FAMOUS GOATS OF WEST POINT
Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point. James S. Robbins. Encounter Books. 503 pages; photographs; notes; index; $29.95.
Reviewed by Col. Cole C. Kingseed, U.S. Army retired
Does class ranking at the U.S. Military Academy determine future career success?
In Last in Their Class, author James S. Robbins brings a refreshingly new perspective to the question by concentrating not on the cadets who ranked highest in class standing, but rather on those who graduated at or near the bottom of their respective classes. Robbins sees some remarkable similarities between the class “goat,” the cadet who graduated last in his class, and “the Immortals section,” the academic section that one future commandant of cadets noted “contains those who are hanging on at the ragged edge of deficiency.” Included in the ranks of the Immortals were some of West Point’s most colorful personalities: future Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Edgar Allan Poe and James McNeill Whistler, Henry Heth, James Longstreet, George Pickett and George Armstrong Custer to name but a few.
Telling the story of the Goats is necessarily telling the story of West Point’s formative years. In examining the first century of West Point’s existence, Robbins presents a glimpse of the less-known side of West Point—”of the mischief, the fraternization and other unofficial activities at which the Goats excelled. Notorious in their day, many of these events are now revered as folklore exemplifying West Point’s gilded age.” Robbins also explores the origins of many of West Point’s most cherished traditions, including the reforms of Col. Sylvanus Thayer, the presentation of class rings, the tossing of the hats following graduation and Gen. Winfield Scott’s fixed opinion of the value of West Point graduates in the Mexican War.
Separate chapters concentrate on the legendary Benny Havens, who owned a tavern just outside the gates of West Point, and Flirtation Walk, the Revolutionary War sentry path along the Hudson River that became a favorite haunt of cadets escorting their ladies after hours. Robbins also examines the academic curriculum and the efforts of the cadets to seek what he terms temporary refuge from the Academy’s rules and regulations.
The centerpiece of Robbins’ story revolves around Cadets Custer and Pickett, both of whom graduated last in their respective classes. Custer remains the most notorious of West Point’s Goats. Over the course of his four years at West Point, Custer accrued 726 demerits, but during the Civil War, he became the Army’s youngest division commander and one of the Union army’s most dynamic cavalry commanders. Robbins dedicates several chapters to Custer’s postwar career, culminating in his death at the Little Bighorn in June 1876.
Pickett, too, receives his share of the author’s attention. Pickett’s name will be forever immortalized by the futile attack on the third day at Gettysburg, but the future Confederate commander came within five demerits of expulsion from West Point in his final year. Robbins discusses Pickett’s heroism at Chapultepec in the Mexican War and Pickett’s role in the Pig War of 1859, when a dispute on San Juan Island in the Pacific Northwest created an international confrontation with the British governor of Vancouver Island. Robbins also disproves many of the myths surrounding Pickett’s antebellum relationship with Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln.
The Civil War became West Point’s central defining event, and the war validated the Academy’s value to the nation. Warfare had become far too sophisticated to be left to amateurs. West Pointers commanded armies on both sides in 55 of the war’s 60 largest engagements. None of the Union’s most successful commanders—Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Philip Sheridan—were scholars of the first magnitude, but each contributed mightily to the ultimate Northern victory.
In addition to the return of West Point’s most distinguished graduates to the Military Academy, the postwar decade also witnessed what Robbins calls “The Passing of the Greats.” First to go was Gen. Joseph G. Swift, the first West Point graduate, who died on July 23, 1865. Gen. Winfield Scott, who played such an instrumental role in nurturing graduates Robert E. Lee, George McClellan and P.G.T. Beauregard, was next, dying quietly on May 29, 1866. Sylvanus Thayer, the father of the Academy, followed on September 7, 1872. Dennis Hart Mahan, West Point’s most distinguished professor, committed suicide in 1871. And venerable Benny Havens passed away on May 29, 1877.
