The Lords of Discipline (12 page)

“Sir?” he asked.

“Speak freely, Pearce.”

“What group do you belong to, sir?”

“We are called the nigger-lovers, Pearce.”

He smiled.

“Glad you’ve got a sense of humor, dumbhead. You’re going to need it. Good luck and welcome to the most miserable year in your entire life. Just do what they tell you and show lots of enthusiasm. If they’re killing you and you show lots of enthusiasm, they think it’s a sign of a wonderful attitude. You’ve got to change the expression in your eyes, Pearce. That’s going to hurt you. It’s the guys who looked pissed off that they try to break. I speak from experience, friend. Be hearing from you.”

“I hope not, sir.”

“Me, too, Pearce. By the way, how does it feel to be the dumbest fucking nigger in the world?”

“Not so good right now, sir.”

“That’s how I felt my knob year. Like the dumbest white boy, like the stupidest goddam cracker that ever lived. The funny thing was, Pearce, I was right. Absolutely right. Now I’m going to scream at you and order you up to your room. We’ve got to make this look official. Get ready for McLean, the assracker. You better fly to your room, dumbhead,” I screamed into Pearce’s ear.

Pearce turned and sprinted for the E Company stairwell on the first division. “I said move, boy, move. Move. Move. Move,” I chanted as he moved rapidly up the stairs, the sweat staining his gray cotton field shirt from his underarm to his waist.

Chapter Nine

T
hat afternoon I sat on the auditorium stage of Durrell Hall watching the plebes filing down the long rows of folding chairs minutes before I would address them on the Institute’s honor system. The shouts of cadremen rang through the hall, and the plebes, bovine and disoriented, moved without animation in a blind, stunned herd toward their seats. The smell of them was overpowering. It was easy to loathe a group that smelled so horrible.

Gauldin Grace, the chairman of the honor committee, rose to deliver a brief synoptic history of the honor system at the Institute. His voice, fervent and evangelical, carried with it an absolute conviction of the rectitude and efficacy of a society ruled by honor; it quavered slightly and conveyed the earnestness and gentle decency of the speaker. In his simplicity and radiant faith in all systems of order, Gauldin represented to me the embodiment of the Institute man. Unimaginative but virtuous, unflamboyant but solid, he was good in the religious sense of that oft-abused, word. He embraced the honor code as his personal catechism, and there was nothing ironic or incredulous in his solemn devotions to its service. When he introduced me to the freshmen, he listed my credentials and accomplishments at the Institute. It was an embarrassingly short introduction.

I rose and walked to the podium. Power flowed through my veins like a quicksilver intake of oxygen. When I spoke, my voice, magnified by the microphone, boomed out godlike over the hall. It was the phony, insincere voice I always use when I address assemblies. Today I was princely; today I was cadre.

“Good morning, gentlemen.”

“Good morning, sir,” they roared back.

“Gentlemen, my name is Will McLean and I’m a senior private in Romeo Company. This is my fourth year as a private at the Institute. You and I are the same rank. When the rest of the Corps returns next week, you’ll see other privates like me, but I’m your first glimpse of this strange, maligned breed of cadet life. Today, I would like to talk to you about honor.

“There are some wonderful things about this school, although it’s very hard for you to notice them right now. You are thinking, quite naturally, that you screwed up badly when you selected the Institute as your college. But the Institute has promised to make a man out of you and this Institute will do it.

“Gentlemen, I too entered the Institute as a spindly freshman. Like you, the cadre tortured, humiliated, beat, and otherwise abused me during my plebe year. They made me do pushups until I dropped, run the stairs until I couldn’t feel my legs, and hold my M-1 straight out until I couldn’t feel my arms. But at the end of the year when I looked into the mirror, I saw what the plebe system was all about. I had become an Institute man. I had a twenty-inch neck, legs like redwood trees, the temper of a piranha, and my IQ had dropped a hundred points. In other words, gentlemen, I had become the rock who stands confidently before you today.”

I could feel Gauldin’s rising disapproval blaze into life behind me as the laughter grew in volume. It made Gauldin ill to see a freshman smile. He had always opposed my militant flippancy about the plebe system, and I knew it would offend him deeply to see it directed at newly ordained aspirants to the invigorating rituals of that system. Laughter was the one unassailable survival technique of the plebe year, and one you would never learn from the cadre.

