The Lords of Discipline (13 page)

Yet even before I came to the Institute I knew I could not be an aviator, despite my promise to my father. The vision in my right eye began to go bad in my final year in high school, and aviators have perfect eyes. It was the first absolute proof that I saw the world differently from my father, and by extension, from all aviators and Marines. When I took another eye test at the Institute, hoping to get a waiver on the requirement for 20/20 vision, the doctors found an additional flaw: color blindness of the red-green variety. It was further proof that I looked upon the world differently from others.

Later I would think of this myopia and color blindness as my salvation from a predestined course. The black, horn-rimmed glasses that I wore for driving were the first signal that my destiny was not inalterably preordained. It was the beginning of a long, convoluted crystallization that would prevent me from serving in Vietnam. At first it had nothing to do with the war itself; I thought it had to do with my not being able to fly. Because of my father’s legendary heroism on Iwo Jima, I did not want to be a grunt. Nor did I want to die in a country of whose troubled existence I had only so recently learned. But in the committed, engaged milieu of the Institute, my decision not to enter the military was looked upon with alarm by both cadets and the administration. Because there was a war going on and because the Institute was losing a number of its graduates each month, my refusal to sign an Army contract my junior year was seen as a betrayal of the Institute and an act of minor sedition against my country.

The Institute took a remarkably proprietary attitude about the war. At first, the war stimulated enrollment and conferred a sense of mission on the school, a stature and an eminence it did not enjoy during those rare times when the United States was not trading the blood of its sons for the blood of other, darker, sons. Nothing made the college prouder than the death of a graduate in combat. We kept a tally of those fallen heroes and felt that we were in direct competition with the service academies as to who would have the most graduates killed in Vietnam. Careful records were kept, and when Captain David Foxworth Johnson was killed while leading a night patrol in October of 1966, we pulled ahead of West Point for the first time. When the Regimental Adjutant announced this fact, the mess hall ignited in a spontaneous chant from the Corps, “We’re Number One. We’re Number One. We’re Number One.” It was done with the highly oxygenated, disingenuous, high-humored esprit of boys still young enough to laugh at death. The black, grisly humor of the barracks even viewed the death of heroes with a gruff and vigorous irreverence. Until we began to recognize the names of the graduates killed, until we began to hear the names of our friends included on the fatality lists. Then the war became ugly and serious; then, and only then, did it become real.

Yet even then humor remained the one legitimate response to diffuse the horror of those weekly reports from the front. Often it would appear as graffiti on latrine walls. One could trace the political and sociological history of the Institute by collecting the most representative and angrily comic examples of graffiti from its latrines.

In 1966 most of the graffiti were partisan editorials about the war in Vietnam. One grouping was a series of suggestions for ways to end the war: train packs of piranhas to swim up North Vietnamese rivers and chow down on anything with slanty eyes and a rice base; invite the leaders of North Vietnam, China, and Russia to America for peace talks and make them eat in the Institute mess hall—they’d all be dead in forty-eight hours; parachute the Bear into Hanoi alone—give him a day or two to rack ass and shape the place up; parachute John Alexander into Hanoi—he’d be such a pain in the ass the North Vietnamese would voluntarily leave Hanoi.

Beneath this series of proposals scribbled in an angry, almost illegible prose was this sentence:
You chicken shit fucks, how dare you make fun of the war when our boys are getting it every fucking day.

But even this was not the final word. Even this furious anonymous cadet had merited a response:
Big deal, hero
—
I’m getting it from Third Battalion Mary every fucking day.

The latrine walls became a battleground between cadets who wanted the war treated with reverence and those who insisted on treating it with skepticism, with the Corps’s supernatural gift for reducing sacred topics to absurdity. In the Corps that often was an act of reverence in itself.