Robbins’ final two chapters pay tribute to the Immortals and the Goats. In captivating detail, Robbins traces the post-Civil War legacy of the men who continued the tradition of the Goat. Here is the story of Clarence Ransom Edwards, the Goat of 1883, who received three Silver Stars in the Philippine Insurrection and later commanded the 26th (Yankee) Division in World War I. Powhatan Henry Clarke, the Goat of 1884, is the only Last Man to receive the Medal of Honor. And Charles Young, the Goat of 1889, was the third African American to graduate from West Point and the first African American to achieve the rank of colonel.
In 1978, West Point discontinued the General Order of Merit and announced “The Last of the Last Man.” The official rationale for the change according to a West Point study group was “the Military Academy’s intensification of the pursuit of excellence in academics … to stress competition against a high standard of learning rather than to have the students compete against one another for class standing.” Today’s graduates are listed in the register in alphabetical order, except for the honor graduates, even though unpublished class rankings exist.
Robbins obviously rues the demise of the Goat tradition, emphatically stating that the institution “surrendered a part of its soul and turned its back on its history.” Unlike the reformers who viewed the “Goat syndrome” as “a synthesis of all the negative attitudes on academic excellence,” Robbins views the drive toward standardization and the quest for conformity and political correctness as both harmful and wasteful. According to Robbins, a less than stellar academic record does not reflect a lack of honor, sense of duty, or physical and moral courage. In telling the history of the Goats, Robbins concludes that “some virtues are not learned in the classroom.” He may have a point.
In the final analysis, Robbins provides a provocative insight into the early history of West Point. The tradition of the Goat and the Immortals clearly demonstrates that academic performance is not a prerequisite for military success. The crucible of West Point has produced men and women “of many and varied abilities, which were then tested in the arena of life, always at the whim of luck and circumstance”—which brings us back to Robbins’ original question concerning whether class standing is an accurate determinant for future military success. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who graduated in the middle of his class and who ranked near the bottom of his class in discipline, gets the last word: “If anybody recognized greatness in me at West Point,” stated the future 34th President, “he surely kept it to himself.”
COL. COLE C. KINGSEED, USA Ret., Ph.D., a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is a writer and consultant.
CIA AGENT'S PENETRATING MEMOIR OF EARLY DAYS OF OEF
Jawbreaker—The Attack on bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander. Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo. Crown Publishers. 328 pages; maps; photos; index; $25.95.
Reviewed by Scott R. Gourley
America’s global war on terrorism is frequently portrayed in terms that are starkly black and white, but the fact is that winning that war also involves dealing in shades of gray. It is that gray part of the spectrum that provides the backdrop for Gary Berntsen’s personal memoir of leading CIA field operations in Afghanistan during the opening days of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).
The short version of America’s initial response to the attacks of 9/11 is remarkably black and white: In just more than months, approximately 110 CIA officers and 350 special operations forces, supported by air power, allied with 15,000 Afghans to defeat a Taliban army estimated at from 50,000 to 60,000, plus several thousand more al Qaeda fighters.
But the longer version is a little more complex. Berntsen’s fascinating personal experiences as a CIA officer during those two months tend to blend the extremes between black and white, as he operated in a world of gray, where allegiances were “leased” and there was no surprise in guidance from his higher headquarters to “continue purchasing surrenders when and where it makes sense.”
Together with co-author Ralph Pezzullo, Berntsen builds a foundation for his OEF actions by reaching back to his CIA experiences following the 1998 al Qaeda-sponsored bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa and a subsequent CIA paramilitary mission that he led into Afghanistan in 2000. The gray world at that time saw the CIA supporting the same Afghan groups supported by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
MOIS support was based on Shia Iran’s hatred of the Sunni Taliban and put the CIA team leader on the same side as a group he considered “the equivalent of Middle Eastern Nazis.” Meanwhile, the authors note that Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence Directorate (ISID) “had helped create the Taliban and had been a close ally of their government for years.”
The attacks of 9/11 found the author in a South American posting. However, his earlier experience on the ground in Afghanistan paved the way for immediate recall to the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center and subsequent deployment as the agency’s “key field officer in Afghanistan.”
