Word: atkinson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rick Atkinson...
...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...
...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...
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...
...gentlemen in question represent the classic poles of soul. Sweet Pea Atkinson sports an open shirt and a pirate's booty of gold chains that make him look, according to a standing band joke, like "a killer pimp." He worked on a Chrysler assembly line for eleven years; when he sings, his voice is all rough edges, Wilson Pickett-style, that soar and spar. Sir Harry Bowens may still be unknown to Burke's Peerage (relax, guys: his knighthood is self- imposed), but fans of the O'Jays will recognize the cool, platinum elegance of his phrasing. He sang with...