The Lords of Discipline (2 page)

My mother is a different case. As lovely a woman as I have ever seen, bred and nurtured like a gardenia, she has always seemed somehow odorless and sexless to me, yet viscerally seductive in the manner of Southern women, that taloned species who speak with restrained and self-effacing drawls, fill a room with elegance and vulnerability, move with the grace of wind-tilted cane, and rule their families with a secret pact of steel. The sweetness of Southern women often conceals the secret deadliness of snakes. It has helped them survive the impervious tyranny of Southern men more comfortable with a myth than a flesh-and-blood woman.

It took me years to spot the howitzers in my mother’s eyes and many more to understand why they were there. Because of my father, my childhood was a long march of fear; my mother’s dispassionate assent to his authority took me longer to discover. She won my everlasting love by wading fearlessly into battle with my father whenever he abused me. For years I looked at her uncritically. But I learned something in my long earnest study of my mother. The adversary who is truly formidable is the one who works within the fortress walls, singing pleasant songs while licking honey off knives. It was my mother who encouraged me to keep my promise to attend the Institute. It was my mother who made me stay. Because she was a Southern wife, my domination by things totalitarian did not end when my father died, weighing one hundred pounds less than he had in his prime. Her severity was soft, but severity nonetheless, for she was a product of the South as much as I was. My father’s discipline was harsh and unmistakable; the discipline of my mother disguised itself in love and tenderness and often held far greater terrors. I am always writing revisionist histories of my mother. But because I needed to love her and love her deeply, her strafing runs against me brought on surrender almost immediately. I was all white flags and trembling fingers signing treaties and giving up territories to her. She, a Southern lady, had raised me to be a Southern gentleman, and that made us both foreigners in my father’s house. In the lock step of my nineteenth year I entered Carolina Military Institute. I did it because of my mother. She and I agreed it was because of my father. A lifetime of practice had taught us to blame everything on him. My father had become the manager of Belk’s, but he never could lure me from behind the perfume counter.

But in the end, the Institute was my choice and my responsibility It, too, became part of my definition. My instincts were those of sheep, lemmings, and herring. I trundled along with the herd on the course of least resistance. My parents had trained me exquisitely in the fine art of obedience. Because I was Southern, the military school seemed like the place for a final honing, the polishing of the rough spots. I would emerge glossy and shiny from the Institute as a man to serve my country in any way I could, but with absolute devotion and forthrightness. A Southern man is incomplete without a tenure under military rule. I am not an incomplete Southern man. I am simply damaged goods, like all the rest of them.

At first, I thought I had wasted my college years, but I was wrong. The Institute was the most valuable experience I have ever had or will have. I believe it did bring me into manhood: The Institute taught me about the kind of man I did not want to be. Through rigorous harshness, I became soft and learned to trust that softness. Through the distorted vision of that long schizophrenia, I became clear-sighted. Under its system, a guerrilla was born inside me, and when the other boys rushed to embrace the canons of the Institute, I took to the hills.

Whenever I look at photographs of myself in the cadet days, I stare into the immobile face of a stranger. His name is mine and his face seems distantly related, but I cannot reconcile the look of him. The frozen, unconvincing smile is an expression of almost incomprehensible melancholy. I feel compassion and unspeakable love for this thin, fearful ancestor. I honor the courage he did not know he possessed. For four years he was afraid. Yet he remained. A lifetime in a Southern family negated any possibility that he could resign from the school under any conditions other than unequivocal disgrace. Yet I know what he did and what he said, how he felt and how he survived. I relive his journey in dreams and nightmares and in returns to the city of Charleston. He haunts me and remains a stranger. Once while they were doing pushups on a shower-room floor, a classmate, too exhausted to turn his head, threw up on him. The upperclassmen made all the freshmen roll in the vomit of their classmate until nothing was left on the fetid tiles. He remembered the moment often, not because of his disgust or humiliation, but because it was then that he had the first premonition that someday he would tell his story, tell what it was like to be at the Institute, an eyewitness report on the contours and lineaments of discipline. Amidst the dark hearts of the boys around him, he felt a magnificent radiance. He would roll in vomit again, but the next time the symbolism of the act would be clear to him. This was the story he would tell: At the Institute the making of men was a kind of grotesque artistry.

