Honor and Duty (62 page)

I failed the reexam.

“Kai,” said Sonny, shaking his head and laughing. “Thank God—they’re giving you another chance.”

I flunked the second reexamination. Upon Major Maher’s advocacy, a third reexam was scheduled.

“I guess they want to keep you,” said Sonny. “They’re gonna keep doing this till you get it right.”

It was supposed to be simpler than any I had yet seen.

To this day I cannot recall the final test. I don’t know where it occurred, or the time of day, or if I had slept the night before. I don’t know what uniform I wore. I know that I ate at a special table at the mess hall, and the cooks went out of their way to prepare a special meal for me and Sonny.

I was given three days’ leave while the Academic Board convened to determine my disposition. This meant that I had failed the last reexam. If I had passed, I would not have been given leave but airline tickets to speed me to Fort Sill.

Sonny got his tickets, but he never said goodbye to me. He couldn’t do it, and I was glad he spared me the pain.

I had West Point practically to myself. I began to run ten to fifteen miles, and lift weights for three hours a day. I alternated between flats and hills; shoulders, lats and biceps, and chest, triceps, back, and abs. I began to know every corner of the Academy as I never had as an overscheduled cadet, studying the tall medieval architecture, its arcane carvings, gargoyles, and griffins hidden on the facings of the tall granite towers. I ran along the river, by Building 665 where McWhiff had led me to Big Dick. I explored the post exchange and the commissary until I tired of the sad, understanding glances I got from the shoppers. “Oh, Ben, look—a Second Classman—still here
in June. He must’ve been found. And a Chinese, too. It must’ve been medical—a sports injury.”

I was in the weight room when a man in his forties asked if I was Kai Ting.

“Colonel Jerry Galligan,” he said as we shook hands. “Academic Board. Have you thought of being turned back?” That would mean joining the Class of 1969, and taking Juice, thermo, nuclear physics, fluids, and solids again, from the bottom.

“Sir, I’m afraid I’d flunk them all, a second time around.” I stood up. “My brain is worn out in engineering, sir.”

He nodded, wiping the sweat from his brow.

I was called to the office of the Academic Board on 25 June. That was the anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn by the greasy grass, which had placed George Armstrong Custer into his permanent residence across the street from Major Maher’s quarters.

“Kai,” said Lieutenant Colonel Galligan, seated alone at the long table behind which stood the Mighty Nine—Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Joshua, David, King Arthur, Judas Maccabaeus, Charlemagne, Godfrey de Bouillon. I had always thought that Guan Yu, Mohammed II, Crazy Horse, Sun Tzu, and El Cid Campeador; maybe even Chingis Khan should have been there, too.

“Mr. Ting. It is the decision of the Academic Board that you be separated from the Corps of Cadets for academic deficiency. It is with regret that this decision is rendered, for you have traits which would produce a successful graduate of West Point. As you know, each graduate must pass all courses. The Board could not help but note that you are an outstanding student in most of your work, suggesting to us a lack of focused effort.”

I tried to smile.

“Formal outprocessing commences now. Do you have anything you wish to say to the Academic Board?”

I had a speech about the superfluousness of Juice in a modern world filled with Vietnams, where it was clear an isolated military solution was inadequate. Cultural understanding of politics, clan structure, Asian
gahng
and
lun
, social network loyalties, rice farming, history, reverence for complicated pantheons of gods, spoken communication, technical assistance in agriculture and medical health, caring and sacrifice for common villagers—these were the ingredients for modern victory
in wars of national liberation. West Point had taught me that. Juice wouldn’t help in Vietnam. But I had not earned the right to speak of such matters. This was an opportunity to plead extenuating circumstances in my engineering performance. I was down to my last right—the right to leave. “No, sir.”

Lieutenant Colonel Galligan handed me a packet. “Outprocessing will take two days. Your military assignment will be made by your regimental sergeant major. Your last station is Warrant Officer West, for the return of your cadet military identification card. The Academic Board, and I, wish you every success. Kai, we’ll miss you.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, saluting him and leaving the boardroom with meticulous care. In the boardroom waiting area I had to sit down. I felt numb and wounded, intact and ripped from innards to ear. I wanted to cry. I waffled between feeling too much emotion and feeling none. When the latter prevailed, I stood, thanked the secretary, and left the Administration Building.

