RE-MAKING THE AMERICAN DREAM

A writer recounts his objection to West Point academy rules that violated his religious freedom and explores the evolving nature of the American Dream. 

Debut author Vaught grew up in the Bible Belt on a small farm in a family enthralled by the example of his father, Harry, who weathered the Depression’s terrible deprivations and served bravely in World War II. Thanks to his Baptist upbringing—his father was a deacon—Vaught was shown how genuine religious devotion and a healthy tolerance for the divergent beliefs of others could be reconciled. Much to the chagrin of the author’s own mother, Harry supported John F. Kennedy for president despite rampant anti–Roman Catholic sentiments among American Protestants. Meanwhile, Vaught fell in love with the adventure of aviation—he earned a private flying license by age 17—and matriculated to West Point in 1965. But he wasn’t prepared for the academy’s emphasis on relentless competition, draconian rules, and a “total and confining existence.” He found it to be a “pernicious environment,” and finally took a stand against West Point’s compulsory chapel service attendance and forced religious donations, demands he believed infringed on his constitutional rights. In soaring language, he explains his principal complaints: “This was not the American Dream. It was coercion and abuse of power. It stepped back toward the unification of church and state that existed for centuries in Europe. It ignored the breakthroughs toward religious freedom achieved in the American Revolution. It corrupted the ideals that made us free.” The author recollects his intransigent pursuit of the issue, including testifying in court twice, and the “pure retaliation” he suffered in the Army as a result.  Vaught’s intriguing memoir is a wide-ranging one that includes a meditation on the value of an authentic religious pluralism, the tension between his spiritual beliefs and the grim reality of war, and the fluctuating meaning of the American Dream. At the heart of that dream, the author contends, is a religious freedom that seems to form the basis for independent thought itself: “Full religious freedom, not just religious tolerance, leads to freedom of thought, as well as the acceptance of the different religions or ideas of others. It implies listening, self-reliance and the freedom to think, along with freedom from the hierarchy of the aristocracy and their organized official religion.” This isn’t the first instance in the book wherein he likens the upper echelons of the military to an aristocracy. In another place, he compares the military brass more specifically to the “aristocracy of medieval Europe,” a peculiar exaggeration that raises questions about the author’s knowledge of the history of aristocracies. In addition, readers should not expect a rigorous legal analysis of the First Amendment. But Vaught still furnishes a rich and compelling account of his own radicalization from a “farm boy wanting to fly airplanes” to a “dissenting political actor.”

A gripping memoir combined with an uneven legal and political analysis.