(I’m doing this particular memory post twice. Because one is a little more creative - and kind of different - and one is a regular old story. I couldn’t decide which one I should post, so I thought I’d throw caution to the wind and post both. Version two will be up later today.)

 

“I think this song is about this place,” he said, turning the knob on my stereo so that the beginning of Round Here filled up the inside of my car. Adam Durtiz’s voice sang the first line, and Derek sighed. “It’s always foggy here.”

We were parked in the lot that lead into Central Area, the huge feild in the middle of West Point where the cadets had drill at 1600 hours, and marched in parades on important days. It was deserted then, nothing but nighttime filling the space between us and the cadet barracks beyond the bleachers and the grassy plane before us. He was right; It was always foggy there. And even if it wasn’t foggy right then, it was always gray at West Point. Winter was the worst, but even in the summer, gray consumed every other color. The historic buildings, all made of stone and worn by age, were gray. The streets that snaked through the houses and businesses and acedemic halls, they were gray too. Even the uniforms were gray. Every single young man and woman there wore the privelige of attending the military school in mist-colored pants and a matching jacked, zipped up over a starched white shirt. But the air, at dusk and dawn, in daylight and night, was almost always hazy. Almost always gray.

“I mean, think about it. I mean, ‘the difference between wrong and right.’ We all think we’re doing the right thing, right? But who really knows? And we have to stand up straight.”

I sank into my seat and listened as he drew the parallels. It didn’t take long for me to see them, too.

Legends fill the fog that blankets those ancient buildings. Derek spun the spurs on the statue of General Sedgewick for luck at midnight before every exam, just like cadets before him have done for God knows how many years. They talked about General Patton’s statue, how it faced the libarary because he never once set foot inside of it during his study there. Hundreds of cadets have kissed their gals and guys under the Kissing Rock on Flirty Walk, in keeping with tradition. There’s the story about the one room in the barracks, where a cadet died: It’s always freezing cold in there, and even the Academy doesn’t force anyone to live in it. On dares, the cadets spend the night alone in there, only to have the sheets drawn tightly over their bodies, the blankets tucked in at the corners in accordance with room inspection requirements. And then there’s the R-Day parade.

“I know I’m going to war,” Derek told me not long after we started dating. He was a sophomore at the time, nearly three years away from graduation, and already he knew. “It rained on my R-Day parade. In fact, it didn’t just rain, it was a fucking hurricane. It rained on the R-Day parades of every class that went to World War II, Vietnam, even Kosovo. And it poured on mine.” He’s on his second tour in the Middle East right now.

“‘Something radiates,’” he sang along, quietly. I knew what was radiating without him having to tell me. The permanence of accepting your nomination to attend the school; the five years of your life that you serve in the Army once you graduate. The gravity that lies within that promise.

The lines suddenly vibrated with meaning:

Round here, we’re carving out our names.
Round here, we all look the same.
Round here, we talk just like lions, but we sacrifice like lambs.

“I mean, ‘we’re carving out our names?’ We are. We’re going into the military. And I bet a lot of us are going to war. Just by being here, we’re carving our dates into tombstones.”

The morbidity startled me. “Derek…Don’t talk like that.” He put his hand on mine.

“I’m not trying to depress you, but I mean, seriously. Listen to it. We do all look the same. And we’re all about talking about how badass we would be in a firefight, at war, but every single one of us,” he shook his finger at the barracks in front of us, “are terrified of the moment we’ll have to live through it.”

They’re all a little crazy, he went on, just like the woman in the song. They’re driven mad by the impossible schedule: The PT, the classloads, the required extracarricular activities, the drills, the pressure. And a lot of them just want to give up. They’re all tired of something.

“We stay up late, even though Lights Out is at ten. And we wait for everything,” he chuckled. “That part is just sarcasm.”

And they all need someone to catch them, he said. Because they can see nothing but The Academy, and they’re all under the gun.

He hit the back button and repeated the song, letting it play through again. He’d clearly listened to it a million times before, finding the truth in its lines, but he was giving me a clearer listen. And that second run-through, it burned the song into my mind. I’ll forever see him there, in the passenger seat of my Mazda Navajo: His head rested wearily against the seat of my car, his gray hat folded on his lap, his nametag reflecting the streetlights above us, hearing his present and future on his words, eyes fixed on nothing but the foggy night sky above us.