Yet I am a product of this artistry. And I have a need to bear witness to what I saw there. I want to tell you how it was. I want precision. I want a murderous, stunning truthfulness. I want to find my own singular voice for the first time. I want you to understand why I hate the school with all my power and passion. Then I want you to forgive me for loving the school. Some of the boys of the Institute and the men who are her sons will hate me for the rest of their lives. But that will be all right. You see, I wear the ring.

Part I

THE CADRE

S
EPTEMBER
1966

Chapter One

W
hen I crossed the Ashley River my senior year in my gray 1959 Chevrolet, I was returning with confidence and even joy. I’m a senior now, I thought, looking to my right and seeing the restrained chaste skyline of Charleston again. The gentleness and purity of that skyline had always pleased me. A fleet of small sailboats struggled toward a buoy in the windless river, trapped like pale months in the clear amber of late afternoon. Then I looked to my left and saw, upriver, the white battlements and parapets of Carolina Military Institute, as stolid and immovable in reality as in memory. The view to the left no longer caused me to shudder involuntarily as it had the first year. No longer was I returning to the cold, inimical eyes of the cadre. Now the cold eyes were mine and those of my classmates, and I felt only the approaching freedom that would come when I graduated in June. After a long childhood with an unbenign father and four years at the Institute, I was looking forward to that day of release when I would no longer be subject to the fixed, irresistible tenets of martial law, that hour when I would be presented with my discharge papers and could walk without cadences for the first time.

I was returning early with the training cadre in the third week of August. It was 1966, the war in Vietnam was gradually escalating, and Charleston had never looked so beautiful, so untouchable, or so completely mine. Yet there was an oddity about my presence on campus at this early date. I would be the only cadet private in the barracks during that week when the cadre would prepare to train the incoming freshmen. The cadre was composed of the highest-ranking cadet officers and non-coms in the corps of cadets. To them fell the serious responsibility of teaching the freshmen the cheerless rudiments of the fourth-class system during plebe week. The cadre was a diminutive regiment of the elite, chosen for their leadership, their military sharpness, their devotion to duty, their ambition, and their unquestioning, uncomplicated belief in the system.

I had not done well militarily at the Institute. As an embodiment of conscious slovenliness, I had been a private for four consecutive years, and my classmates, demonstrating remarkable powers of discrimination, had consistently placed me near the bottom of my class. I was barely cadet material, and no one, including me, ever considered the possibility of my inclusion on the cadre.

But in my junior year, the cadets of fourth battalion had surprised both me and the Commandant’s Department by selecting me as a member of the honor court, a tribunal of twenty-one cadets known for their integrity, sobriety, and honesty. I may not have worn a uniform well, but I was chock full of all that other stuff. It was the grim, excruciating duty of the honor court to judge the guilt or innocence of their peers accused of lying, stealing, cheating, or of tolerating those who did. Those found guilty of an honor violation were drummed out of the Corps in a dark ceremony of expatriation that had a remorseless medieval splendor about it. Once I had seen my first drumming-out, it removed any temptation I might have had to challenge the laws of the honor code. The members of the court further complicated my life by selecting me as its vice chairman, a singularly indecipherable act that caused me a great deal of consternation, since I did not even understand my election to that cold jury whose specialty was the killing off of a boy’s college career. By a process of unnatural selection, I had become one of those who could summon the Corps and that fearful squad of drummers for the ceremony of exile. Since I was vice chairman of the court, the Commandant’s Department had ordered me to report two weeks before the arrival of the regular Corps. In my senior year, irony had once again gained a foothold in my life, and I was a member of the training cadre. Traditionally, the chairman and vice chairman explained the rules and nuances of the honor system to the regiment’s newest recruits. Traditionally, the vice chairman had always been a cadet officer, but even at the Institute tradition could not always be served. Both tradition and irony have their own system of circulation, their own sense of mystery and surprise.

