Murder at Woo Poo

By LANCE MORROW

DRESS GRAY by Lucian K. Truscott IV Doubleday; 489 pages; $10.95

The offspring of heroes often choose between emulation and rejection. In the category of the overreaching emulator, consider George S. Patton III. As an Army colonel in 1968, he sent out a Christmas card: a photograph of a pile of Vietnamese corpses, with the inscription "Peace on Earth." In the Oedipal upmanship of military dynasties, Patton's father, the ivory-pistoled mystic brute of World War II, was a tough act to follow.

Lucian K. Truscott IV also bears a refulgent military name. His grandfather, who affected pink riding breeches and a scarf of white parachute silk for combat wear, was a World War II general described as a fighter who "out-Pattoned Patton." Author Truscott's father is also a career military man, a West Pointer. Truscott IV, 31, has found a complicated way to deal with the family tradition. He graduated from the Point with a resolutely undistinguished record in 1969, then resigned his commission 13 months later in a row with his superiors. Truscott became a journalist--largely for the Village Voice--and bent politically somewhat to the left.

Now he has accomplished a lucrative but ambivalent sort of revenge upon the military. His first novel, which has earned $1.4 million in paperback, movie, bookclub and other sales, is the nastiest assault on West Point since Benedict Arnold tried to hand over its plans to the British. Dress Gray turns upon a conceit exquisitely designed to offend the rectilinear machismo of the Military Academy. It seems that there are inverts at the Point, Truscott writes. One, a model cadet named David Hand, turns up drowned, his body naked in Lake Popolopen and showing signs, in an autopsy, of recent homosexual activity. But Hand was an expert swimmer. Evidence suggests he was murdered by another cadet, also homosexual.

The idea has great possibilities, but Truscott writes with the subtlety of a rifle butt. His villain, Charles Sherrill Hedges, commandant of cadets, is a pathologically ambitious martinet who tries to cover up the killing; his plan, an elaborate tangle of implausibility, is to make it look as if the academy's superintendent had ordered the coverup. That done, Hedges can take over as the supe of what cadets call "Woo Poo." But Hedges reck ons without Ry Slaight, a second-class man who stumbles upon the truth and then besieges it for nearly 500 pages, like Grant trying to take Richmond.

Although the story is a somewhat amateurish mess and the characters are made of plywood, Truscott's book bristles with engaging, sometimes horrific lore about the ordeal of West Point, circa 1968, its codes and disciplines. His description of Beast Barracks, the two sum mer months before plebe year that turn oafish high school graduates into passable cadets, has the ring of first-rate journal ism. Truscott possesses a subversively accurate ear for the intonations of officers:

"Outstanding, major. Damn fine work.

Damn fine."

Truscott seems to retain a sadomasochistic affection for West Point. He must forgive readers who detect traces of auto biography in the paragon Ry Slaight: "An odd case, a cadet who seemed somehow out of place at West Point, and yet he possessed all the qualities of a textbook military leader: poise, bearing, guts, intelligence, and a massive, nearly impenetrable ego." Outstanding. Man sounds like a real Truscott. Damn fine.

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