I sat on my Boarders Ward bunk, staring at the empty room. I forced myself to stand. I had
gahng
and
lun
with my faculty, and had to say farewell to them. It was not one of my skills.

As I walked down the brightly lit hallway of Thayer Hall, the heels of my cordovans clicked in the largely empty building, I found myself saying farewell to familiar classrooms and “lucky” section seats. I realized how many
foo chi
, good fortune, connections I had made in my three years at West Point. I had a lucky coat hook outside Captain MacPellsin’s English 101 classroom on the second floor, where I had hung my raincoat during the heavy winter rains of 1964. There was a hall light that used to flicker outside Advanced Economics 321A, which I had interpreted as the well-wishings of Guan Yu’s spirit of commerce. I smiled at the bright, polished floor, remembering one afternoon after classes when Arch had used that space to teach me the rumba. I remembered a lengthy Yearling arm-wrestling contest at the lower entrance to Thayer, by the Five Stone Mounted Warriors, where I beat everyone except Mike Benjamin. I remembered exiting those doors as a Plebe, with my neck in, looking straight ahead in the presence of the upper class, saluting everyone, hoping no one would stop me because I stood out in a nation of bracing, faceless knobs.

I remembered Deke Schibsted and I leading a company of new cadets out of South Aud after their first Honor lecture during
R-Day in Beast for the Class of 1970, when we saluted a thousand crots a day until I began laughing from the meaningless repetition.

I entered the hushed, awesome silent expanse of South Aud, seeing the seats I had occupied for so many events. I remembered the horrible German westerns. Harper Lee had been on stage, talking about tolerance; Captain Mac had sat in the first row right, holding his children and smiling. I remembered the Vietnam briefings on the Battle of Iadrang Valley in November 1965, and series of operations like Linebacker and Hastings, and the sobering lessons on Red Chinese infantry operations.

Although the corridors in Thayer and Bartlett and Washington halls were empty of cadets, I heard their voices, and felt their energies struggling against an impossible schedule, and knew no school nor any experience in my life could ever match this.

I had arrived with one bag, a letter to General Schwarzhedd, my father’s automatic pistol, Momma LaRue’s plastic cup, and Tony’s old rosary in my pocket. From the first day forward, I had acquired more and more equipment, and now I was shedding it, like a moth returning to chrysalis, and had none of the original assets with which I had arrived.

I had three unbearable pieces of information for my father.

Dad, I flunked out of West Point, in math. I will not have the ring. And I lost your gun. I could write him a letter.

I would have to call him.

I felt nostalgia when I turned in my rifle, serial number 58179; it had accompanied me on hundreds of hikes and marches, and entirely too many parades and reviews on the Plain, and Bandbox Reviews and inspections in Central Area. Never had it closed on my thumb or dropped during a Buckner reveille run or misfired on the range. Its straps and frogs had always held firm against me, inverted under a poncho under heavy summer rains. It had stood loyally by me when I faced Uncle John Sedgwick, two minutes late.

I found Elmer Scoggin in a maintenance shop, cleaning the buff-spinners. “Damn, Kai, I can’t believe they’d boot
you
out.”

“Can’t believe it either,” I said. “I did it to myself.”

“You gonna be okay?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, trying to keep my lip from doing a hula. “Take care of yourself, Elmer,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Thank you again for protecting West Point when it was in trouble.”

“God bless you, Kai Ting. You’re a good man.”

At the mailroom I received several cards from Pearl, wishing me luck. I couldn’t read them. Someone had sent me a corsage. It was black. The card said, “Congratulations on getting found, stupid. Remember me. I’m going to remember you. Duke.”

On my last night at the Academy I undertook my conventional soporific of iron works. I benched and did flies. I did tricep extensions three ways and parallel bar dips with a towel holding a ninety-pound bell. I did triple extension curls, military presses, delt raises, and lat pull-downs until my muscles screamed, and then I did more. I hit the body bag for twenty minutes, took two minutes off, and did thirty minutes until I felt pain and moved through it. By this time, I had the weight room and boxing gym all to myself. I studied my pumped body in the mirror. I liked the bulk, the glistening hardness, but I did not admire the man.

I was afraid to enter the shower. In the shower, with all that water, I might cry. I bathed at the sink, making such a mess that I had to laugh, and I felt better.

