From Cadet to Casualty : THE LONG GRAY LINE: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966 <i> by Rick Atkinson (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95; 592 pp.) </i>

After 1966--if one had to affix a date to it--the American Center did not hold. The political and social culture of the country began to boil and decompose. Applied reason, idealistic aspiration, “energy of will”--all were discredited as sources of political fuel and national guidance. The estrangement of the generations began in deadly rather than amused earnest; we swirled and sank helplessly into the black maw of Vietnam; we assassinated our leaders, burnt our campuses, fought and rioted in Watts, Detroit, Newark.

Eighteen months after having been told by John F. Kennedy to ask not what their country could do for them, 800 teen-age boys arrived at West Point, plebe members of the new Class of 1966. Four years hence, 579 were graduated. Less than five years later, 30 had been killed in Vietnam, 100 wounded, and more than a third had become civilians, most of them savagely disillusioned of their 1962 dreams.

Rick Atkinson’s narrative is, therefore, two books in one: a chronicle of the “American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966,” and also a long, if uneven, account of the events, forces, political decisions and changing national ambitions and values that determined the character of that journey.

Americans, runs the cliche, are ambivalent in their feelings about their military establishment. It is their heritage and it is lodged in the language of the Constitution, i.e. “to raise an Army.” That which is fundamental to a successful Army seems most hateful to Americans: that form of discipline in which one must do exactly as told. Nonetheless, the country admires West Point--sometimes with a chilly reluctance, sometimes as a sister might love and admire a brother entering the priesthood. Enrollment at the academy has been the culmination of many thousands of fervent ambitions and journeys, typically from towns and farms, from military families and that portion of our social demography that does not produce lawyers, bankers, architects.

The academy, the author shows us, evinces a “rage for order,” and its quintessential alumnus, in this century at least, Douglas MacArthur, “articulated an idealism that will always attract and hold the feverish admiration, and loyalty, of certain young men--and (since 1976) women. To subsume your talent and ambition in a great national enterprise, to answer a vocation, is to perform every day for a long career an act that is essentially sacral.”

Many scenes in “The Long Gray Line” are laid in the Cadet Chapel or at the academy cemetery. Indeed, if Atkinson uses the 1966 class’ journey as a kind of metaphor for the experience of a whole generation of Americans who came of age in the early 1960s, he also uses its religious experiences, creeds, ceremonies, services, psalms, prayers, funerals, even chapel weddings, as metaphors for the desperately willed commitments, the sometimes forced faiths, of the cadets and young officers, in those things they pray or assume may be true.

The class leaves West Point “eager to fight,” with one lieutenant saying, “I look forward to going to Vietnam. Every American has a definite commitment to go to Vietnam to do his part.” Hubert Humphrey, of all people, exhorts the commencement audience: “We must not falter; we must not be deterred.”

But the country did falter. And thwarted aspirations and expectations are most savagely disillusioning to believers who force themselves, too young, to believe. For every classmate’s funeral there were, only a year or two later, the traumatic resignations of six or seven more. Too few of those who survived the war saw its purposes plainly, such as they were, and too few of these thought them worthy ones. The author follows several men from enrollment to the present, and their lives after military service typically remain ardent quests for meaning in their work, for the reassurance once provided for them by a Spartan, if nourishing, mother.

Perhaps the two missions of West Point are fundamentally irrevocable: to train and to educate young people to serve as army officers. You are trained to do what you are told; you are educated to question the teller and his order, and when he is discredited, as Vietnam discredited political and military authority, one of your alternatives is resignation from the army.

“The Long Gray Line” is a remarkable and sustained effort, but it is--another paradox, perhaps--much better, in texture, conviction, and credibility, the closer it stays to the source of the story: West Point itself, still bravely and ceaselessly calling itself to account for all it does and is. Few institutions are as hard on themselves as is the Military Academy: When there is a cheating scandal, when the football team loses, when hundreds of officers of the same class resign their commissions, West Point--most admirably--asks, “What are we doing wrong?”

So long as it keeps asking, the answer--given its ultimate mission, to prepare citizens to be career army officers--is, very little.