The Lords of Discipline (25 page)

I did not want to be like them.

That was what made me different from my classmates, and I soon began to feel isolated from them and some of them to be wary of me. Most of them had been fully aware of the severity of the plebe system when they chose the Institute, and they welcomed its testing of their fortitude. Many of them planned to make the military their life’s work. They had enrolled willingly at the Institute because of the system, not in spite of it. Their genuine enthusiasm contrasted starkly to my rejection of every indignity we suffered at the hands of the upperclassmen. To them, the excesses of the plebe system were salutary and character-building. Torture was simply an effective test of their bloom and vitality. It was the system and we had all agreed to abide by its laws. So I quit talking, even to my classmates, about my grievances against the system. I just kept my eyes open and tried to figure things out alone.

I saw that the plebe system was destroying the ability or the desire of the freshmen to use the word
I
.
I
was the one unforgivable obscenity, and the boys intrepid enough to hold fast to this extraordinary blasphemy found themselves excised from the body of the Corps with incredible swiftness. The Institute was a universe in love with the first person plural, the shout of the uniformed mob, which gave the school its fundamental identity, the source of its strength and invulnerability. The plebe system, then, infinitely reduced, was a grammarian’s war between two pronouns and, infinitely extended, contained the elements of the major war of the twentieth century. The person who could survive the plebe year and still use the word
I
was the most seasoned and indefatigable breed of survivor. He was a man to be reckoned with, perhaps a dangerous one. No doubt, he was a lonely one. I wanted to be that man in my class. I made that pact with myself and broke it time and time again, for I was a son of the South and I had grown up using the word
we
when I was referring only to myself. It takes a lot more effort to unlearn things than to learn them.

By October the plebe system had changed because the freshmen had changed. They had become inured—or accustomed, at least—to the shouts of the cadre. But when the harassment of the plebe system became familiar, it also became tedious. I thought that even I had become accustomed to being afraid, and I had learned enough about the psychology of the cadre to be immune to their cruelty. It would not be the last time I would be completely wrong about my relationship to the Institute.

My task was fear. Some freshmen lost their fear very quickly; others lost their fear when it was subsumed by their total, passionate faith in the system. But I want to tell you that I never lost any of my fear. I told myself I had, but I was lying to myself. I was humiliated by the discovery of my limitless capacity for terror, for nightmare.

The Coward, though I did not know it before I came to the Institute, had a long and honorable residence in my psyche. I say honorable because I learned to pay homage to this fearful resident within. At times I could overwhelm the Coward and beat him cringing back into the dark interior, but there were other times, when the cadre was in full cry, that he took full possession of the frontier behind my eyes. He occupied me often. He was a guest of the purest fire. Each time during my freshman year that I acted bravely, I was paying ultimate homage to my cowardice. I knew I had to hide my fear. If the cadre discovered it or sensed its undermining presence, then they would come for me and they would come united. Each week the cadre selected one or two freshmen they would run out in the next forty-eight hours. They had chosen twelve boys since Hell Night and all twelve had left school soon afterward. The process was called “The Taming.”

Few boys survived the Taming. It was the sport of breaking down plebes absolutely—to discover how much the boy could take before he was reduced to begging and to crawling, before he came completely apart. They broke you in their own time and their own way and they studied you carefully before they made their move. They usually chose the very weak. The boys selected to endure the most pressure of the system were always the most vulnerable and the least equipped to handle it. I was not one of the victims, at least not at first. I was not ugly or thin or obese or pimply. I did not limp or stutter or cry in front of them or lose my temper or pass out after doing twenty pushups. The victims were the very weakest and most sensitive among us, and each cadre member had his own particular victim whom he singled out as his own special project. My life appeared perfectly miserable to me, but what these boys suffered was worthy of epic poetry. And as those early days passed, the plebe system produced moments of magnificent courage among the victims. Some of them even survived the Taming.