“Gentlemen,” I continued, “you do not understand what you’ve been going through in the past couple of days. It is as though the world has gone suddenly berserk, completely unraveled, taken leave of its senses, and someone has thrown you like meat to the wolves. I remember sitting as a freshman listening to the chairman and vice chairman of the honor court intoning very solemnly and pompously about the importance of honor and how you would be kicked out of school if you did not have it. I remember how the two cadets who spoke to me about honor that day seemed as mean and inhuman as all the rest of the cadre. I came away from plebe week with a very distorted view of honor. The men who told me about honor brutalized me in the barracks, and they did not seem to be honorable men to me.

“I later found out that they were men of high integrity. But I was confused by the relationship of honor to the plebe system. I never quite separated honor from the first traumatic week of life at the Institute. Honor was a concept of fear. This is how my cadre failed me during plebe week.”

I then told them in the clearest, simplest language possible the rules and pitfalls of the honor system as written and practiced by cadets of the Institute. I praised the uncompromising simplicity of the system. The cadet cannot lie, steal, or cheat, or tolerate anyone who does. I cited cases and gave illustrative examples from the past. Briefly, I recited the history of the honor system and compared it to the systems of other military academies. As I spoke, I began to feel rather foolish as I faced the inert artillery of their stunned, botanized gazes. Over and over again I repeated the word “honor,” until it became like a pulse beat of my speech. The abstraction defeated me, strangled me in its maddening inexpressibility. It was like describing the hierarchy of the Trinity or the language of phalaropes. I could feel myself struggle with a game and ardent inarticulateness as I tried to explain the concept of honor to the staggered, uncomprehending mass of boys who shivered in the air conditioning below me. I sounded like a minor character in a flawed and cheaply produced operetta who delivers charmingly absurd recitations that have no meaning.

The freshmen now listened to me with resolute grimness. They listened because they feared me as the moment’s appointed embodiment of the system. They had laughed at my jokes at the beginning of the speech, but their laughter was so joyless and forced that it depressed rather than elated me. They laughed because I was a member of the cadre, not because they thought I was a hoot. That hurt. I had made a minor career out of being a hoot. It was an odd feeling to be feared. And it was an even odder one to like it.

I ended my turgid, rambling, and painfully well-meaning address to the freshmen with a discussion of the final and most troubling aspect of the honor system.

“Gentlemen,” I said, and I must have used that word fifty times in that single hour, making it a strong runner-up to “honor” itself, “the last part of the code is the most difficult to live by. To turn in a friend, a classmate, a roommate, or an upperclassman for an honor violation is the most demanding and crucial part of the code. It is also the severest test of its efficacy, its credibility. But for this part of the code, the honor system would not work. I have often wondered if I were put to the test whether I could actually turn in a good friend of mine. I honestly don’t know. I have never been tested and hope I never am.

“But I will tell you a story that reminded me of the honor system. Several years ago in New York City a woman by the name of Kitty Genovese was beaten, raped, and stabbed to death in the New York City streets. It was later proven that at least thirty-eight people heard her cries for help, her screams, heard her begging the killer to spare her life. Not one of those thirty-eight people went to help her. Not one of those thirty-eight people called the police. Not one of them shouted at the murderer from their windows. Not one of them did anything. Anything at all. Kitty Genovese might as well have been raped and killed in the Gobi Desert for all the help she received from her fellow man. The most common excuse given by each of those thirty-eight people when they were later interviewed was that they did not want to get involved. A woman bled to death because no one wanted to get involved.

“The word
involved
caused me to think of the honor system. The Institute is a special environment that requires involvement. It’s not enough that you do not steal. The Institute demands that you do not tolerate other thieves in your midst. It says that the Corps is responsible for the administration of the code. It says that you are responsible for the actions not only of yourself, but also your neighbor. Because of your living under the code, we hope that other men and women can put their trust in you. If the Institute, indeed, is something special, then the code is the central fact of that specialness. The Institute does not give you a choice about whether you wish to be honorable or not. The code is imposed upon you for your four years at the Institute. It is the written moral manifesto of how you’ll behave. When you graduate, the code goes with you and the code lives as long as you live.