I did not mind coming back for cadre. Since my only job was to introduce the freshmen to the pitfalls and intricacies of honor, I was going to provide the freshmen with their link to the family of man. Piety comes easily to me. I planned to make them laugh during the hour they were marched into my presence, to crack a few jokes, tell them about my own plebe year, let them relax, and if any of them wanted to, catch up on the sleep they were missing in the barracks. The residue of that long, sanctioned nightmare was still with me, and I wanted to tell these freshmen truthfully that no matter how much time had elapsed since that first day at the Institute, the one truth the system had taught me was this: A part of me would always be a plebe.

I pulled my car through the Gates of Legrand and waited for the sergeant of the guard to wave me through. He was conferring with the Cadet Officer of the Guard, who looked up and recognized me.

“McLean, you load,” Cain Gilbreath said, his eighteen-inch neck protruding from his gray cotton uniform shirt.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said, “but aren’t you a full-fledged Institute man? My, but you’re a handsome, stalwart fellow. My country will always be safe with men such as you.”

Cain walked up to my car, put his gloved hand against the car, and said, “There was a rumor you’d been killed in an auto wreck. The whole campus is celebrating. How was your summer, Will?”

“Fine, Cain. How’d you pull guard duty so early?”

“Just lucky. Do you have religious beliefs against washing this car?” he asked, withdrawing his white glove from the hood. “By the way, the Bear’s looking for you.”

“What for?”

“I think he wants to make you regimental commander. How in the hell would I know? What do you think about the big news?”

“What big news?”

“The nigger.”

“That’s old news, and you know what I think about it.”

“Let’s have a debate.”

“Not now, Cain,” I said, “but let’s go out for a beer later on in the week.”

“I’m a varsity football player,” he said with a grin, his blue eyes flashing. “I’m not allowed to drink during the season.”

“How about next Thursday?”

“Fine. Good to see you, Will. I’ve missed trading insults with you.” I drove the car through the Gates of Legrand for my fourth and final year. I realized that the Institute was now a part of my identity. I was nine months away from being a native of this land.

Before I unloaded my luggage in the barracks, I took a leisurely ride down the Avenue of Remembrance, which ran past the library, the chapel, and Durrell Hall on the west side of the parade ground. The Avenue was named in honor of the epigram from Ecclesiastes that appeared above the chapel door: “Remember Now Thy Creator in the Days of Thy Youth.” When I first saw the unadorned architecture of the Institute, I thought it was unrelievedly ugly. But it had slowly grown on me. The beauty of the campus, an acquired taste, certainly, lay in its stalwart understatement, its unapologetic capitulation to the supremacy of line over color, to the artistry of repetition, and the lyrics of a scrupulous unsentimental vision. The four barracks and all the main academic buildings on campus faced inward toward the parade ground, a vast luxurious greensward trimmed like the fairway of an exclusive golf course. The perfume of freshly mown grass hung over the campus throughout much of the year. Instruments of war decorated the four corners of the parade ground: a Sherman tank, a Marine landing craft, a Jupiter missile, and an Air Force Sabre jet. Significantly, all of these pretty decorations were obsolete and anachronistic when placed in reverent perpetuity on campus. The campus looked as though a squad of thin, humorless colonels had designed it. At the Institute, there was no ostentation of curve, no vagueness of definition, no blurring of order. There was a perfect, almost heartbreaking, congruence to its furious orthodoxy. To an unromantic eye, the Institute had the look of a Spanish prison or a fortress beleaguered not by an invading force but by the more threatening anarchy of the twentieth century buzzing insensately outside the Gates of Legrand.