My Losing Season (41 page)

As Al wept again, I thought about Johnny Vaughan, a young man I had not seen in thirty-two years, a man who, like me, was no longer young. I thought about the remarkable generosity of his grand gesture and I know of no other story that reveals the powerful forces that bind the entire Citadel family to the wearing of the ring. The ring was sacramental to us, the great enfolding circle of gold that was the coded, mysterious symbol of our singularity, which carries all the wonder and oneness of our fire-tested tribe. By removing his Citadel ring and placing it on the POW Al Kroboth's finger, I believe Johnny Vaughan wrote his name into the history of my college.

The Vietnam War was never just theoretical with me. It is deeply personal. My father served two tours of duty there, and almost every Marine I knew growing up spent time doing battle against North Vietnam and the Vietcong insurgents. A number of those men returned to this country in body bags. Practically my entire class of 1967 left the graduation stage as a first step that would take them almost directly to the war in Vietnam. It was not until I started losing classmates that I began to grieve for boys that I knew well.

News of my classmates' deaths began to reach me as I taught psychology and government at Beaufort High School the year after my graduation. Bruce Welge, who defended more boys accused of honor violations than any of my classmates, was killed while leading his own Army platoon. Dick O'Keefe, who stopped me in the gutter in front of the Citadel chapel our plebe year to tell me that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, died in a plane crash on his final mission before returning to the States. With Fred Carter I had played outfield on the freshman baseball team and was sick when I heard his plane disappeared from the radar screen while on an attack mission. There were many others, and I hold the memories of these boys sacred. I feel the brief flame of each of them when I finger the letterings of their names as I move along the black marble on the majestic and terrible Wall in Washington that bears witness to their sacrifice. Their names scream out this question to me: “Did you do right by your country, Conroy? Did you do right by it?”

There is one Vietnam veteran's grave I will continue to visit until my death: Captain Joseph Wester Jones III, whose two daughters, Jessica and Melissa, I adopted when I married his widow, Barbara, in 1969. Throughout their childhood, I took the girls to visit their father's grave in Beaufort and would explain what all the inscriptions on his tombstone meant.

“What's the PH, Daddy?” Jessica would ask me.

“That means your father won the Purple Heart. Our country gives that to soldiers who get wounded defending their country.”

“What's KIA, Daddy?” Melissa would ask.

“That's the greatest honor that can be on the grave of any soldier, Melissa and Jessica. That means your father was killed in action while fighting for his country.”

On Memorial Day and Veterans Day, I make sure a rose is placed on West's grave. Frequently, I talk with him and let him know how his daughters are doing and where they are living and that Melissa's married the sweetest boy in the world and that his pretty granddaughter, Jessica's daughter, Elise, is doing well in school. I let him know that his girls are beautiful women now and that he would be proud as hell of them.

I met West's parents almost a year after Barbara and I married, and had no idea what to expect. Colonel Joe Jones was an Air Force pilot and his wife, Jean, was an exemplary military wife. Barbara's mother and father, also Air Force people, had hated me on sight, neither of them ever forgiving me for my antiwar sympathies. If the Joneses had spit in my face and said I was unworthy to raise their son's children, I would have understood perfectly. But the Joneses had a great surprise for me. With amazing generosity, they embraced me and folded me into their family. “Mom” and “Pap” Jones have been two of the most surprising and necessary friends of my adult life, and I admire them beyond all reckoning.

A few years ago, Mom and Pap spent a weekend with me at my home on Fripp Island. They insisted I take them on one of my “famous” tours of Beaufort. Showing off the incomparable beauty of Beaufort is one of the great joys of my life, and I do it with passion, quite well. But I got a surprise as I was ending my tour and took them to visit my mother's grave in the Beaufort National Cemetery. I had noticed the Joneses becoming uncharacteristically tense walking back to my car and did not speak as I drove over to their son's grave. Showing everyone where my girls' daddy is buried is always the last stop of my tour.

I did not realize my mistake until I got out of the car and approached West's grave. It never occurred to me that the death of their only son would be so unimaginably painful to the Joneses that they could never bring themselves to visit his gravesite. I had to catch Jean Jones as she leaned against my car, sobbing. Finally she said, “Thank you for knowing where our son's grave is, Pat. We haven't been back here since his burial.”

I turned and watched Joe Jones kneel by his son's grave and clean some debris from the grass. Then Colonel Jones stood at rigid attention and brought his hand up to salute. Colonel Jones, the man I call Pap, completed that lovely salute and said in a clear, commanding voice: “Well done, son. Well done.”

In the darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, I began to assess my role as citizen when my country called my name and I shot her the bird. Unlike the stupid boys who wrapped themselves in Vietcong flags and burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate against the war without flirting with treason or astonishingly bad taste, having come directly from the warrior culture of this country. But in the twenty-five years that have passed since South Vietnam fell, I have immersed myself in the study of totalitarianism in the unspeakable twentieth century. From
The Gulag Archipelago
to the works of Simone Weil to accounts of the unimaginable goose-stepping of the Third Reich across the borders of Germany, I have read the histories and commentaries and eyewitness accounts of those soul-killing events. Curious by nature, I have questioned survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and talked to Italians who told me tales of the Nazi occupation, to a Croat whose father had entertained Goering on his honeymoon, to partisans who had counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and to officers who had survived the disgraceful Bataan Death March. I read the newspaper reports during Pol Pot's shameless assault against his own people in Cambodia, and the rise of Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi of Libya. I have watched the fall of Communism in Russia and have a picture of my father pushing against the Berlin Wall during the time it was being torn down. Many times I have quizzed journalists who reported on wars in Bosnia, the Sudan, the Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Northern Ireland, Algeria—I have come to revere words like “democracy” and “freedom,” the right to vote, the incomprehensibly beautiful origins of my country, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I not see America's flaws? Of course I do. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. My country let me scream to my heart's content, the same country that produced both me and Al Kroboth.

