Point

By Stefan Kanfer

THE LONG GRAY LINE

by Rick Atkinson

Houghton Mifflin; 592 pages; $24.95

A veteran examines a 20-year-old photograph of his graduating class. "The guy on my left is dead now," he notes. "So is the guy on my right. The three of us didn't fare too well in Viet Nam. I came out the best." He points with the hook that serves as his right hand.

Rick Atkinson's epic of West Point's class of '66 is marked by such piercing incidents. A Washington Post reporter, he begins by following some 600 freshmen, ruddy and damp in their new gray wool uniforms. Loud harassment is the order of the day ("Pull that neck in, mister. You call that bracing?"). It has been this way since Thomas Jefferson founded the academy in 1802, and in the crowd of intimidated cadets the figures tend to blur -- until destiny selects them for service in Viet Nam.

Some soldiers make immediate and tragic exits. Bill Haneke is energized by President John F. Kennedy's 1961 Inaugural speech calling for a new generation to bear any burden, meet any hardship. He returns from Southeast Asia minus a right leg, a left foot and an eye. Tommy Hayes, the son and grandson of West Point major generals, rejects the sanctuary of graduate school. In a letter home he writes, "My country has invested a great deal in me as a soldier. I should like to repay that investment." The price is his life, taken in the jungle north of Saigon.

Three survivors carry the burden of Atkinson's narrative. Tom Carhart is a gung-ho lieutenant whose career is derailed by accidents and disfigured by a war he can neither take nor leave. Jack Wheeler is an idealistic Army brat who loses his military faith in the trenches. Postwar, both men have turbulent domestic lives; both resign their commissions, as do nearly 25% of their class. Both are obsessed by the idea of a Viet Nam memorial in Washington. But Wheeler favors the final design; Carhart, a lifelong iconoclast, censures the "black gash of shame and sorrow, hacked into the national visage that is the Mall." George Crocker, the classic warrior-aristocrat, is far removed from that fray. He distinguishes himself in combat, rises to lieutenant colonel and becomes the liberator of Grenada, a John Wayne figure "doing men things in a manly manner with other men."

It would have been a simple matter to melodramatize or caricature these soldiers' stories. But Atkinson maintains a tone of scrupulous neutrality, and he never loses the Point of his narrative. All along, his greatest character is the military academy itself, sustained by patriotic zeal in the '50s, pocked by controversy in the '60s and cheating scandals in the '70s, yielding in the '80s to a new national temper. Today women are admitted, there is a , course in ethics, and the incoming class is treated with unaccustomed humanity. "Demanding but not demeaning" is the cadre's new motto. Only the school prayer goes on as before: "Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half truth when the whole can be won."

But what constitutes the whole truth? Has the cadets' rigid training, the insistence on blind obedience, ruined more officers than it has made? Or did Viet Nam finally force the Army to create a new and better kind of leader? As Atkinson's brilliant history indicates, the answers are still being debated, and the arguments are likely to continue until the last battalion in The Long Gray Line.