In 1964 they began to hang the portraits of graduates killed in Vietnam in the library. This was a commendable idea in the early stages of the war, but by 1966 the bottom floor of the library was a depressing gallery of toothy, clean-cut young men cut down in various horrible ways before they had reached their twenty-fifth birthdays. The librarian discovered that the cadets had begun to gravitate to the second floor, so as to study in an area not haunted by those sweet doomed faces who had left the Corps only a brief time ago. The cadets began calling the library’s first floor “the body bag.” When the librarian asked the General for funds to build a special addition on the library to house the portraits, word was in the barracks that afternoon that the librarian had requested a building the size of a gymnasium as the only structure large enough to handle the number of projected fatalities from the war. The Institute was doing its job well and preparing its two thousand sons in the barracks to die prettily for their country. And there was this splendid reward for dying: You got your portrait in the library.

During those four years in Charleston we wore the outline of Vietnam etched indelibly on our consciousness. In military science class, we followed battles, skirmishes, and troop movements; we planned imaginary landings of assault troops near Haiphong, envelopments of Hanoi, the mining of rivers, and the limited use of nuclear warheads. So often did I study the map of Vietnam that I retained the image of its shape while dreaming. But I did not dream of maps. I saw myself in a twisted coffin shaped like Vietnam. My body was broken and fitted into the grotesque shape of the coffin, and there were maggots swarming beneath the lids of my decomposing eyeballs as an artist made a preliminary sketch for my portrait that would hang in the Institute’s library. Almost all cadets, no matter how irreverently they referred to the war, were looking forward to leading troops into battle—it was the
grand guignol
of our generation, the testing ground of valor—and the collective eyes of the Corps were turned in an eagergaze toward Asia with all the blind irrational instincts of rutting boys, as new portraits began to arrive at the library each month, and as we began to recognize the faces in the portraits. I do not remember a single day of my college career when we did not discuss the war. But because we were at a military college, the war became an article of religious faith and to question it was an unforgivable blasphemy. We did not receive a college education at the Institute, we received an indoctrination, and all our courses were designed to make us malleable, unimaginative, uninquisitive citizens of the republic, impregnable to ideas—or thought—unsanctioned by authority. We learned to be safe; we learned to be Americans. Many of us learned too much and many too little, and far too many of us ended up on the walls of the library.

The entire design of our education at the Institute was the creation of the citizen soldier, a moral amphibian who could navigate both the civilian and the military worlds with equal facility. It demanded a limitless conformity from its sons, and we concurred blindly. We spent our four years as passionate true believers, catechists of our harsh and spiritually arctic milieu, studying, drilling, arguing in the barracks, cleaning our rooms, shining our shoes, writing on the latrine walls, writing papers, breaking down our rifles, and missing the point. The Institute was making us stupid; irretrievably, tragically, and infinitely stupid.

I did not know this when I was a cadet; this is the accumulated bitterness of an older man obsessed by memory. At that time I only had a glimmer of this intuition. At that time I only knew that I did not see things exactly as my classmates did. Something was different about me, and I suffered because of that difference. But I did know this: In my senior year I was beginning to learn how to discriminate between an idea that was for me and one that was for all the rest. And I was beginning to understand in a visceral inchoate way that every single thing I had been taught or had learned on my own since I was a child contained the elements of a lie. The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest.

I was reading the
News and Courier
on the Thursday morning before our first basketball game with Auburn. I had just read Lord Ashley Cooper’s column about his hatred of okra in any form, fried, boiled, baked, or in a gumbo, when I came across a small article about the Institute. General Durrell had announced that the Institute, attuned to the needs of the military, would begin teaching courses in the Vietnamese language and the history of Southeast Asia the following semester. I read one of the General’s quotes to my roommates. “We will need alumni who can interrogate enemy prisoners with dispatch,” the General had said.

“Can you see me interrogating some Vietcong bastard after I take that course?” I asked my roommates while putting the paper down on my desk.

“I wouldn’t interrogate nobody,” Pig said matter-of-factly. “I’d just cut their fucking balls off. It’s an international language.”

“Pig, why don’t you go out and organize an International Committee for Idjits?” Mark said.

“You almost flunked French, Will,” Tradd said. “So you know you aren’t going to take any silly course in the Vietnamese language.”

