Full Dress Gray Read online

  “Don’t think I can cancel the parade. It’s the pass in review welcoming me to West Point, and the Corps practiced all last week. Gibson’s been laying on this parade all summer,” he said, referring to the Commandant of Cadets, Brigadier General Jack Gibson, the hard-charging infantry officer who was in charge of cadet military training and the disciplinary system. Beginning his third year as Com, the prematurely graying young general with the huge black eyebrows had been nicknamed “Black Jack” by cadets who had become accustomed to encountering his grim face during the Com’s frequent surprise inspections of the barracks.

  “Well, I think it’s too hot,” said Samantha, pouring herself and the general cups of coffee.

  “I agree with you,” he said. “But I’m afraid it’s too late. The Chief of Staff is already on his way up here.” He checked his watch. “We’d better get dressed. We’re supposed to meet his plane up at Stewart Field at eight-forty-five.”

  “Tell me it wasn’t Gibson who invited him. Please.”

  Slaight laughed. “Laying on a big welcome for the new Supe is his job, Sam.”

  “And I’ll just bet he used the opportunity to its fullest advantage. His own.” Disdain broke her words into individual syllables draped with irony as her voice slipped back into the cadences of her native New Orleans.

  “I wouldn’t put it past him. Gibson’s a piece of work,” said the general.

  He stood up and pulled his wife close, kissing her lingeringly. She gave him a mock struggle and pulled away, touching the damp front of her robe. “Look at this. You’re so stinky and sweaty, I’m going to have to put this straight into the wash.”

  He pulled off his T-shirt and stepped out of his running shorts. Naked, grinning ear to ear, he handed his sweaty clothes to her. “Throw these in the wash while you’re at it.”

  She dropped the wet wad of clothing like it was contaminated. “Do it yourself, General,” she instructed. “What do you think that third star earned you? If you think rank is a vacation from shit details, you’ve got a big surprise coming, Superintendent Slaight.”

  She stopped in the kitchen door and gave his nude body a slow once-over and grinned. “Why am I getting this feeling that returning to West Point has brought out the boy in you?”

  “ ‘Cause it has,” said Slaight, sprinting toward her. She raced for the back stairs, taking them two at a time. He caught her at the landing, wrapping her tightly in his arms. “We’ve got time,” he whispered. He kissed her again, holding the back of her neck as she reached up and unclipped her hair, letting it fall to her shoulders. He ran his fingers through the little bursts and streaks of silver that shone in the soft light filtering through the sheer curtains on the landing window, and he heard her sigh as she pulled away.

  “Later, buster.”

  It was going to be a long hot day, but there were sure as hell worse ways to begin.

  IT WAS only a short walk to the reviewing stand from Quarters 100, located on the west side of the Plain. It seemed to Slaight that every step he took deposited a shovelful of irony atop the neatly trimmed grass.

  It was thirty years ago that he had been walking the area when he heard that Samantha’s brother, David Hand, had been found dead by drowning up at Lake Popolopen, about a dozen miles northwest of West Point. The Academy had acted the way institutions act when they are confronted by uncomfortable if not potentially dangerous news. Hurriedly the death of a plebe had been swept under the proverbial rug, and life at the Academy had been returned to what passed for normal. Slaight had spent the rest of that year and a good portion of the next trying to find out what had happened to David Hand. When it was proven that he had been gay and had died at the hands of his cadet lover, the granite of what the cadets called their “rockbound highland home” had seemed to crack under the strain. Slaight had in fact been so disillusioned by the experience of going up against the institutional inertia of the Academy that he had told the then Superintendent, General Rylander, he was going to resign before graduation and forgo his commission as a second lieutenant of infantry.

  Then something had happened. Judge Hand, the father of David and Samantha, walked into his barracks room the morning he was going to submit his resignation and sat down on the bed and told Slaight a story. He was a father with a son who all his life had dreamt of being a West Pointer and an Army officer, and now his son and his dreams were dead. It would break Judge Hand’s heart to see another young man’s dreams dashed against the hard reality of his son’s tragic death.

