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Book Review: 'The Long Gray Line:The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966'

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(C) 2009 Picador Books In 1989, when Rick Atkinson was on a leave of absence from his job as   a staff writer at the Washington Post, Houghton Mifflin published his first work of military history, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of the West Point Class of 1966. Based on a series of interviews with three West Point graduates of the titular Class of ’66, The Long Gray Line earned rave reviews for its intimate and often painful account of a handful of American boys who entered the U.S. Military Academy, endured the brutal hazing and harsh discipline of cadet life, and graduated during the Johnson Administration’s rapid escalation of the Vietnam War. James Salter, the Post’s book critic at the time, hailed The Long Gray Line as being “enormously rich in detail and written with a novelist’s brilliance.” Another contemporary reviewer, writing in Business Week, called Atkinson’s first major work of military history “the best book out of Vietnam to date." Two decades