James Salter - Burning the Days

In the hallway, seated on a banister in an undershirt, doubly forbidden, was Nash with the Blue Book of regulations in his hand. He was smoking a cigar and calmly reading out the particulars, repeating them on demand while we flung clothes wildly off and on. Good luck, he called, as we ran down the stairs. It was his farewell performance.

Had Nash repented and borne the consequences, he might that year or the next have trotted onto the field to become famous, but there are men born to be impetuous, to live by a gesture and keep their pride.

—

You were never alone. Above all, it was this that marked the life. As a boy I had had my own room, and though familiar enough with teeming hallways and schoolboy games, these existed only temporarily. Afterwards there was home with its quiet, lights in the evening, the rich smell of dinner.

There was nothing of that at West Point. We brushed shoulders everywhere, as if it were a troopship, and waited a turn to wash and shave. In the earliest morning, in the great summer kiln of the Hudson Valley, we stood for long periods at strict attention, dangerous upperclassmen drifting behind us sullenly, the whole of the day ahead. Over and over to make the minutes pass I recited lines to myself, sometimes to the bullet-hard beat of drums, The time you won your town the race … Buried and lost, but for the moment by myself, wrapped in words.

I was an unpromising cadet, not the worst but a laggard. Among the youngest, and more immature than my years, I had neither the wisdom of country boys, who knew beasts and the axioms of hardware stores, nor the real toughness of the city. I had been forced to learn a new vocabulary and new meanings, what was meant by “polished,” for instance, or “neatly folded.” For parade and inspection we wore eighteenth-century accessories, crossed white belts and dummy cartridge box, with breastplate and belt buckle shined to a mirrorlike finish. In the doorway of the room at night, before taps, we sat feverishly polishing them. Pencil erasers and jeweler’s rouge were used to painstakingly rub away small imperfections, and the rest was done with a continually refolded polishing cloth. It took hours. The terrible ring of metal hitting the floor — a breastplate that had slipped from someone’s hand — was a sound like the dropping of an heirloom.

—

At the end of the summer, assignment to regular companies was made. There were sixteen companies, each made up of men who were approximately the same height. Drawn up in a long front before parade, the tallest companies were at each end, grading down to the shortest in the middle. The laws of perspective made the entire Corps seem of uniform size, and as it passed in review, bayonets at the same angle, legs flashing as one, it looked as if every particle of the whole were well formed and bright. The tall companies were known to be easygoing and unmilitary in barracks, but among the runts it was the opposite. To even pass by their barracks was perilous. This was not only fable but fact.

The stone barracks were arranged around large quadrangles called Areas. Central Area was the oldest, and on opposite sides of it were South and North Areas, and a small appendix near the gym called New North. They were distinct, like provinces, though you walked through several of them every day. Beyond and unseen were the leafy arrondissements where West Point seemed like a serene river town. In mild September with classes about to begin, it settled into routine. There was autumn sun on the playing fields but the real tone was Wagnerian. We passed by the large houses, all in a long row, of the colonels, heads of academic departments, some of them classmates or friends of my father’s, old brick houses to which I would one day be invited for Sunday lunch.

My new roommates were from Texas and Michigan, the one wide-jawed and springy-haired, the other handsome and Teutonic. Bob Morgan was the Texan. I am trying to recall if he smoked but it was surely the other roommate who taught me that. Morgan came from a small town, Spur, a dot on the map, and the sun and dust of Texas had paled his eyes.

We had clean slates. All demerits from the summer had been removed and we were as men paroled. Demerits were a black mark and a kind of indebtedness. The allowance was fifteen a month. Beyond that, there were punishment tours, one hour for each demerit, an inflexible rate of exchange. The hours were spent on the Area, walking back and forth, rifle on shoulder, and with this came a further lesson: at the inspection which took place before the tours began, demerits were frequently given out. For shoes with a scuff mark accidentally made or brass with the least breath of tarnish you could receive more tours than you were there to walk off.

We had learned the skills of a butler, which were meant to be those of gentry. We wore pajamas and bathrobes, garters for our socks. Fingernails were scrubbed pink and hair cut weekly. We learned to take off a hat without touching the bill, to sleep on trousers carefully folded beneath the mattress to press them, to announce menus, birthdays, and weekend films with their casts. Like butlers we had Sunday off, but only after mandatory chapel.

There was an exception to this. On Friday evenings in an empty theater, twenty-five or so of us sat on folding chairs in Jewish chapel, including one of the most respected men in my company, a yearling named Sohn. After an hour of services, eternal and unconnected to the harsh life we were leading, we marched back to barracks where everyone was studying or preparing for the next morning’s inspection. I felt uncomfortable about having been gone. Though no one ever said a word, I felt, in a way, untrue. In the end I dropped out and went to chapel with the Corps.

Of course, you cannot drop out — you may perhaps try — and I became part of neither one group nor the other, but it seemed to me that God was God, as the writings themselves said, and what essentially distinguished me was an ingrained culture, ages deep, which in any case I wanted to put aside.

Three times a day through three separate doors the entire Corps, like a great religious order, entered the mess hall and stood in whispery silence — there was always muted talk and menace — until the command “Take seats!” With the scrape of chairs the roar of dining began. Meals were a constant terror, and as if to enhance it, near their close the orders of the day were announced, often including grave punishments awarded by the regimental or brigade boards. At the ten-man tables upperclassmen sat at one end, plebes at the other. We ate at attention, eyes fixed on plates, sometimes made part of the conversation like an amusing servant but mostly silent or bawling information. At any moment, after being banged on the table, a cup or glass might come flying. The plebe in charge of pouring looked up quickly, hands ready, crying “Cup, please!” It was a forbidden practice but a favorite. A missed catch was serious, since the result might be broken china and possible demerits for an upperclassman. It was better to be hit in the chest with a cup, or even in the head.

“Sit up!” was a frequent command. It meant “Stop eating,” the consequence of having failed to know something — passing the wrong dish, or putting cream in someone’s coffee who never took it that way — and might result in no meal at all, though usually at the last permission was given to wolf a few bites. Somewhere, in what was called the Corps Squad area, the athletes, plebes among them, were eating at ease.

Like a hereditary lord’s, the table commandant’s whim was absolute. Some were kindly figures fond of teasing and schoolboy skits. Others were more serpentlike, and most companies had a table that was Siberia, ruled by a stern disciplinarian, in our case an ugly Greek first classman, dark and humorless. In the table assignments you made your way downward to it and there, among the incorrigibles, even felt a kind of pride.