  As Judge Hand spoke, Slaight’s friends Leroy Buck and John Lugar wandered into the room and stood over by the window. Listening to Judge Hand, Slaight looked over at his friends. Their faces wore the weary frowns of firsties—guys who had spent four years at West Point and had pretty much seen and heard it all. But their frowns dissolved as the Judge’s personal pain flooded the room. When the Judge left, Buck and Lugar hung around, waiting for Slaight’s reaction. He remembered now that there had been literally nothing he could think of to say. He had walked over to his desk and torn up his resignation. The next day, the three of them walked together to Michie Stadium and stood in the June sun and threw their cadet caps high into the air in the traditional celebration signaling that they were no longer cadets but second lieutenants in the United States Army.

  Slaight remembered he was standing there holding hands with his lover, Irit Dov, when Samantha Hand and Judge Hand walked up to congratulate him.

  “David would have wanted it this way,” Samantha said.

  Judge Hand cleared his throat and did his best to hold back the tears welling up in his eyes. “I’m . . . proud of you,” he stammered. Then Samantha gave Second Lieutenant Slaight a quick kiss on the cheek and she and her father melted into the crowd surging around the new grads.

  Irony upon irony. Now his wife, Sam walked with Lieutenant General Slaight as he strode across the grassy expanse of the Plain. Behind the barracks walls, he could hear the cadet companies forming up.

  “A Companayyyy . . . a-ten-SHUN! B Companayyyy . . . a-ten-SHUN! C Companayyyy . . . a-ten-SHUN!”

  Soon the sunny exits of the sally ports through the barracks would be alight with the glistening buttons of cadet full dress gray coats as the Corps marched from the barracks and began the age-old tradition of passing in review for the Superintendent of the United States Military Academy. It was an onerous task that Slaight had performed literally hundreds of times as a cadet, and now, across the years, the generations would connect once again on the Plain. This time, he would stand atop the reviewing stand and they would pass in review for him.

  The cadet who had shaken the stony foundations of the rock-bound highland home had returned to find the place changed. As he watched the cadet battalions pound through the sally ports, he could see the occasional dark expanse of cadet neck where female hair was pinned under the full dress hat of the cadet parade uniform. The old tennis courts across from the library were gone, and Thayer Road no longer bisected the Plain.

  But so much had remained the same. It was bloody stinking West Point hot, the way Slaight remembered it had been in the Septembers of his cadet years—the kind of heat that wilted the crease in cadet dress white trousers the moment they were put on; heat that caused the wool jackets of the full dress gray uniform to smell like a barnyard. He looked up at the gothic chapel, standing high above the barracks atop its rocky promontory like a medieval military fantasy. The stone barracks across the Plain from him were as stately and austere as he remembered them. As battalions came on line across the broad expanse of the Plain, the cadets themselves were still ruddy-cheeked and ramrod straight, and they marched with a proud precision that paid homage to the generations who had done exactly what they were doing so many, many times before them.

  Four thousand cadets in a row of four regiments broken down into three battalions each stood at attention before him. Not for nothing, Slaight mused, was it called the Long Gray Line.

  Slaight was standing to the ri
ght of General Edward Jay Meuller, the Chief of Staff of the Army. The Commandant, Brigadier General Gibson, stood to his left. The Cadet First Captain took the report from the Cadet Adjutant and spun around to face the reviewing stand.

  “Sir, the Corps of Cadets is all present and accounted for!” he barked, as he executed a snappy salute with his saber. Slaight took a single step forward.

  “Pass in review!” he commanded.

  The First Captain wheeled around and shouted, “Pass in review!”

  Starting with the First Battalion of the First Regiment, cadet commanders barked the orders that would send their respective units marching across the Plain in front of the reviewing stand. First came the Brigade Staff, followed by the First Regimental Staff, which preceded the First Battalion Staff, which led the First Battalion. Slaight, and indeed all of the officers on the reviewing stand and in the bleachers, stood and saluted as each battalion executed its snappy “Eyes . . . RIGHT!”