Over several chapters, Jawbreaker takes the reader through an exciting day-by-day and battle-by-battle account of the victories and setbacks that occurred over the next two months. The battles spanned centuries of technology, as riders on horseback timed their attacks to follow the aerial delivery of everything from GPS-guided and laser-guided munitions to Vietnam era 15,000-pound BLU-82 “Daisy Cutter” bombs that were rolled out of the rear of cargo planes.
In every vignette, the authors consistently praise the performance and bravery of the military special operations personnel who worked hand-in-hand with CIA officers in the field.
For a military reader, the book offers tremendous insights into the political implications and challenges of coalition military issues in the environment of a global war on terrorism. Moreover, it also provides an exceptional reference on successful combat operations of joint military-agency (CIA) teams.
The book’s primary criticisms are directed at bureaucracies, both at CIA headquarters and at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). In the latter case, the criticism is largely based on Berntsen’s field request, declined by CENTCOM, to insert a U.S. Army Ranger battalion to block the escape of al Qaeda fighters from the kill zones of Tora Bora. He credits that decision with the escape of bin Laden, claiming that the CENTCOM commander “was either badly misinformed by his own people or blinded by the fog of war.”
Criticism of the CIA’s bureaucracy included the agency’s decision to pull Berntsen out of Afghanistan in December 2001.
In May 2005 he announced his retirement from the agency and submitted the Jawbreaker book manuscript for publication review. Based on legal difficulties with that review process, the current edition includes several blacked-out sections that have been redacted by the CIA. An appeal on those redacted sections has been filed in Federal Court with the goal of including that material in future editions of the book. Any future editions of the book would also provide the opportunity to correct several minor errors in dates, terminology and technology in the first edition.
It should be emphasized that nothing about Berntsen’s presentation in any way reduces the enormous significance of the achievement or the personal sacrifices of the Americans involved. To the contrary, the ability to achieve that success in the world’s harshest climates against that operational backdrop is testimony to the professionalism of America’s military service and intelligence personnel.
Jawbreaker presents this testimony in an exceptional and thoughtful manner as it takes readers through the shades of gray that separate black and white.
SCOTT R. GOURLEY, a freelance writer, is a contributing editor to ARMY Magazine.
TWO PERSPECTIVES ON AFGHANISTAN
The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan. Ben Macintyre. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 351 pages; photographs; index; hardcover, $25; softcover, $14. The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead Books. 371 pages; $14.
Reviewed by Nancy Barclay Graves
Books about Afghanistan are proliferating, and among them, two books, very different from each other, are highly recommended reading.
The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan, written by Ben Macintyre, is a biography of Josiah Harlan. It reads like a derring-do novel, but every word is true.
The second book, on the best seller list more than a year, The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, is fiction which reads like a true story. It is the story of a boy’s life in Kabul before he and his family were forced to flee at the time of the invasion by the Russians and the return of the adult narrator 20 years later when Kabul is under Taliban rule.
The title of Macintyre’s book may ring a bell of familiarity because of the famous movie by that name, which was based on Rudyard Kipling’s short story. Kipling was a journalist living in India when he heard of Harlan, whose story was so bizarre that people still talked about him 30 years after he had left Afghanistan. Kipling’s story is fiction, based on Harlan’s life as it was told by word of mouth in India. Macintyre’s biography is based on the actual journal kept by Harlan.
In 1799, Josiah Harlan was born in Chester County, Pa., into a Quaker family, the eighth of nine children. His mother died when he was 13. She left her estate of several thousand dollars to her three daughters, but the sons had to make their own way. They were an educated family, well-read. Josiah read Latin and Greek and spoke French. He read medical books and Plutarch’s history and reveled in the stories of Alexander the Great, who became his model.
Growing up in the days of adventure and exploration (Lewis and Clark were on their quest), it was not unusual for a young man to go to sea. Three of his brothers had done so before him. Josiah shipped out to the Far East when he was 20, and saw the exotic worlds of Canton and Calcutta. Returning home he met and fell in love with a young lady. Assured that she would wait for him, he sailed again. However, fickle Eliza married someone else even before Harlan had reached Calcutta, where a letter from his brother told him of her marriage. Deeply hurt, Josiah swore never to return to the United States, and became a swashbuckling adventurer in far-off lands.
