Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(22)
Berry was not an outstanding athlete. Academically he was in the middle of the crowd. But he was well liked and popular. “Setting his standards by his father and Wendell Willkie . . .” the yearbook reads. He rose to be a cadet captain.
He was sent to the occupation forces in Japan. It seemed a kind of exile. Everyone was requesting duty in Germany. Nobody had foreseen the Korean War. For Berry it was a great piece of fortune, the first of many. One needs luck to go with ability. Luck may even be part of ability, in fact. When in the later days Napoleon no longer knew all the officers in his army who were being promoted to general, he would put a mark by names he did not recognize and ask in the margin, “Is he lucky?” Berry was wounded in Korea and twice promoted on the battlefield, from first lieutenant to major. Fifteen years later he was wounded again in Vietnam—shrapnel, sixteen holes. The man next to him was killed. He has won a Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star—four times—and the Air Medal an improbable forty-two times. The days are gone when a single bit of ribbon on a man’s chest was a sign of heroic achievement. But wounds are still not cheap. And perhaps, God willing, he is lucky.
The superintendency has often served as a stepping-stone to the very top. Berry has all the credentials. He was military assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the Pentagon. He earned a master’s degree at Columbia. He taught history. The proper mixture of education, exposure at high levels, the sound of guns. Like a racehorse making its move, he began to come to the front. He was the first in his class at the academy to earn a general’s star.
He begins, in his careful, undramatic way, to tell a story about a Vietnamese officer he knew who was given command of a division known as “the coup division” near Saigon. The moral turns out to be, in his words, that “generals must become more politically aware but not more politically involved.” He admires George Marshall, a man of strong principles and soldierly attitudes—“one of the outstanding men of this century,” he says simply. And Omar Bradley, Lee and Grant, strike him as leaders of great integrity.
“The symbol of the army,” he explains, “is the mule. The mule is stubborn. It works hard. It’s basically a very honest animal.”
Now, at this moment, the vivid caricatures of Dr. Strangelove—or the threat of holocaust—are worlds away.
The heat of afternoon lies over the green fields of West Point. There are grass cutters at work. The smell of the fairway. A question floats forth, apparently simple, though behind it is a certain amount of suspicion and guile. Could we have won in Vietnam?
The answer comes promptly: “No.”
And the reason?
“The political understanding and the staying power of the Communists,” Berry says, “were greater than those of our forces.”
This must certainly have been one of the more knowledgeable admissions made by any field or flag officer involved in Vietnam. There were generals who wanted in both Korea and Vietnam to go the whole way, to take on China. It would have to be done sooner or later, they argued. Berry was and is not one of these. It would have been crazy, in his view.
He is a man one trusts. Like many soldiers, he comes from the south, from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. His wife is from Decatur, Georgia. They have two daughters and a son.
It was his children who brought him Dostoevsky and Hermann Hesse—and a book he has read more than once, War and Peace. He seems to have read without passion, however. One senses he reads to broaden himself, dutifully, as if trying to learn a foreign language.
“I identify with Prince Andrei,” he says, referring to the nobleman in War and Peace whose bravery in battle was immortalized by Tolstoi.
The mule works hard. It is patient.
Vietnam is past. The presidents who committed us to it are gone, their advisers, their ministers of war; Kissinger is the only important exception. The army suffered badly there. Frustration and defeat. The loss of a sound moral position. The dissatisfaction, even the contempt of much of the country, especially the young, focused on it.
Resignation figures of West Point graduates rose sharply, going up to about 37 percent in the class of 1966. There was a four-year service commitment after graduation, so officers from this class could only begin to leave the army in 1971. Indications now are that the percentage of resigning officers is beginning to go down.
Berry has most recently come from commanding a division, the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The army was buffeted during Vietnam, he admits, but the 101st is far healthier now than it was a year ago, and it will be even healthier a year from now, he promises.
This image of a fighting general himself—behind him the years of dusty encampments, bloody battles, daring escapes, and obedient routine—this dedicated life as it is revealed in his character and face is perhaps the real lesson he will somehow impart to cadets. Among them is probably one who will someday sit in this very office when Sidney Berry is a photograph high on the wall, above the Whistler sketches, the Catlin landscapes. It is a life that is a proof of things which no longer seem to exist.
The cadets come from the great cities now, and from sprawling suburbs. The rural and agrarian character of the Corps is changing. These new young men know little of nature and the kind of everyday hardship that used to be part of American life. West Point can no longer attract the great football players either, or even the very top students, perhaps. Can it compensate, in part, by the fiber of those who do come? And where can they now be found? For a long moment, Berry stands at the window embrasure, cold gray eyes looking out over West Point. Once a fortress that guarded a river, it became a school to guard a nation. There are trophies everywhere, cannon taken in Mexico, the cannon that fired the last shot at Appomattox. Tradition and glory. Enormous eagles carved onto the buildings. An oxide-green General Patton standing near the library.