“You have chosen a strange school, gentlemen,” I said to the plebes but I no longer saw them and had the strange sensation of talking only to myself. “There is much good and much bad in this college. I think the honor system is good. It is the one thing I believe in with all my heart. I think the integrity of the Corps is good. And I know this: If Kitty Genovese had screamed outside of Number Four barracks instead of that street in New York City, she might have been seriously hurt in the stampede to murder her attacker. Gentlemen, from this moment until you withdraw or graduate from the Institute, you are subject to the Code.”

Chapter Ten

B
efore I came to Carolina Military Institute, I had never once heard of the obscure and thinly elongated country of Vietnam. But long before my senior year I became acutely aware of the distinct and extraordinary possibility that I might die in Vietnam for reasons that were rather unclear to me. Since I had never seen a Vietnamese in my life, it amazed me that somewhere, on the planet’s largest continent, lived an Oriental man, perhaps plowing with a team of oxen or digging an irrigation ditch on the green fringes of an impenetrable jungle, who might one day kill me.

The thought did not altogether displease me. It would have been odd indeed if I had not fallen victim to some of the more lurid fantasies of the military mythology. I even had moments of wanting to die heroically in battle to fulfill my father’s legacy or to prove the Institute wrong about my fitness as a cadet. When I was eighteen and nineteen there was some awful gravitational or lunar force within me that embraced the notion of a valiant death by fire. In my freshman year, I was so impressed and overwhelmed by a unit of Green Berets who came to the Institute to demonstrate the newest counterinsurgency techniques that I tried to enlist in their ranks that very day. A lantern-jawed sergeant talked me into staying until I graduated from the Institute because the Green Berets needed qualified officers and the pay was much better. The reprieve gave me three more years to consider myself in light of Asia, North America, duty to my country, duty to myself, and war. It gave me time to think, study, and ask questions; in other words, it gave me the time to obtain that most fascinating and life-changing of commodities—a college education. But I never forgot that I had once tried to sign up with the Green Berets. War is a religious conviction to an eighteen-year-old boy, and though it later became hard for me to relate to that boy, I had at least to acknowledge the sincerity of his passionate, blazing idealism and his total willingness to sacrifice his life for his country.

But the Institute changed me, slowly, imperceptibly, as any good college would. There was a lot of time to think in the barracks and to talk with classmates, a lot of time to change one’s mind. I did not view myself as the dangerous sort. I viewed myself quite artlessly as a prince among men, a real sweetheart, and my entrance into the masculine province of the Corps had only served to strengthen my conviction that I was at least as virtuous as the majority of my fellow human beings. I looked upon the Corps as a captive microcosm of the entire human race and thought if I could study them properly and learn all the secret rites and neuroses of the cadets, then in some profoundly inclusive way I could discover the most illuminating sanctities, dilemmas, and mysteries of the human spirit. As a soldier I would have learned much more about an aggrieved and singularly bewildered species, but by then due to the strangeness of our times, of Will McLean, born and bred to be a military man, had decided he would never be a military man. He had also resolved in his own mind, through beginning to believe in his own convictions, through his own slow unravelings of the great questions of his time, his own readings and interpretations of those readings, and his own colloquies and interrogations with his secret self, that he had no quarrel, absolutely none, with the Vietnamese.

I had originally planned to come to the Institute because I had wanted to become a fighter pilot. I wanted to be winged and silver and unseen in the dizzying heights of the stratosphere, where I would drop from the safety of cumulus and prey on enemy fleets and cities whose surprised citizens would speak not a single word I could comprehend. Nor would I even hear their cries of pain and death. Pilots are granted the luxury of not witnessing the results of their terrible passage, their rapacious encounters with earth; they are far removed from the carnage, grief, and destruction that their visitation inevitably brings to the targeted population. I wonder how many humans have died because sons wanted to prove themselves worthy of their fathers? I used to dream constantly of diving toward the earth, machine guns blazing, rockets streaking from beneath my wings, companies of enemy soldiers falling on their bellies in fearful adoration of my swift approach. This was the cyclical dream of the future aviator when the only wars I won were fought at night.