WHAT ABIDES

Ryan reflects on his years attending West Point Academy and his disillusionment with the Vietnam War.

The New York City author was born in an age dominated by the Vietnam War. His uncle Charlie fought in that war as part of the 82nd Airborne, and Ryan was raised with a sense of patriotic pride. “Brimming with optimism,” he dreamed of attending the prestigious West Point Academy. He was eventually admitted and provides a captivating account of his mother’s crafty efforts to secure the necessary recommendation from a congressman. Ryan’s depiction of West Point—its prisonlike confinement as well as its disciplinary rigors—is as thoughtful as it is transporting. Despite being told in a speech by President John F. Kennedy at his graduation that his principal responsibility was to deter war—a lie he considered “huge” and “murderous”—he was deployed to Saigon in 1964. The author expertly details the strategic and moral failings of the war, a grotesque combination of misinformation and hubris, a critique that is not at all original but is astute nonetheless. In particular, his biographical vignette of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the secretary’s faux “analysis from nowhere,” is striking. However, Ryan’s remembrance has an indulgent peripatetic quality to it, which creates the impression he is simply musing out loud. At one point, he reflects at length on the way he was taught Tolstoy’s rendering of the Battle of Austerlitz at West Point, a reflection without much of a conclusion. In fact, the memoir seems self-consciously erudite—there are repeated references to literary luminaries like Proust and Joyce, and Ryan often indulges some modernist writing of his own. “Words, words, words. Book-words, newspaper-words, magazine-words, printed words, words everywhere. And more words, invisible words, words-in-the-air words, radio-words. Words spoken. Words sung. What is a word?” For all his undeniable intelligence, it doesn’t seem to occur to the author that the reader’s attention can’t be taken for granted.

A sometimes-gripping war memoir that loses its audience.