  General Meuller, a robust, barrel-chested man with bushy white eyebrows and twinkling blue eyes, waited until two battalions had passed before he nudged Slaight with his elbow and whispered, “I still can’t get used to hearing a young woman give the command ‘Battalion . . . a-ten-shun.’ “

  Slaight chuckled. He had been the tactical officer of a cadet company in 1977, the year after women had first been admitted to West Point, and he had still been there in 1979 when the first female battalion commander shouted her first orders at a parade on the Plain. “It won’t be long before one of these young women will be standing up there in Michie Stadium with four stars on her shoulders giving the graduation address, sir.”

  He heard a chuckle from General Meuller and caught a sideways glimpse of Gibson’s face reddening beneath the visor of his cap.

  “I want to be there when that happens,” said General Meuller.

  “I’ll make sure you’re invited, sir.”

  Just then the battalion immediately in front of the reviewing stand marched off and executed a column right, then proceeded down the Plain toward the west. Lying on the Plain where the battalion had stood was a cadet who had dropped from the heat.

  “Still leave ‘em on the Plain till it’s over?” asked General Meuller, turning to General Gibson.

  “Yes sir. Medics will be out there as soon as the last battalion passes in review.”

  “Happened to me when I was a plebe,” said General Meuller. “Same kind of day. Walking out on that Plain was like stepping into a goddamned frying pan. Sweat was pourin’ down my face, and I felt my knees shaking. Next thing I knew, I was on a stretcher. I took shit from the yearlings clear past Christmas.”

  Slaight stifled a laugh. “I always thought it was that damn full dress hat squeezing your head that did it,” he whispered.

  “There’s another one dropped, sir,” said Gibson, nodding at a second cadet facedown on the grass as another battalion marched off. The last battalion came on line, leaving a third cadet crumpled on the turf.

  When the final battalion had passed in review and was headed back to the barracks, three teams of medics carried stretchers onto the Plain and began treating the prone cadets. Slaight invited General Meuller to stay for lunch in the mess hall, but as the general shook hands with the officers and wives who had joined them on the reviewing stand he begged off, citing a staff meeting he had to attend that afternoon to get ready for a White House briefing the next day. Slaight followed the Chief of Staff down the steps from the reviewing stand and stood there as Gibson escorted him to his staff car. Samantha joined him.

  “Watch him,” she snarled. “Gibson’s going to escort him back to his plane.” Sure enough, the Commandant climbed into the rear seat of the staff car next to General Meuller, and they watched as the car sped away toward the North Gate. “Asshole.” Samantha spat the word between clenched teeth.

  “Aww, c’mon, hon. He’s got the Academy’s best interests at heart,” joked Slaight.

  “Yeah, and bears use a Kohler toilet instead of the woods.”

  Slaight laughed. In the distance, he saw two medics help one of the fallen cadets to his feet. “C’mon,” he said, taking Sam’s hand. They started walking across the Plain toward the cadet who had dropped in front of the reviewing stand. There was a stretcher on the ground and two medics were bent over the cadet. One of them, a specialist with a mustache that struggled to cover his upper lip, making him look even younger than he probably was, had a look of panic on his face. Slaight broke into a run, Samantha close behind.

  When they reached the medics, one of them was speaking excitedly into a handheld radio, calling for a doctor. Slaight looked down at the cadet. She was lying on her back, her eyes were open, and her face was drained of color. She opened her mouth, gave a little gasp, and shivered, as though she’d been hit with a blast of cold air. Then she was still. The medic with the mustache felt her pulse and pressed his ear close to her mouth.

  “Cardiac arrest!” Quickly he began CPR. He pulled her head back and cleared her airway. Then he pinched closed her nostrils and started mouth-to-mouth. The other medic threw down the radio and started unbuttoning her full dress coat. He exposed her chest and started the rhythmic process of cardiac massage.

