stadium. Pep rallies in the mess hall, in spite of the slight damage they caused, were an unofficial tradition and one of the few outlets for the cadets. But thus far that year the academy leadership had ordered the celebrations to be subdued—to the frustration of the corps.

                That afternoon, however, the commandant, Brigadier General Philip Feir, had filtered a message down through the companies to all cadets: The Commandant has determined that damage to the mess hall is of secondary importance to the morale of the corps. The implication could not have been clearer and the effect was electric. We entered the mess hall and took our places as usual.

                The mess hall, with hundred-foot ceilings, stone arches, and light filtering through stained-glass windows, normally felt like a church. Portraits of stern soldiers of yore lined the walls, peering down at cadets, who sat with their respective companies. There were eight companies seated during Beast, then thirty-six companies divided into four regiments when we joined the rest of the corps at the start of plebe year. Laid out like an asterisk, with six wings converging in the center, the mess hall was where General MacArthur, near the end of his life, bade adieu to “the corps, the corps, the corps” in his famous 1962 address to cadets. The wall at the end of the northwest wing was a massive mural from 1936, a Bayeux Tapestry–like panorama of twenty decisive battles.