James Salter - Burning the Days

We were inmates. The world was fading. There were cadets who wet the bed and others who wept. There was one who hanged himself. I sometimes thought of boyhood friends with whom I had spent countless hours. I saw that we were separating; I would not find them again.

In a leather-dark room in the gym we stood with boxing gloves on in facing lines while a bird-legged ex-champion gave instruction. His voice was hoarse and street-accented. It was as if the chalk of the prize ring had given his skin a permanent ashen tone. He moved along the line and stopped in front of me. We had been practicing jabs. “Hit me,” he ordered. I hesitated. “Go ahead,” he commanded. He was standing close.

I jabbed. He leaned back, fluent and spry. “Again,” he said. I tried harder. “Go on,” he said, “hit me this time.” I stepped forward, missed again, and something solid crashed into the side of my head. I stood with my ear ringing as he explained my error — I had let my right hand slip down as I jabbed. He shuffled like an old pensioner but his fists were like cement.

In the gloom of the sallyports were lighted boards where grades from classes were posted at the end of the week. Morgan was already failing in mathematics and I was in difficulty in languages. “Don’t worry,” the professor, a major, had said, “it’ll get tougher.” We stayed up after taps studying with a flashlight, exhausted and trying to comprehend italicized phrases in the red algebra book. I was trying to explain them and have Morgan solve problems; he was stubborn, it seemed, in his inability to do it. “Let’s rest for a few minutes.” Kneeling side by side on the cold wooden floor we dozed with only our upper bodies on the bed. Often we studied past midnight in the lavatory.

—

The field marshal’s gift was soon squandered. My name appeared on the gig sheet three or four times a week; I was walking tours and coming back to the room at dusk, dry from the cold and weary, putting my rifle in the rack, taking off my crossbelts and breastplate, and sitting down for a few minutes before washing for supper.

Punishment had a moral, which was to avoid it, but I could not. There was something alien and rebellious in me. The ease with which others got along was mysterious. I was losing hope.

In the first captain’s room in the oldest division of barracks there were the names of all those who had once held that honor. I wanted to see it, to linger for a moment and find my bearings, as had happened long ago in the Cadet Store line. Late one Sunday afternoon, telling no one, I went there — nothing forbade it — and stood before the door. I nearly turned away but then, impulsively, knocked.

The first captain was in his undershirt. He was sitting at his desk writing letters and his roommate was folding laundry. He looked up. “Yes, mister, what is it?” he said.

Somehow I explained what I had come for. There was a fireplace and on the wall beside it was a long, varnished board with the names. I was told to have a look at it. The list was by year. “Which one is your father?” they asked. I searched for his name and for some reason missed it. My eye went down the column again.

“Well?”

It was inexplicable. I couldn’t find it; it wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to say. There had been some mistake, I managed to utter. I felt absolutely empty and ashamed.

My father, in a letter, was able to explain. His class, in wartime, had graduated early and had come back to West Point after the armistice as student officers. As highest-ranking lieutenant, the result of his academic standing, my father had been student commander. He called this being first captain, and I realized later that I should never have brought it up.

When he came from Washington to visit we walked on the lawn near the Thayer Hotel in winter sunshine. Bits of the wide river glittered like light. I wanted him to counsel me and, looking moodily at the ground, recited from “Dover Beach.” What was I struggling for and what should I believe? It would be more clear later, he finally said. He had never forsaken West Point. He believed in it and would in fact one day be buried near the old chapel. He was counting on the school to steady me, fix me, as the quivering needle in a compass firms on the pole, a process he did not describe but that in his case had been more or less successful.

It was a school not of teachers but of lessons, many unspoken, few forgotten, and some I have made an effort to forget. There was the idea that one could be changed, that West Point could make you an aristocrat. In a way it did; it relied on the stoic, outdoor life which is the domain of the aristocrat: sport, hunting, hardship. Ultimately, however, it was a school of less-privileged classes with no true connection to the upper world. You were an aristocrat to sergeants and reserve officers, men who believed in the myth.

It was a place of bleak emotions, a great orphanage, chill in its appearance, rigid in its demands. There was occasional kindness but little love. The teachers did not love their pupils or the coach the mud-flecked fullback — the word was never spoken, although I often heard its opposite. In its place was comradeship and a standard that seemed as high as anyone could know. It included self-reliance and death if need be. West Point did not make character, it extolled it. It taught one to believe in difficulty, the hard way, and to sleep, as it were, on bare ground. Duty, honor, country. The great virtues were cut into stone above the archways and inscribed in the gold of class rings, not the classic virtues, not virtues at all, in fact, but commands. In life you might know defeat and see things you revered fall into darkness and disgrace, but never these.

Honor was second but in many ways it was the most important. Duty might be shirked, country one took for granted, but honor was indivisible. The word of an officer or cadet could not be doubted. One did not cheat, one never lied. At night a question was asked through the closed door, “All right, sir?” and the answer was the same, “All right.” It meant that whoever was supposed to be in the room was there and no one besides — a single voice answered for all. Absences, attendance, all humdrum was on the same basis and anything written or signed was absolutely true. Even the most minor violation was grave. There was an honor committee; its proceedings were solemn; from its judgment there was no appeal. The committee had no actual disciplinary power. It was so august that anyone convicted — and there were no degrees of guilt, only thumbs up or down — was expected to resign. Almost always they did. Inadvertence could sometimes excuse an honor violation, but not much else. Word traveled swiftly — someone had been brought up on honor. A few days later there was an empty bed.

—

At Christmas that year, apart from the few upperclassmen who for one reason or another had chosen not to take leave, we were alone. Morgan was failing and in the end was turned out. He was by then resigned to it. He had wanted to play football, as he had in the districts of West Texas with their rickety grandstands, but never had the chance; math had barred the way. I knew his plain but honest dreams, his muscular torso, his girlfriend’s temperament and name (it was Nona).

He did not pass the reentrance exam. He joined the paratroops with the uncertain prestige of having failed at West Point, and eventually earned a battlefield commission. I received occasional letters written in pencil and with words like “bucko” in them. He was wounded in Italy and deserted the hospital to rejoin his unit, which by then was fighting in France. He was in reconnaissance, which took heavy casualties, and one day a letter came — it was the first I ever received from Paris; he was there on leave in the fall of 1944 for four days, he had the most beautiful girl in the entire city, she had a fur coat that cost ten thousand dollars. It was, I think, the last letter. I lost track of him. I was engaged in urgent things myself. The wires went dead.