“Man, I’m a born interrogator,” I disagreed. “I’ll prove it to you. Tradd, you sit in that chair and pretend you’re the meanest fucking Vietcong who ever lived. Good. Put your hands behind your back like you were tied up. Now, here’s the scene,” I said, speaking directly to Pig and Mark, ignoring the prisoner. “This important Vietcong prisoner is brought to my tent. He’s a tiny little fucker. He’s been wounded in a fire fight and he knows Ho Chi Minh personally. We’ve got to extract information from him. So the brass calls for the best master of the Vietnamese language in the whole fucking army, Colonel Will McLean, who has risen in the ranks faster than anyone in the history of the American military.”

“Oh, sure, Will,” Tradd groaned.

“Fat chance, Toecheese,” Pig chimed in.

“Riii-gght,” Mark added.

I ignored them and continued, “Will is a changed man after graduating from the Institute and spending two years in the jungle fighting gooks and acting with incredible courage. Who wouldn’t be changed after winning two Congressional Medals of Honor and having personally captured General Giap after a firefight on the outskirts of Hanoi? The men in his outfit look upon Will as his roommates in college did, not as simply the greatest man who ever lived . . . no, that does not adequately describe their adoration of him. They look upon him quite simply as a god, a god among men. They affectionately refer to him as Colonel Will, that fighting fucking fool.”

Tradd said, “They affectionately refer to him as that poor boy who lost his mind and his marbles soon after he graduated from the Institute.”

“They call him Colonel Toecheese,” Pig muttered, looking at me strangely.

“The Vietcong captive thinks he has been led before a torturer. He looks into McLean’s cold steely eyes and is completely cowed. Though he has fought with the Cong for twenty years, has faced platoons of Green Berets, has endured the terror of napalm and B-52 raids, he has never known the true meaning of fear until he stares trembling into McLean’s eyes. McLean looks at him like he is looking at a urine sample,” I said, leaning forward and staring malignantly into Tradds eyes.

“Trained by professors at the Institute,” I continued, my nose now an inch from Tradd’s, “in the secret nuances of the Vietnamese language, McLean leans down close to the prisoner and begins the interrogation with these subtle, well-chosen words: ‘Fuck you, Cong.’ Naturally, the prisoner is taken aback. But McLean relentlessly presses ahead with the questioning. ‘Have you ever eaten a Hershey bar? Have you ever owned a Chrysler or a Chevrolet? Have you “ever seen
Gone with the Wind?
Have you ever got a hard-on looking at pictures of Marilyn Monroe?’ I’m confusing him with this line of questioning. My accent is so perfect he thinks I was born next door to him in Hue. I’ve got him off guard—then, quick as a flash, I show him my Institute ring and he panics, he flips out, he goes fucking bimbo. He realizes that he is not being questioned by any ordinary man. He’s being questioned by a full-fledged Institute Man, a goddam bona fide, Grade-A, government-inspected, sterling-silver Whole Man. He breaks down completely when I tell him that we’ve enrolled him as a knob at the Institute and he’s going to have to go through the plebe system. Colonel Will, that fightin’ fuckin’ fool, has done it again. The prisoner gives me the telephone number of Ho Chi Minh’s daughter. I call her up for a date. When we go out, she goes wild with lust at the sight of an Institute man’s body. We get married and a peace treaty is signed. All because the Institute offered a course in the Vietnamese language.”

“Are you really going to take that course, Will?” Tradd asked.

“Hell no,” I answered. “I’m not going to have anything to do with that goddam country.”

“You didn’t hear the news this morning, did you, Will?” Pig said.

“What news?”

“Rodney Harris got killed in Vietnam last week.”

“Hey, I’m sorry, Pig. I know you two were good friends.”

“He was on the wrestling team with me. We used to work out together, get in shape together. I don’t feel like joking about Nam the day I hear about my buddy getting wasted. OK?”

“You should have stopped me, Pig,” I said. “I didn’t know about Rodney. There are so many casualties over there now that you need a slide rule to keep up with them.”