Literary whirl provides a storybook romance

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to know they were smoking dope at Ft. Bragg."

Truscott said he chose his homosex ual murder theme not because he knew a great many homosexuals at the academy, but because, "by necessity the sexual element of power exercised among men in an all-male society like this is homosexual,

"I knew of only three instances of guys getting kicked out of the academy for being gay," he said, "and only one was in my class. They get medically discharged, to save the academy any embarrassment."

What did his father, Lucian K. Truscott III, think of the book?

"He loved it," Truscott replied. "There are things about the book that disturbed him. It always pains people to read that venerable institutions are fallible and full of corruption. But he told me that as disturbed as some of these older Army men are, they can't deny the truth of the book."

Truscott said he began his writing career during his sophomore year at West Point by writing what he calls “conservative, right-wing letters to the Village Voice." The newspaper began printing his letters regularly, "and I was hooked," Truscott said.

"I used to write six or seven letters to people every night," he recalled. One of his letters, about the "forced hippie happiness" he observed one Christmas at the Electric Circus discotheque in the East Village, wound up as a front-page article in the paper..

Truscott, who ranked 658th out of 800 cadets in his class (“I didn't study, I wrote letters") was involved in controversies throughout his military career.

In 1969 he was one of four cadets disciplined for using a telephone credit card number that they were told belonged to the radical Students for a Democratic Society.

"I got caught for $600," Truscott said. "I didn't see anything wrong in having the SDS pay for my long-distance calls."

After graduating from West Point, Truscott was sent to Ft. Carson, Colo., where he continued to write, although his articles by then had to be approved by a military censor for security reasons. After he submitted articles about heroin addiction at Ft. Carson (he admitted to having smoked marijuana in one of them) and about what he considered to be an illegal court-martial procedure for soldiers who had gone AWOL, he lost both his platoon and his security clearance.

Vietnam, to the forward areas, basically to kill me," he said. "I was really hotheaded and didn't know what to do. It was 1970, with Kent State, and everything was maniacal. I was uncomfortable about going to Vietnam and leading men in combat, because tactically, it was an atrocious mess."

Eventually, Truscott said, the Army began "administrative elimination proceedings" against him.

"As a result, I resigned 13 months after I went in," he said. "I got a general discharge under other than honorable conditions, generally known as a 'bad discharge.'

He hopped in his car, drove straight to New York and has been writing ever since. His politics gradually shifted leftward over the years, he said, and he is now an independent Democrat.

Truscott met Miss Troy at a party in his loft in 1975. She said she thought he was awfully gruff, and they didn't start dating until 1977, when she was beginning her now two-year-old project to revive the irreverent fashion magazine, Rags.

Miss Troy said that in putting together her "Cheap Chic Update," she had excluded many of the "extreme styles that scared people" in the first edition. "I made it more oriented to the "They threatened to send me to working woman," she said.