I studied my masters with as much thoroughness as the system afforded. From observation and experience I knew which of them to avoid at all costs. Some of the cadre were basically harmless; some were even gentle, affable guys when you met them alone on campus. Some simply held the impartial, impersonal belief that the plebe system was a proven and effective method of turning boys into Institute men. But all of them required that we play the game. I had to learn the delicate and obsequious art form of being a plebe. The cadre was vigilant for the slightest sign of a bad attitude, of unchecked anger or frustration, or that sudden, desperate glazing in a freshman’s eyes just before he was ready to crack. They studied us as carefully as we studied them, but with more patience. Slowly, as the year progressed, they discovered what our severest weak points were, and they profited by their diligent attention. They would introduce the marked freshman to horrible situations outside of the framework of the system, and by watching him, they would learn what he was truly afraid of. Then they would use that knowledge callously, and with deadly intent. If they could not discover some central fear, they had a final trick: The whole cadre would come at you alone. Very few indeed could withstand the onslaught of twenty determined men.

The Taming took different forms. In the second week they discovered quite by accident that Graham Craig was afraid of heights. He was a hot-tempered boy from Greensboro who had won the undivided attention of the cadre by quitting the Institute and then returning two days later. The Taming began. Maccabee noticed that Craig could not bring himself to look at the quadrangle from the fourth division. Craig admitted to vertigo. They put him inside a mattress cover, threw it over the side of the fourth division, and tied it to the railing on the gallery, one hundred ten feet above the concrete. Disoriented, Craig struggled until his head popped out of the mattress cover. He fainted when he saw where he was, an act highly amusing to the upperclassmen. They let him spend the night hanging over the railing. He never looked out again. The bag never moved and Craig resigned the next day

Jeff Lieckweg feared snakes. He was from Cleveland and had never seen a snake alive until his squad sergeant, Muller, brought his pet boa constrictor with him when he inspected Lieckweg’s room one morning. The snake terrified him. Lieckweg could not keep his mouth shut, could not bring himself to stop answering the upperclassmen insolently. He always looked angry and he always was. That night they tied his hands behind his back and lowered him by a rope tied to his feet into an open elevator pit. As they lowered him into the shaft, they told him they had dropped twelve copperheads into the shaft that day. They suggested he lie perfectly still when he reached the bottom of the shaft and perhaps the snakes would not strike at him, perhaps they would not notice him. But it would be a shame if they lowered him on top of one or two of the snakes. That would be very bad, the cadre agreed. There were no snakes in the pit and Lieckweg never reached the bottom. He was screaming so loud halfway down that there was no need for any further taming and he left the barracks that night.

Masturbation was forbidden by the Blue Book. It may have been the most often violated law in history. But the cadre amused themselves by catching freshmen in the act of masturbating. Bill Agee, a fat, miserable boy from Fort Lauderdale, was caught masturbating every single night for two weeks. “I can’t help it. I can’t help it,” he would cry out to the upperclassmen. The cadre made him walk around the campus wearing one white glove. You could see Agee clear across campus, spot him instantly among five hundred other freshmen, and keep careful watch on his comings and goings. It was a very public humiliation and everyone on campus, including the faculty and the President’s wife, knew what the single white glove signified. Agee was degraded slowly, in degrees, and finally, long after he became the campus joke, he left R Company in tears. He was wearing one white glove when he walked out of the Gates of Legrand.

Rodney Aimar was a painfully thin, fragile boy from Anderson, South Carolina. He could not perform a single pushup when he arrived at the Institute. He could only do ten after a month of sustained harassment. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before they broke Rodney, but he proved surprisingly resilient. He seemed absolutely impervious to their screaming, and he showed no inclination to leave. In fact, he confessed to his classmates that there was nothing they could do to run him out. He had planned to come to the Institute since he was a little tyke. That was his phrase, “a little tyke.” He fully intended to stay. He also said you didn’t have to be able to do pushups to be tough. If you had it inside, you could take anything the cadre could dish out. That was before the cadre found out about Rodney Aimar and bugs. They let his classmates watch his Taming. They tied him naked to his rack, which they had pulled out onto the gallery where we were braced in a straight line to watch him. His frail body struggled against the ropes. None of us knew what they were going to do. Fox had gone to a bait farm and bought a thousand crickets. They emptied box after box of the crickets over the body of Rodney Aimar. They gagged him so his screams would not attract a tac officer or the Bear. On his face, on his genitals, on his chest, until his body almost disappeared beneath the swarm. We did not see Rodney Aimar after that night.

