RIP Colonel Buckley

A fall Saturday at West Point means booming drums sounding off in crisp, autumn air; it means ritual upon dog-and-pony show ritual on display for the taxpaying slice of the gollygee American idealogues. It starts with a parade where half-drunk, disinterested toy soldier upperclassmen and zit-faced, stressball Plebes--decked out in 20th-Century full-dress complete with shiny brass buttons, tarbucket helmets and starched cartridge belts--are frogmarched across the famous "plain" where Grant, Eisenhower, and Patton once traipsed. This is the militaristic foreplay which teases the gollygee taxpayers into a state of God n' Country/Shock meets Y'all excitement; it gets drawn out for hours and finally climaxes, orgasmically, inside the endzone of Michie Football Stadium with a spewing of Plebes running amok doing manly pushups, celebrating the deeds of manly men on that sycophant McArthur's "fields of friendly strife." To complete the deed, they are his seeds, sowing themselves on these fields in order to prepare themselves for the other "fields of victory" (i.e. the Flanders Fields of the future). I was a seed: I was there: It was madness. All jadedness aside, there was one parade that I never took for granted or scoffed at. There was one parade where I made extra sure that my shoes were properly shined, my pants, starched with a strong line of care, my cadets under my command, drilled ad nauseum on the importance of this parade, this one annual event: homecoming. Homecoming means lining the "Long Gray Line" of old graduates up along the diagonal walk and parading them from one end of the plain to the other. As a cadet, after the parade, you stand at attention while this long line of man's life, man's mortality, inches across the field where a final man, the oldest living graduate, places a wreath at the Thayer monument. The line starts with youth--the youngest graduates. These men and women laugh and move freely. They are nimble and full of good cheer. The line turns gray, moving to 1980, the first class of women. It passes and then the line gives way to all men. Vietnam comes along; limbs begin to turn up missing--America's first lost war and the warriors thrown at it march in step. The 1960s have passed. Here comes Korea with cracking knees and a few canes--stalemate. Truman's integrated Army goes by. World War 2's next. Men with medals; men with combat jumps over North Africa, Sicily, France, and Holland, men who crawled inside foxholes while Rommel's 88s shelled them in the desert, limp along. The line thins incredibly in-between wars and gives way to the end, to the men too proud to ride a wheelchair for this moment: they are a tight group of the last living graduates. They lock arms and creak their way in front of the parading corps of cadets at rigid attention. The drum beats echo off the stone cold granite facings of our barracks. Birds chirp. 1000 cadets freeze and hold in their sneezes, holding in their humanness. The oldest men move along, they are the World War 1 veterans, the ones who took part in the "War to end all wars." Some went over the top: they cross their final no-man's land and reach out for the end, for the final objective. Dedication. The band strikes up a different tune but the drum still beats so that the old group can keep in step. The group breaks up in front of the statue of Thayer and one man steps forward. He holds a wreath; it shakes because he shakes. The corps of cadets still hold its breath surrounding him in a vivid cloak of gray; enveloping him with their youth, with their ignorance and immaturity; the birds still chirp; echoes reverberate everywhere. That cold bite of a New York Fall is there. The man has reached the end of the line. He stands at the lip of the tunnel. He puts down the wreath, stiffens up and salutes. He is the last man of this long line; he is but one shaky step away from the void. I learned that this man took that step today. RIP Colonel Buckley. Note: The oldest living graduates when I was a cadet were WW1 grads which is why I wrote about them, because this essay is about my experience when I was there. They are all gone now. The oldest grads are now men who served between the 'great' wars, when the Bonus Army was purged and when adults couldn't drink a beer for some stupid reason. --------------------------------------- I'm writing about him, because, for the most part, no one cares. People know that some sick fuck child porn dude hiding out in Thailand got a real nice meal and all the Remy Martin he wanted while reclining in business class waxing with law enforcement handlers about whether or not the tenets of Kant's epistemology of Transcendental Idealism applies to 2nd-degree murder suspects. People know that Brad and Jen are sadly a thing of the past and that Katie is no longer happy; she's now serious and intense, burdened by the millstone's weight that comes with being America's next propagandistic storyteller. No one cares that an old hero died today; no one ever cares about that kind of thing.