Chapter One Down Fifth The one thing I never want to see again is a military parade. —Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States and West Point, Class of 1843
Nothing thrills like a snappy stroll down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue on a sunny May afternoon. Today is such a day, Armed Forces Day—Saturday, May 19, 1962—a day to parade down Fifth. Twenty-four hundred of us will step off at noon—as the oldest service academy, West Point always leads military parades.
Again, we will march for our benevolent citizenry—the people who pay our educational way, our salaries ($111.15 per month), and our enormous overhead expenses, hundreds of thousands of dollars. In eighteen days, six hundred of us will graduate as second lieutenants. Our salaries will double. We are the fortunate ones, and today, and every day, these are the people for whom we polish and shine. They are our collective rich uncle who stakes us to a four-year university experience of a lifetime. They are the taxpayers, the genuine owners of West Point and America. Today is a triumph of spring, a perfect day for a parade, our final gig in New York City.
In our passage to become soldier-statesmen, we are kept well-informed. Early each morning we receive the papers--The New York Times and the Herald Tribune. They are delivered to our room by a plebe, one of those indefatigable first-year cadets learning the art of subservience. Thus I was able to learn that the fledgling New York Mets had again routinely lost in Milwaukee. The front page held a warning--KHRUSHCHEV SAYS U.S. TROOPS RISK FIGHTING IN ASIA. So much for current events. We must now march to breakfast. We always seem to have such little time. Our buses leave at 7 a.m.
Only now, decades later, does old news seem shockingly relevant. The Mets are peopled with has-beens, two of whom had hit home runs last night to no avail—Gil Hodges and Frank Thomas. The team will finish dead last this year, seven years away from being in a celebratory parade. Khrushchev is now less than two years away from being ousted by Leonid Brezhnev. For Khrushchev, this is the Kremlin’s equivalent of finishing dead last. Forced into retirement, beset by depression, the man the free world fears most will spend much of his retirement years crying. No parades for him either, though he will prove more correct about Asia than all our politicians and generals with illusory domino theories dancing in their heads.
Someone said at breakfast that President Kennedy will be in the city today. To raise funds, not to watch parades. His trip coincides with an evening fete in Madison Square Garden, where Miss Marilyn Monroe will sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” None of us had been invited to provide military support for our civilian commander in chief. We will see him at West Point in eighteen days. He will speak at our graduation. He will also become an honorary member of our class. Happy Birthday and Congratulations, Mr. President.
It is relaxing to ride in a comfortable convoy of buses from West Point to the swank digs of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. We form ranks in the shadow of 1140 Fifth Avenue, a residential bastion overlooking Central Park. The entire corps of cadets, twenty-four hundred of us, fills 95th Street stretching two long city-blocks to Park Avenue. We will march a little over two miles down Fifth to the southern end of Central Park. Afterward, we will be free in the city, returning to West Point at 1 a.m. on the same diligent buses. There will not be much time...
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TRAMPING THROUGH LIFE TR
A BEGINNING A BEGINNING... MAY 11, 1940
New York Times
May 11, 1940
Almost 30,000 days ago, I, James Charles Ryan, at precisely 4:23 a.m., debouched at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital’s Harkness Pavilion on Riverside Drive hard by the Hudson River. I arrived well before The Hellcats would blare and bang their wake-up music called reveille for 2,400 sleeping cadets forty-five miles upstream at West Point. My dawning D-Day, May 11, 1940, , . a Saturday, fell precisely one day after the Nazis had invaded France and, indeed, most of western Europe. And precisely one day before Mother’s Day. As my mother comforted me on my first day in this warring world, so did the New YorkTimes do likewise for its readers. Despite the shocking news of war, its excited frontpage streamers hinted a reflexive optimism.
D-Day, May 1DUTCH AND BELGIANS RESIST NAZI DRIVE ALLIED FORCES MARCH IN TO DO BATTLE CHAMBERLAIN RESIGNS, CHURCHILL PREMIER
While its subheadings absolutely soothed:
Coalition is Assured…Aid is Sent At Once…Holland is Firm… Belgium Reports Nazis Are Halted. [1]
Ah, these sanguine Americans. It will be a long, bloody war. The Nazi blitzkrieg had arrived and so had I. For three days, my mother Margaret and I lay in post-partum solitude at the Columbia Prespiterean hospital. Thereafter, we deployed together into the northern Bronx to an apartment in Woodlawn. Next to a firehouse with a terrifying air raid siren and across the street from the eponymous cemetery. From there my life proceeded. “Life, what is it but a dream?” wondered Lewis Carroll imagining his Alice drifting languorously down the stream of life, “dreaming as the summers die.” And now, so many dead summers later, I too wonder. 11]The New York Times, May 11, 1940, page 1. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1940/05/11/issue.html
The Bronx Zoo, Sea Lion Pool April 7, 1942 "My mother made me join the Navy."
WHAT ABIDES West Point in Afterthought
Chapter 2 Intimations
As the old song goes, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” Where does it come from, this desire for the military life? And the yen for West Point in particular? Is it in the bones? Perhaps. Coming from a military family helps. A free education, cultural glamour, the local-hero syndrome, the honor of it all, the idea of being accepted by a historically elite institution, all these contribute. But in the end, like life itself, it all seems a leap of naive faith. Youth is impetuous. West Point is patient. It succeeds because of the adaptability of the human species and not from any instinctive love of marching.
Chapter 3
Mom, Do I have Severe Hallux Valgus?
The requirements for admission to the Military Academy differ somewhat from those for admission to a civilian college or university. —United States Military Academy Catalogue, 1954-1955, page 13
The official United States Military Academy Catalogue, 1954-1955 arrived. One hundred fifty-two pages replete with text, maps, charts, lists of requirements, sample examination questions, photographs, calendars, and a mini-history of West Point. The table of contents promised thirty pages of detailed prerequisites—medical, physical, and mental. Everything one needed. to know about applying to West Point—or not.
I began to riffle the pages, pausing here and there.
Page 123 stopped me cold at “Physical Requirements.” What words! Who could understand this? No high school kid I knew. What language! Even Mark Twain would have scratched his head. Is this the vocabulary that West Pointers knew? Otitis, atresia, cycloplegic, heterotropia? And just what is a deciduous tooth? A long list headlined “Causes for Rejection” followed. My teenage ego trembled. My eyes spun. Did I have an encroachingpterygium? Atresia? What the heck is atresia? Where is Atresia?
Who would know about this? Only one place to go. I would ask my mother.
Chapter 12 Gloom Period Under Snow
"Is there anything more spiritual than watching a blizzard perform from the warm side of af a cold window?"
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Chapter Nineteen Barnum
"With nothing and nowhere to hide, we became walking glass houses subject to immediate examination"
"A cadet formerly known as Donald, now called Woody, a cadet who knew his circus history, burst into song. And like a lark ascending, in mellifluous baritone, he crooned."