  A siren sounded somewhere in the distance and grew louder. In a moment, an ambulance skidded to a halt next to them. Two medics and a doctor rushed forward carrying a portable defibrillator. The doctor, a young captain, rubbed the paddles together as the machine powered up. “Clear!” he shouted, placing the paddles on the sides of the young woman’s chest. Her body jerked involuntarily as a jolt of electricity surged through her abdomen. The medic immediately restarted mouth-to-mouth while the doctor felt for a pulse. “Nothing. Let’s try again.” He rubbed the paddles together, watching the control panel of the defibrillator. A red light blinked off and a green light began flashing. “Clear!” he called. Then he gave the prostrate cadet another jolt.

  Slaight squatted next to the cadet’s body. Her eyes were glassy. He took her hand. Still kneeling, the doctor felt for a pulse, then he gently touched the shoulder of the medic. The medic stopped giving mouth-to-mouth. The doctor looked over at the Superintendent. He squinted into the bright sun and licked his lips. “She’s gone, sir.”

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  SLAIGHT SAW two officers running toward him. They halted and snapped salutes.

  “Colonel Rafferty, sir. I’m the Regimental Tac.”

  “Major O’Donnell, sir. H Company tactical officer. How is she?”

  Slaight returned salute and glanced at the doctor, who was slipping the paddles into slots on either side of the defibrillator. “I don’t think I caught your name, doctor.”

  He straightened up with a start. “Captain Miles, sir.”

  Slaight turned to the tactical officers. “Captain Miles has pronounced this young woman dead. May I ask her name?”

  Major O’Donnell blinked his eyes repeatedly. His mouth opened, but no words came out.

  “Major?” Slaight asked gently. “Are you okay?”

  The major nodded vacantly. He coughed, bringing his hand to his mouth. “Sir, her name is Dorothy Hamner. She’s a first-class cadet, from upstate New York.”

  “Thank you, Major.” He turned to the regimental tac. “Colonel Rafferty, will you call the Provost Marshal and the Staff Judge Advocate? I want an immediate and thorough investigation of this incident.”

  “Yes sir.” The two tactical officers stood there for a moment, looking down at the body of Cadet Dorothy Hamner.

  “Gentlemen,” Slaight said sternly. “Today.”

  “Yes sir,” said Colonel Rafferty. They walked away at a brisk pace.

  For the first time in several moments, Slaight became aware that Samantha was still standing next to him, her hands clasped together as if in prayer. “Sam, this is going to take some time.”

  She looked at him blankly. “It was too hot for a parade, Ry.”

  “I’ll walk you back to the quarters.” He t
ook her hand, but she pulled quickly away.

  “You’ve got work to do. If there’s some way I can help, let me know. Maybe we should send a car for her mother and father.”

  “That’s a good idea. Why don’t you call Melissa and tell her to have a staff car standing by,” he said, referring to his secretary.

  “Sure.” She took a step backward, then she reached for him. “Ry, this has never happened before, has it?”

  “No. There’s never been a cadet who died at parade. Never in the history of the Academy.”

  “It’s so sad,” she said. She touched his wrist, then she turned and headed across the Plain.

  “Yes, it is,” he said quietly to himself.

  Even though the congressional appointment process ensures that West Point classes are composed of students from all fifty states and a wide variety of backgrounds, there are certain truths about West Pointers that apply nearly across the board. One of them is that returning to West Point as the Supe would be for most, but not all, a dream come true.

  To be appointed Supe was to have the Army and the Academy itself recognize that your service to the nation as an Army officer had a strong component that came from West Point, and indeed that celebrated the Academy and all that it stood for. It meant that the Academy motto, “Duty, Honor, Country,” was in your bones. It meant that your country trusted you to see to it that the principles of the Academy were conveyed to the cadets who would pass through its gates just as those principles had been conveyed to you when you were young and eager for an Army career. This was not something that Slaight took lightly. In fact, he knew the day they told him he was appointed Supe that his dedication to the cadets who were his charges would become his very reason for being.