Most Succinctly Bred

Alex Vernon

Description

A memoir on being a soldier"At this moment, the nation seems interested in soldiering. Not the politics that complicate the very act of service, but the dirty business of being a soldier. No one, except soldiers, knows much about the aftermath of such service. most succinctly bred opens the experience to those who want to know more without having to sit inside the sweltering temperatures of the tank's turret, without having to face day after day the real threat of dying."-Pat C. Hoy IILike Susan Griffin's A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, Alex Vernon's most succinctly bred explores war by exploring around war, by operating in the margins. Vernon records his ongoing relationship with war and soldiering-from growing up in late Cold War 1980s middle America to attending West Point, going to and returning from the first Gulf War, and watching, as a writer and academic, the coming of the second Iraq war. Not merely a collection of essays, this book has a trajectory, and the chapters, appearing in rough chronological order, loop in and out of one another. It is not a narrow autobiography that attempts to account only for the writer's life; it uses that life to illuminate the lives of its readers, to tell us about the time and place in which we find ourselves.War has seasoned this reluctant soldier; it has wounded him as it wounds all soldiers. But war has not stopped Alex Vernon's life. A large part of what we read here is a fascinating story of recovery. He dares to tell the stories of recuperation without naming them as such, without being in the least maudlin about his experiences or his suffering. Full of surprises, most succinctly bred tells all of the truth tells all of the truth Vernon can muster in a language that is lively, rich, suggestive. This is a book that aims high in an artful, subtle way.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Military history