I still could not sleep, tossing on the cot that I associated with my dual-left-footed Dance of the Seven Veils with Juice. I put on sweats. I still had an absence card, although in the morning I would no longer be a member of the United States Corps of Cadets, subject to the Honor Code.

I stepped into Central Area, my footfalls unnaturally loud in the cavernous silence. Of course, my room was the only one illuminated. I returned and doused the light. In the dark of night, I felt the Academy was mine alone. The four tall, castled towers of the Area seemed to belong to a painting of an imaginary Gothic castle. I could not believe that a place so dynamic could ever be this peaceful. I looked at the naked uniform flag pole, which never again would dictate to me the uniform of the day; the emptiness of the square which the Corps had filled with its smartly precise winter Bandbox Reviews, the sounds of Souza and the coordinated tramp of marching. In a few days, the Area would be occupied by young men dropping their bags to the sound of screams under a humid sun. I turned in a circle. I can’t leave. I can’t leave you.

What will I do without you?

I stood there, inside a wide-shouldered body I had needed
since childhood. I felt the strength in my shoulders, capable of absorbing heavy blows, the breadth of chest for exchanging oxygen during extremis, the capability in my arms and hands for fending off any bully. I spoke English, and had won many friends.

You should be happy, punk. I felt awful, rejected, unworthy, dunced. A gross failure. How could this be? It wasn’t that I had been so full of promise, because I wasn’t. I wasn’t that good. But my love for West Point should’ve been enough to get me through. It wasn’t right. Some guys who hated it here were going to graduate. I loved it and had been booted out. I remembered Duke’s lament—“Some of these guys aren’t even American”—and quickly changed my tack. Everyone who graduates deserves it. Everyone who didn’t had his own reasons, his own foul
yeh
that made him outcast rather than brother.

But I would have been a good officer for you. I know a lot about Vietnam. You should teach more of that, so we can win, so that losing Marco purchased something.

I poured lighter fluid on Hammond’s Juice text and my Juice notebooks, ASPs, and lab books, near the base of the Central clock tower and only a few paces from the small, eccentric concrete pockmark where I had stood in the heat of Beast, when Studs Went Fourth for clothing formations under the orders of Bob Arvin, King of Beasts. I told the Army corporal in the Guard Room that a controlled fire to DX cadet texts was about to occur, and lit it.

I watched the sparks from the flaming books rise above the clock, into the dark night sky, the illumination of the sparks brightened by the darkness of Central Area. The pages crackled. I liked it.

I looked at Uncle Shim’s Piaget. “The big hand does not care about numbers. It is literary.” I was the big hand, the big fool, who had not cared about math. The guy who made it to West Point, and lost it, the honor of the experience smudged by the final imprint of failure everlasting.

I looked in the skies for an answer, wanting someone up there to receive the smoke and flame of my once and former West Point career. Take the smoke, Chu-i. I was not to be a West Pointer. I never would. I would never wear the ring. All of my closest friends, my brothers, would; and the emptiness on my hand would ache for all my days.

I was going to be a sergeant, an honorable rank—one closer
to my ’hood, where few of the guys had gone to college, and the best of us had up and disappeared like young smoke in an American night sky. Toos, where are you?

Being a sergeant would be closer to my true past—locker room attendant, Vitalis salesboy, assistant lifeguard, assistant gym instructor. I thought of Leroy Johnson running the desk at the Central Y. I thought of Tony Barraza, who had poured his heart and soul into the little fighting hearts of ruffian street urchins. I shouldn’t have tried to better them, by doing college, wearing a bright saber and a sash, by having a plume on my tar bucket and a gold ring on my hand. I wasn’t that good.

The fire sputtered, then reignited.

Well, God, I have tied up something miserable. I’ve ruined my relationship to my father and busted the one thing he wanted from me. I helped kill my stepmother. I forgot my real mother and sister, and have screwed up all the Chinese rituals of my life. I’m not so hot with the American ones. I couldn’t save my sister, and I should’ve, and then I just dropped her from my mind for eleven years. My sisters hated war, war killed Uncle Shim’s entire family, and I joined the Army. I killed Leo and Lucky. I became an Honor hot dog and ended up pulling the trigger on Clint and Pee Wee and fifty other classmates. I can’t study math. I’m not worth wet crap.