BRAVE WORDS MATT THOMPSON FULL

As one who went to West Point himself, as did my father before me, I wondered once again, as I read, if I would survive. 'The long gray line has never failed us.' At times all this was, for me, difficult to read. 'From your ranks come the great captains who hold the nation's destiny in their hands,' MacArthur had intoned. It was the contrary the war would carry them, if they were lucky, if they hurried, to glory. Graduates from earlier classes were going, more and more troops were committed, there was more news of it daily and then, like a slow tolling, the funeral announcements given in the cadet mess hall. The war, like a distant tide, was meanwhile rising around them. You come to have an enormous sympathy for the main characters and the classmates who surround them: the immortal Buck Thompson, first seen with pillows stuffed behind his head, nipping on forbidden scotch and reading Chaucer Tommy Hayes, another among the princes, father and grandfather both West Point graduates, chairman-to-be of the all-important Honor Committee, Hayes, whom Wheeler admires, in one imperishable image in the Ben Franklin Hotel after an Army-Navy game, lying on the bed with his date, her breasts stunningly exposed.

In barracks and classroom, in the gymnasium and on leave, there are the recklessness of youth, the grim ideals, the innocence and struggle. The four years at West Point have a powerful romantic aura. Like doors pushed open slightly in a great house at various hours, there are quick views of unexpected figures, and these illuminate the chapters.

Some months later he makes a quiet last visit to the West Point cemetery, spending several hours there with William Westmoreland, then the academy's superintendent, seeing dead comrades for the final time and, Westmoreland assumed, deciding whether or not he would be buried there himself. An aged Douglas MacArthur, his veined hands trembling with palsy, comes to deliver his florid farewell to the corps. Author Rick Atkinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Washington Post, provides a remarkable picture of cadet life and of West Point itself. They are immediately thrown into the furnace of the first, harrowing summer, Beast Barracks as it was called. We see them almost as soon as they arrive at the military academy, mingled with the others, eager, nervous and suspecting. Real names and real destinies, the first three the sons of Army officers, the other two, country boys, from Arkansas and Nebraska respectively. Wheeler, Carhart, Harrison, Crocker and Bonifas are the principal figures. BY FOLLOWING a handful of intertwined lives rather closely and offering brief glimpses of others, the book, for all its length, covers with ease a quarter of a century. Enormously rich in detail and written with a novelist's brilliance, the pages literally hurry before one. The Long Gray Line - the title refers to all those who have worn cadet gray, present and past - is the story of that class. Its members went to Vietnam as lieutenants, often as platoon leaders, and for the company grade officers the war was particularly ferocious.

BRAVE WORDS MATT THOMPSON FULL

It was the class that had the most deaths and that the full weight of the war fell on. The class of 1966 at West Point, the one that had entered that day, would be distinguished from the many preceding as well as those following it by being the most bloodied by the Vietnam War. One in four would not make it to graduation. As goes the Army, so goes the nation.' A forest of hands, over 800, rose to take the oath. The commandant, a brigadier general named Richard Stilwell, told them among other things that 'the history of the United States of America and the history of the United States Army and the history of the United States Military Academy are so closely intertwined as to be inextricable, one from the other. $24.95 ON A HOT July afternoon in 1962, at the end of the first exhausting day, the bewildered new plebes at West Point were marched to Trophy Point to take the oath. THE LONG GRAY LINE By Rick Atkinson Houghton Mifflin.

Brave words matt thompson