Now, at this moment in New Jersey, I come to a conclusion about my actions as a young man when Vietnam was a dirty word to me. I wish that I had entered into the Marine Corps and led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my Marines well and that the Vietcong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with my men. From the day of my birth, I was programmed to enter the Marine Corps as a fighting man, but then my eyes locked onto the headlights of the sixties and took me far afield of the man I was supposed to be. Now I understand I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty. I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones, but lacked the courage to act on: America is a good enough country to die for even when she is wrong.

So I looked for some conclusion, a summation of this trip to my teammate's house. I wanted to come to the single right thing, a true thing that I may not like, but that I could live with as a man. After hearing Al Kroboth's story of his walk across Vietnam and his brutal imprisonment in the North, I found myself passing harrowing, remorseless judgment on myself. I had not turned out to be the man I had once envisioned myself to be. I thought I would be the kind of man that America could point to and say, “There. That's the guy. That's the one that got it right. The whole package. The one I can depend on.” It had never once occurred to me that I would find myself in the position I did on that night in Al Kroboth's house in Roselle, New Jersey: an American coward spending the night with an American hero.

         

A
T MY THIRTIETH HOMECOMING AT
T
HE
C
ITADEL
, my team reassembled itself in Charleston for our own personal reunion. Eleven of us met in the field house, toured our old locker room, looked around the recently restored Armory, then walked out and viewed the Friday-afternoon parade. As we were watching, Caldwell Warley, a recent graduate and my friend John Warley's eldest son, came up to me and said, “Conroy, I thought it was illegal for you to come on this campus. Didn't the legislature pass a law or something?”

That same Friday night, my team and I went to root for the opening basketball game of the Citadel Bulldogs. To further complicate the emotions of the gathering of my team, The Citadel was playing its first game against Francis Marion University, which had just hired my young cousin, Ed Conroy, as its head basketball coach. It was easy for the Conroy family to root against Francis Marion, but it was impossible for us not to want the very best for young Ed.

My father had driven down from Atlanta for both the team reunion and Cousin Ed's first game against his alma mater, where he had been a brilliant point guard twenty years after my Citadel career had ended. My aunt and uncle, Carol and Ed Sr., had flown in from Iowa with the same set of dual loyalties aflame in their psyches as the other members of the family. Even when I lived in Europe, it was a matter of honor for me to look up the scores of Citadel games before I read another entry in the
International Herald Tribune
.

My team sat in the stands beside the locker room where we had dressed for four years. We stood and cheered when the Bulldogs burst out to the court led by a seven-foot Russian kid whom the cadets called BRK, for Big Russian Kid. He was the first legitimate seven-footer the Citadel basketball team had ever recruited. There were not many cadets in the stands, which stood in stark contrast to our era when we could count on five hundred cadets to attend all of our games. We were told that the status of athletes had deteriorated badly since our time, and that the Corps resented the athletes with a bitterness that seemed almost incurable.

“How do they expect The Citadel to attract athletes if the Corps hates them and tries to run them out?” Bridges asked.

“They have to be rocks like we were,” Mohr said.

“They just don't make men the way they used to,” Barney said.

The wives groaned in a collective chorus. They had heard most of the stories of this star-crossed team, and now they would be able to put faces and stories together. My teammates had married beautiful, accomplished women, and the children they had helped raise would make America a better country.

“Where were you women when we really needed you? In 1967?” I asked the wives.

“We were out looking for
you
boys,” Kennedy's wife, Cynthia, said.

Francis Marion came out to the floor, and I stood to cheer my cousin Ed's entrance into the world as a head basketball coach. Ed walked over, and I went down to the court to embrace him. “This feels funny, Ed,” I said. “How's your team?”

“We'll give The Citadel a game,” he said. “I like some of my players a lot.”

“These guys are my team, Ed,” I yelled up into the stands to my teammates. “This is my cousin Ed, guys. This is the team from the history books—the one they all talk about. The Citadel powerhouse from the mid-sixties.”

“Conroy was full of shit even back then,” Cauthen said.

I was never happier to see a basketball game begin, but it was a bad omen when Francis Marion controlled the opening tip from our big center. Instantly my teammates smelled trouble for the Bulldogs as we whispered among ourselves that the Citadel team seemed listless and uninspired. The Citadel's coach, Pat Dennis, considered one of the young hotshots when he had taken on the job, was encountering the same difficulties as had the twenty-five head coaches who preceded him, with the notable exception of Norman Sloan. Though young and dedicated and gifted, Pat was trying to balance the exigencies of putting a winning team together with the expectations and pressures his players felt being part of a military college. Coaching at a military college is the hardest coaching job in America, and my team watched the effects of years of stress settle into the lines around Pat Dennis's eyes.

The game became a metaphor of Citadel basketball itself. We watched five Citadel men who were fighters, who would go to the wall for their college, and who would never quit or throw in the towel. They were kids just like we had been; they were cadets just like we had been. They were exhausted and in a kind of unnameable despair, and they looked like they did not think they were supposed to win, just like us.

My cousin Ed proved that night that he was a coach to be reckoned with. The Citadel was favored to win against Francis Marion, but Ed's team was playing as though they had not received that news bulletin. My cousin had infused his team with his own easy confidence. The exhaustion and the malaise that had plagued our team hit this Citadel team in the middle of the second half. They made a late run, but Francis Marion got the win. Pat Dennis and his players looked stricken as they made their way off the court, and in the stands, my teammates and I hurt for them, having once walked in their shoes.