The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966.

The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966

GLORY, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. We are told often that there is no glory in war, but iconoclasts like Glenn Gray, author of The Warriors, assure us that some men, some decent men, do find glory there. War affects different men differently, so a writer who attempts to tell the story of a group of men who see the same war as well as the same peace faces the daunting task of doing justice to each man's experience.

In The Long Gray Line, Rick Atkinson, a reporter for the Washington Post, takes up that task and very quickly abandons it. Though he intends to tell the story of the West Point Class of 1966, from their entry into the Academy during the glory days of the Kennedy Administration to just after their twentieth reunion, the book is really about two colorful and confused classmates whose different reactions to the war in Vietnam propel them through two decades of public and private misadventures. The rest of the Class of 1966 appear as supporting actors, walking in and out of the pages of the book for occasional updates and asides.

This is not to say the book isn't well worth reading; it is. The asides are often poignant and compelling, and Atkinson's stars are the kind of characters a novelist would invent if they had not been born. Jack Wheeler is the scion of a long line of military men who nevertheless inherits his mother's disposition toward sentimental intellectuality. Wheeler, as presented by Atkinson, is haunted by a romantic hankering to serve some great cause and fearful of dying for no good in Vietnam. He avoids combat by staying stateside, going to graduate school, and then serving a safe tour with the headquarters and support units at Long Binh. Later, his lack of combat experience fills him with guilt, made all the worse by the memory of an admired classmate killed in Vietnam.

Tom Carhart is a brash and daring ne'er-do-well of the class and a bonafide West Point legend for stealing the Naval Academy's goat out from under the noses of its Marine guards. He yearns to see combat and dreams of becoming a general. He clings to the simple belief that duty means always choosing "the harder right instead of the easier wrong," as stated in the Cadet Prayer. Unfortunately for Carhart, his view of what is right often doesn't agree with everyone else's, and he very well ruins his Army career in short order. Unable to forget his missed glory, Carhart nurses a fierce pride in his combat service and his two purple hearts.

A third character also plays a prominent role for the sake of contrast and balance. George Crocker is the professional soldier. Neither a student nor an intellectual, Crocker feels most at home in the field, "doing men things in a manly manner with other men." It is significant for two reasons that Atkinson borrows this telling phrase from one of Crocker's friends. First, it is not something we would expect Atkinson to have noticed himself, given his demonstrated insensitivity to the importance of traditional sex roles among military men. Second, it appears from all else that is said about Crocker that Atkinson never gets past Crocker's carefully crafted professional persona, perhaps because Crocker is not introspective enough to supply Atkinson with a better understanding of himself, but more likely because Crocker, who was still on active duty as the book was being written, was careful never to let his mask slip. He remains the image of the good soldier, without any of the complications of being a man with a conscience.

With his dutiful wife, Vonda, at his side, Crocker stays the course in the Army for more than two decades, rising fast to command both a battalion and a brigade in the 82nd Airborne Division. Meanwhile the all too introspective Wheeler and Carhart deal separately with their disillusionment, give up their commissions, and become lawyers. They join forces later as members of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, but the controversy over Maya Lin's wall causes them to part as enemies.

Their stories would be worth reading even if rendered by a less competent writer, but Atkinson is an able storyteller. The book began as a series of articles for the Kansas City Star, which won Atkinson a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Factual errors are few, a feat, considering the ignorance most journalists reveal when writing about the military. Though not a veteran, Atkinson grew up an Army brat and obviously shares the soldier's respect for proper nomenclature. He does tend to overdo the details sometimes, as if to show off the thoroughness of his research. Does the reader need or care to learn, from a book about West Point, that Henry Hudson's Half Moon displaced eighty tons? Such distractions occur less often after the first few chapters, when the scene is set and the narrative takes over.

It is the narrative that makes this book. The Class of 1966 played its part in history. Many served in Vietnam. A few saw action in Grenada. A classmate was bludgeoned to death by the North Koreans in the tree-pruning incident in 1976. Another survived the collapse of the scandal-ridden Wedtech Corporation. Others crossed paths with the likes of William Westmoreland, Charlie Beckwith, and James Webb.

But as a book about West Point, the Army, the Vietnam War, or any of the larger philosophical issues that Atkinson tries to weave into the narrative, the book disappoints. Though there is much written about duty, honor, and country, there is little said worth serious reflection. Atkinson does not have the depth of understanding to comment credibly on all of these things, and he ends his ruminations too often with glib remarks of questionable validity, like a television reporter wrapping up a sixty-second segment. Of commemorating the long dead at recent reunions, he writes, "It wasn't easy, but certainly it was easier. And that was one of the most terrible things about it." At the end of a brief passage about duty, Atkinson mentions Robert E. Lee's assertion that duty is the most sublime word in the English language, then finishes by adding, "Yet sometimes a young officer could not help noticing that it was also a four-letter word."

Of course, the search for meaning is part of the story, and confusion part of the experience of many of the characters, but the author should make some sense of things. Instead, he subjects the reader to periodic sermons from West Point's ambitious chaplain, who admires William Sloane Coffin as a prophet but is savvy enough to avoid tainting his own reputation with controversy. Atkinson returns again and again to this man, partly because he conducts the funerals of many of the class who are buried at West Point, but mostly because Atkinson likes him and is impressed with his ideas, which he airs uncritically. We are told the Christian doctrine of grace conflicts with West Point's system of reward and punishment, and that Lutherans take grace more seriously than other Christians. We are told repeatedly about the necessary separation of religion and morality. "Religion and morality, he believed, were two different beasts, not to be cross-bred," writes Atkinson. How nice that the chaplain only had to concern himself with the one that wouldn't offend anybody. Not surprisingly, this man later lands the job of chaplain of the House of Representatives.

Atkinson's personal opinions intrude most obviously when the subject is women at West Point. Here alone the author takes a rest from the grind of research and falls back comfortably on the party line. The only continuing problems with women at the Academy, he writes, are that there are not more of them and that they are still excluded from combat. He equates traditional beliefs about the sexes with "misogyny," which is properly defined as hatred of women. He ignores the blatant double standard affecting everything the Academy does and the deceitful way Army officials have pretended to the world that women are exactly equal to men at West Point. He minimizes the impact of the integration of women on the Academy, attributing the revolutionary reforms of the late 1970s to the 1976 cheating scandal and changes in pedagogical thinking. In fact, the cheating scandal provided a convenient cover for changes in pedagogical thinking that were inspired and accelerated by the need to protect, accommodate, and advance women.

Elsewhere Atkinson arrogantly assumes the reader will share his prejudices. He rings all the right bells for the sympathetic left-leaning reader, and when he does, the rest of us remember that this man works for the Washington Post. Armed guards at a bullfight in Spain are casually referred to as "Franco's thugs." Ronald Reagan is said to have been "obsessed with the new leftist state in Nicaragua." A Church of God minister is described as "spewing fire and brimstone" until his dying day. It's a shame, too, because the story of the Class of 1966 is a brave one, and Atkinson's rendering of it reads like a good novel most of the time. If only he had told us less about himself and more about the class.

Mr. Mitchell is a reporter for the Navy Times in Alexandria, Virginia.