His exploits for the next 20 years make for a page-turning book full of excitement. He raises his own army to return an ousted Maharaja to his former lands; he passes himself off as a military expert, as a doctor, as a holy man, as a representative of the United States, always venturing deeper into unknown Afghanistan, following in the footsteps of his idol, Alexander the Great. He finally does, in fact, become king of his own country.
The author of The Man Who Would Be King served as a journalist in Afghanistan during the Russian occupation and subsequent defeat by the Mujahideen. Vacationing in Peshawar found him reading Kipling, and the story of the man who would be king made a deep impression on him. Later, during repeated tours in the region to cover the civil war, the Taliban and the quest for bin Laden, Macintyre became intrigued by Harlan’s story. By untiring detective work over the course of several years, Macintyre found Harlan’s journal in a small library in Chester County, Pa. Amid the long lost papers, thought to have been burned in a house fire, Macintyre found “there, yellow with age at the bottom of the box, a document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal, a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king.”
The second book written about life in Afghanistan is The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. This story of a boy’s conscience and his attempt at atonement could, perhaps, be placed anywhere. Khaled Hosseini has placed it in the Afghanistan of his heritage.
Hosseini was himself born in Kabul. His father served in the Afghan diplomatic corps, and was posted in Paris at the time of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. He asked for and received political asylum in the United States. The family settled in the Los Angeles area. Hosseini became a physician and is now a novelist. The Kite Runner is a powerful and passionate novel based on his memories of life in Kabul.
The main characters, Amir and Hassan, one year apart in age, grew up as inseparable playmates despite their difference in caste. Amir was the son of the wealthy Baba, respected leader of the community; Hassan, the son of the servant, Ali. Amir’s mother died at his birth; Hassan’s mother ran off and joined the gypsies five days after he was born.
Hassan’s devotion to Amir, and Amir’s insecurity, jealousy and the idea of caste result in a series of episodes in which Amir denounces Hassan and finally falsely accuses him of theft, forcing the honest Ali and Hassan to leave the service of Baba.
Life is never the same for any of them. Revolution, invasion and terror change Kabul forever. Baba and Amir escape to America. The old man cannot cope with the new world; Amir integrates easily.
Twenty years later, Amir returns reluctantly to Kabul, called there by his father’s dying friend. The reader suffers with Amir as he is reminded of his perfidy, which resulted in Hassan and Ali leaving the service of Baba. As he sees the horrors under the Taliban of the country of his youth, Amir is torn by questions of “what if?” and “what might have been?” had he not as a child lied monstrously about Hassan. The challenges he meets, the mistakes he makes and his final attempt at redemption “when guilt leads to good” are spellbindingly written. This book is heartwarming as well as heart wrenching. It is easy to see why the book has been on the best-seller list for more than a year.
Although these two books are set approximately 150 years apart, both give insight and vivid descriptions of a country long isolated and now thrust into the headlines—good reads, both of them.
NANCY BARCLAY GRAVES is a freelance writer who lives in Arlington, Va.
50 YEARS AGO IN ARMY
DEDICATED BATTLEFIELD LEADER
Soldier: The Memoirs of Matthew B. Ridgway. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, as told to Harold H. Martin. Harper & Brothers, 1956; 371 pages; illustrated; index; $5.
Reviewed by Maj. Gen. H. W. Blakeley
Gen. Ridgway’s Saturday Evening Post articles, “My Battles in War and Peace,” ran to a total of about 30,000 words and, on the evidence of the resultant letters to the editor, were clearly controversial. His biography of 125,000 words naturally gives a broader picture of an “Army brat” who rose to the Army’s highest position. Along the way he had an almost incredible variety of experiences: semi-diplomatic assignments in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, China and the Philippines; a trip through Central America by bull cart, canoe, mule back, bus and train; a parachute drop into Normandy in the darkness of the night before D-Day; personal combat, armed with a Springfield rifle, when he was a corps commander; the sudden assignment to command Eighth Army in Korea; and later the burdens of supreme command, first in the Far East and then in Europe.