I
am not sure when I first heard the name of Bobby Bentley of Ocilla, Georgia, or when I became aware that the cadre had vowed to run him out of R Company by Thanksgiving. I heard his name often during plebe week, echoing along the galleries, a name shouted contemptuously by beardless corporals. Before I ever saw him I knew that they had selected him for the Taming. But Bobby Bentley was different from the rest. He refused to quit the Institute even under the most monstrous pressure. He was a study in courage I will never forget.

Later I would learn that many of the same boys who suffered most grievously in the plebe system became the most brutal and sadistic of upperclassmen. The Institute had allowed them to find the courage that was hidden within them. Beneath the fat and bone, beneath the terror, the blade of the system had hit upon an undiscovered vein of iron. The system had surprised and honored them by alerting them to the existence of an enormous interior strength and capacity for survival. I witnessed the magnificent courage of the weak and then watched them turn into the defiled images of their tormentors. But that happened to others; it did not happen to Bobby Bentley.

He was thin to the point of emaciation and looked as though his body had been assembled from the discarded produce of a vegetable garden: arms of celery, legs of asparagus, and spine of broccoli. But Bobby was not a physical weakling like Rodney Aimar. Bobby could do pushups all night long and hold his rifle straight out in front of him as long as any of us. His sin was a weakness of another variety. He had the unfortunate tendency during the height of sweat parties to urinate in his pants. This had happened once during plebe week, twice the next week, four times the next, until finally, he pissed in his pants every time an upperclassman screamed at him. Within a week he was the prime target for removal in R Company. The cadre swarmed all over him. They went to work on Bobby Bentley from Ocilla, Georgia, with a savagery that passed swiftly into legend. Even the most tolerant and easy-going members of the cadre recognized the fact that Bentley was an embarrassment to the integrity and efficacy of the system. He rapidly became a symbol to them, and it soon became a joke among the other companies that the R Company cadre could not run out a boy who pissed in his pants during every formation. It became a point of honor during the month of October that Bobby Bentley be removed from the Corps. The level of cruelty directed at this frail plebe was extraordinary, and there were boys who left our class because they could not stand to watch what the cadre was doing to him.

But there was something in Bentley the cadre had not reckoned with, something that we, his classmates, had not guessed. At some point during that first month, after pissing all over himself at each formation, after being humiliated beyond the limits of human decency and having drawn packs of upperclassmen who made it a sport to scream at Bobby Bentley and watch him foul himself—this plebe, in the middle of a most intense agony, made a simple, awesome decision. Bobby Bentley decided he was going to stay.

But the cadre could not allow someone afflicted in the manner of Bobby Bentley to survive the plebe system. If they could not run out someone like him, a boy who could not even control his bladder, then how could they strike fear in the hearts and minds of other marginal plebes? For Bobby was not only surviving the plebe system, he was surviving the Taming.

Beginning in September, there was a sweat party every night in that despised hour after dinner and before evening study period. Each night they made Bobby Bentley piss in his uniform pants. They put a bucket beside him in formation. They made him wear his raincoat on sunny days. They forced him to wear diapers and rubber pants, made him come to formation in a bathing suit, made him speak in baby talk, suck on a pacifier, and drink his milk from a baby bottle. He stimulated the cadre’s creative powers as they conjured up new and inexorable methods to assault the human spirit. He became their obsession, their failure.