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612774640
• Langue: English

Extrait

most succinctly bred
most succinctly bred
alex vernon
the kent state university press
kent, ohio
© 2006 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2005024324
ISBN -13: 978-0-87338-855-9
ISBN -10: 0-87338-855-0
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vernon, Alex, 1967–
Most succinctly bred / Alex Vernon.
p. cm.
ISBN -13: 978-0-87338-855-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ∞
ISBN -10: 0-87338-855-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ∞
1. Persian Gulf War, 1991—Personal narratives, American. 2. Persian Gulf War, 1991—Influence. 3. Vernon, Alex, 1967– I. Title.
DS 79.74.v472 2006
956.7044'342'092—dc22
2005024324
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
for Anna Cay
“I fucking hate army officers.”
—Kurt Vonnegut’s first remark to an assembly of cadets and officers, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York, 1972
“I fucking hate army officers.”
—Kurt Vonnegut’s second remark to an assembly of cadets and officers, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York, 1972
contents
preface
1 ghosts in gray
2 guide us, thy sons, aright
3 duty, honor, goddess
4 then i went to war
5 desert farewell
6 back in the world
7 the gulf war and postmodern memory
8 sunday, september 23, 2001
9 wedding: new york city, november 10, 2001
10 orion in the ivory tower
11 tiger, tiger
epilogue
preface
The chapters in this book appear in the order of their primary events rather than in the order of their composition. While each piece can stand independently—versions of several of them have appeared in other publications—they follow a trajectory, an arc through a life. They tell a story.
The composition process spanned over ten years. A number of chapters, written as occasional pieces over the course of this period, do not know how history will unfold, how it has unfolded; some middle and later chapters know nothing about now-transpired events that fully inform earlier ones (the approximate date of composition appears beneath each chapter title). One chapter, “Desert Farewell,” began as a short story in 1992, a fictional attempt to explain an event I learned about soon after returning from the Gulf War. After seven years of failing to make sense of the event, the piece morphed into a record of that failure. Call it fiction, call it nonfiction; it belongs here either way.
As to the reason for arranging the book as I have, and for producing it at all, I’ll let others speak for me. First, Annie Dillard, who in her essay “Total Eclipse” has articulated her own motivations as a writer more gracefully than I ever could mine: “We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add—until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.” And here’s James Salter, speaking of his book of recollections, Burning the Days: “I wanted to make something that was wonderful to read, and that was true, and that brought back the flavor of certain things in my life during that period of time that I was alive. That’s all.”
I hope this book proves useful. I hope it is true and pleasant enough to read.
The versions of these chapters that have appeared previously are as follows: “Ghosts in Gray,” American Heritage (Oct. 2002); “Desert Fare-well,” WLA: War, Literature, & the Arts (Fall-Winter 1999); “Back in the World” as “Bridging the Gulf” in central North Carolina’s Independent Weekly (Feb. 14–20, 1996), then as a part of Chapter 5 of The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War, with Neal Creighton, Greg Downey, Rob Holmes, and David Trybula, Kent State Univ. Press (1999); “The Gulf War and Postmodern Memory,” The Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2001); “Orion in the Ivory Tower” as “Barbarian in the Ivory Tower” in The Chronicle of Higher Education/Chronicle Review (Feb. 2002); a very slight portion of “Tiger, Tiger” in “A Strange Yet Familiar War,” The New York Times Op-Ed (Apr. 7, 2003).
1 ghosts in gray
(summer 2002)
I have this story from a classmate. Let’s imagine that I first heard it at dinner, where he and I sat with eight others at a rectangular table in one of the ten or so rows of identical tables that filled the six wings radiating from the center of Washington Hall like the spokes of a caisson’s wheel. You know it is winter because we wear our wool dress gray uniforms, and a double-breasted, gold-buttoned coat hangs on the back of each cadet’s chair, a black scarf draped over top. Our faces are still ruddy from the outside cold: the wind barrels down the Hudson from the north and sweeps over the point of land jutting out into the river on the west side, where the academy sits.
Bruce was returning to his room from his afternoon classes. He looked up and saw, on the third floor of Pershing Barracks, another classmate, Eric, standing at the window in his daily academic uniform. Beside Eric at the window stood a figure Bruce couldn’t identify, decked out in a cadet’s full dress uniform with cross belts, shined brass breastplate, plumed tar bucket, the works. Knowing we did not have a parade that day, Bruce went straight to the room, where he found Eric at his desk, alone. Bruce asked, and Eric answered: There wasn’t anybody else here. He had been alone in the room for the past hour.
In my four years at West Point, although I never saw a ghost, I heard a number of ghost stories. We all did. The place is ripe with spirits. “The Long Gray Line has never failed us,” General Douglas MacArthur once cautioned the Corps of Cadets. “Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.” Statues, memorials, building names, street names, and gravestones constantly reminded us of those who had gone before, the successes and the failures, the famous and the forgotten. Walking around the grounds at night, you could feel the energy of the place, an energy generated as much from its history as from the urgent present. The place pulses with the past; no wonder it fascinated William Faulkner so. It haunts. It cannot be exorcised. Former cadets hate it, love it, or both; they cannot forget it. I know of the devotion in alumni inspired by other schools—the University of North Carolina, Duke, Kansas State, Arkansas—but I cannot believe that the hold these institutions have on their own approaches that of West Point’s on its own. A fine basketball or football team, some great parties, and the site of lost virginity are not enough to seize the soul.
The Naval and Coast Guard Academies, true to their East Coast seafaring heritage, feature the red bricks and white gables of colonial architecture. The Air Force Academy, built in the 1950s and 1960s, looked forward in its design in the spirit of the newly hatched, forward-looking air force itself. Unfortunately, its flat, sleek halls look today exactly like a failed fifty-year-old effort to anticipate the future and, but for the chapel, do not do justice to their setting at the base of the Rocky Mountains.
But the Military Academy’s massive gray granite buildings seem to bear the whole of American history on their backs. Studying Washington Hall and the flanking barracks from across the parade field—the Plain—you wonder that it all hadn’t long ago sunk into the earth under its own weight and disappeared. You wonder if the chapel on the hill above suspends the rest on invisible chains. And in the hills beyond the chapel, visible from the Plain only to those who know to look, Fort Putnam peeks through the branches. One of the site’s original and primary fortifications from the War for Independence, from before West Point became West Point, the fort commands everything below. It is the true spirit of the grounds: singular in function and form, bare, sparse, the soldier’s habitat.
Sunk into the earth and disappeared, like its graduates killed and buried in trenches, foxholes, mass graves.
It pulses. It seizes the soul.
My wife says that even as she loves the man who went and came through West Point, it took her the entire eight years we have been together to heal the damage it did to me. West Point made me, it unmade me.
Imagine spending the four years of peak adult social development, from eighteen to twenty-two, segregated from the greater world of your culture and peers. Instead of learning how to get along with others according to American norms, you learn the rules and regulations for how to behave at this particular institution. All interactions between people at West Point are official, public, regulated. Your roommate and best friend is also your platoon leader or company commander, and even if he isn’t, he is still another cadet, and his ultimate allegiance belongs to the academy. Duty, Honor, Country. Every act you do with him, every outing and adventure and braggadocio and confession, he subjects to his evaluation of your compliance to rules and codes.
You learn responsibility; you have it thrust upon you. You frequently serve as the representative of some body of cadets to an officer, and your words and actions will influence the larger situation. You often accept the blame and consequences for a crime or oversight committed by another. You might sit on an Honor Board with several other cadets to decide whether an accused cadet did in fact violate the Honor Code, the board’s collective decision determining whether the young person’s cadet career will end. I sat on one board the week prior to the accused cadet’s graduation; we “found” him, to use the proper parlance, and the last four years of his life went to waste. A classmate of mine, once a good friend, spent his senior year self-destructing. Having survived tw