Both the articles and the book are written in the first person, but are ‘’as told to” Harold H. Martin. Mr. Martin, an associate editor of The Saturday Evening Post, is, of course, an expert at this sort of thing. Presumably, the results are smoother texts than Gen. Ridgway could have produced, but one wonders if a little of the general’s personality may not have been lost in the process. Some minor errors probably also come from the dual authorship. Second lieutenants didn’t wear gold bars in the spring of 1917, for example, and 2200 hours on 5 June 1944 wasn’t twelve hours before H-hour.
Undimmed is the picture of a dedicated, competent battlefield leader. Matthew Ridgway was born at Fort Monroe, the son of Col. Thomas Ridgway. The general pays high tribute to him: “I recall the infinite patience of my wonderful father. He never seemed to be too tired or too busy to help me, particularly in math, in which he, as an artilleryman, was necessarily gifted, and in which I was exceptionally ill-informed.” As a candidate for West Point, young Ridgway achieved an improvement from being “exceptionally ill-informed” to the point where he scored a 96 in math in the competitive examinations for a Presidential appointment.
He also pays tribute to Gen. Frank McCoy. Ridgway was a 33-year-old company commander in the 9th Infantry and also training for the pentathlon squad for the 1928 Olympic games when McCoy asked him to go to Nicaragua. McCoy was to head a mission there to supervise a free election. Ridgway speaks of the calm self-assurance, the absolute honesty and integrity with which Gen. McCoy handled his assignment and adds: “I have, perhaps unconsciously, sought to model myself on him. By any standard, of any people, in any age, he was a great man.”
Ridgway had earlier served in China under George C. Marshall, then a lieutenant colonel, and says that Gen. Marshall’s “friendship and faith in me in later years were to have a profound effect on my career.” When war came in 1941, Ridgway was a colonel on the War Department General Staff and “had never actually commanded a unit larger than a rifle company, and, for a brief period, an infantry battalion.” This pattern of progress to high command by the staff and school route was typical in the case of many officers who reached high command in the World War II period. It would be unfortunate if the young officers of today were to conclude that that is the route to be followed. In the period between the two world wars, the Army was reduced for a considerable time to not much more than 100,000 men, many employed in overhead and other non-troop duties. The result was little opportunity for duty with troops; and when an outstanding young officer did get troop duty he was often appointed to a staff job. Some of these officers never did learn to command. Those who did will in most cases testify that command in battle would have been easier if they had had experience in handling troops at all levels from the platoon on up.
If lack of command experience handicapped Gen. Ridgway when he became a brigadier in the 82nd Division it didn’t trouble him for long. Perhaps a vital factor was his desire for command duty. He tells of going to Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, then Gen. Marshall’s staff secretary, every day and asking, in reference to his hopes for assignment to troops, “Any word?” and getting the answer one day: “Yes. This morning Gen. Marshall said, and I quote, ‘Tell Ridgway I’m tired of seeing him hanging around every time my door opens. When I have something for him, I’ll send for him.’ “
In light of Ridgway’s later efforts, when he became Chief of Staff, to instill more of a family feeling and esprit de corps in combat units by means of the gyroscope and other innovations, it is significant that, after combat experience in North Africa and Sicily, he left behind in England at the time of the Normandy invasion a small, carefully selected cadre from his division to handle replacements for the expected casualties in each regiment and battalion: “My purpose was to indoctrinate each new man, not only with the proud spirit of the division as a whole, but with the spirit of each smaller unit which was then in combat.”
He didn’t think that toughness was indicated by lack of discipline and took active measures to get the cocky paratroopers of his division back into line when they tended to get out of hand after their Normandy experience. Incidentally, he does not pull his punches in his opinion of the Doolittle Board’s report: “It dangerously undermined that priceless element—the officer-enlisted man relationship based on mutual respect—that had been built up over generations of service together. … The purpose of the report, of course, was to create a more ‘democratic’ Army. Its effect was to undermine discipline.”
MAJ. GEN HAROLD W. BLAKELEY, USA Ret., contributed many articles and reviews to ARMY and its predecessors. During World War II he commanded the 4th Infantry Division.