A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

by Pat Conroy

  She said, “Yeah, they pay you money…”

  So I went to the Coast Guard Academy and was met by the guy who invited me, and he said, “Mr. Conroy, I had no idea inviting you would be such a stir.” He said, “The commandant told me if you said anything that irritated him, he would fire me even though I had tenure.”

  So I said, “What do you think I’m going to do, call for the dissolution of the American armed forces?” I said, “This will be great.”

  The commandant flew up from Washington. He sat there stern-faced. I like the way generals can be stern. So he was sitting there stern-faced, and I talked to the group, but first of all, I had gone to talk to the freshmen. I talked to these freshmen, and I looked out there, and 25 percent of them were women. I said, “What are you girls doing here? Are you crazy? Are you nuts?”

  And one of them there, the woman who was leading me around, said, “Sir, they let women in the academies in 1974.”

  And I said to these freshmen girls, “Is it as horrible for y’all as it was for me when I was a freshman?”

  A couple of them go—you can’t say anything naturally—but a couple of these young women went [Conroy nods his head].

  I talked to the Coast Guard Academy that night. I had a ball. I want to tell y’all something—I can talk to a corps of cadets. I talked to them about what happened to me at The Citadel. We roared with laughter. Military colleges—we have common experiences; we share common things. When they took me to the plane the next day, the four women—I asked them—I said, “What are you going to do when you get out of here?”

  One of the women said, “Fly an attack helicopter, sir.”

  “No kidding. What are you going to do?”

  “Drive a ship, sir.”

  So they helped me off then, these four accursed Coast Guard Academy women. And right before I got on the plane, one said, “How’d you like the Coast Guard Academy?”

  “I loved it.”

  Then one of them said, “How’d you like us, sir? How’d you like the women at the Coast Guard Academy?”

  I said, “I loved y’all. What’s not to like? You’re sharp cadets—funny, smart.”

  One of them then said, the trap then being set, “Mr. Conroy, when a woman applies at The Citadel, will you help her out? Will you support her? She’s not going to have much.”

  I said, “Listen, gals, you don’t know The Citadel. That is never going to happen in my lifetime. It’s not even a chance and you just don’t know The Citadel.”

  And one of the women said, “Mr. Conroy, you don’t know women.”

  In the early nineties I received a letter from one of those accursed Coast Guard women. “Mr. Conroy, the first woman has applied to The Citadel. We remember your talk. Your talk is famous at the Coast Guard Academy. We especially remember you talking about your time on the honor courts, how much that meant to you. How much that changed you. How much that set your character. And we know because you promised to support the first woman that we can count on you because, like you, we have an honor system we believe in. Her name is Shannon Faulkner. And we know you’ll do your duty.”

  I tore that letter up. I said, “These women are going to get me killed.” But I’m a Citadel man, and they mentioned the honor code. And there’s a lot wrong with me, Class of 2001, except this—I know what the meaning of “is” is.

  While writing this latest book, My Losing Season, I interviewed all the basketball players, the boys I loved from this gymnasium…I adored them. They did not know it. I went back to meet all of them, but one meeting changed my life. I went back to see Al Kroboth, center, Class of 1969, a POW, a Marine in Vietnam. I sat him down, and I said, “Al, you got to tell me about being a POW. You got to tell me everything, but I’m a novelist—you got to let me know how it feels.”

  “Can I have my wife, Patty, be with me?”

  “Sure.”

  An interview I thought would take an hour, took seven. And I said, “Al, history is going to come between us.” And history is going come all over this, Class of 2001. And I said, “Al, I was a draft dodger. I was a Vietnam protester during the war…you need to know this before we talk.”

  He said, “Conroy, you did what you did. I did what I did. I’m fine.”

  Then he proceeds to tell me about the most harrowing Vietnam experience I’ve ever heard of where he is shot down. He wakes up with an AK-47 pointed at his face. He has a broken back, a shattered scapula. They tell him to get up, and Al Kroboth, who is in South Vietnam, in the jungle, walks barefoot at night for three months through the Vietnam jungle. It is the most horrible, tortured thing I have ever heard about in my life.

  I said, “Al, how did you make it? How’d you do the pain, the leeches, the boils, the bites—everything?” I said, “How’d you make it?”

  Al Kroboth looks at me and says, “The plebe system. I made it because of the plebe system. I made it because I’m a Citadel man.”

  He gets along. He’s in terrible, terrible confinement in North Vietnam. Then I said, “Tell me when you got out, Al. Tell me how it felt.”

  He talked about the plane landing. Al’s a Marine, like the general. And Al is standing there. “I didn’t feel anything, Conroy. And then the plane, I saw it go down to the end of the field, and I saw it turn, and I saw the American flag.” And as Al Kroboth said he saw the American flag, he wept. His wife wept. Then I wept.

  He said then the plane takes off and all of the POWs are in this plane, and he says he’s not feeling anything. And then the pilot comes on and says, “Feet wet. Feet wet. We have left North Vietnamese territory.”

  And Al Kroboth weeps again, and his wife weeps.

  [He said] the North Vietnamese told them that Americans hated the war. They were hated. That they were considered war criminals. So when Al landed, and all of the other POWs in the Philippines, they got a hero’s welcome from ten thousand people…he was shocked when he walked through that crowd, across a red carpet, and a little girl sitting on her father’s shoulders handed him a piece of paper. He didn’t look at it until he got on the bus. And in this childish scrawl, this girl had written, “Greater love than this, no man hath.”

  And Al Kroboth broke again. His wife broke. I broke.

  Then Al, on the tenth floor being debriefed, he gets a call that there’s a Citadel man waiting for him down in the lobby, so he takes an officer down there, and he goes down to the lobby, and Johnny Vaughan, who had been a cheerleader on my basketball team—Johnny used to jump up and down for me and Al—Johnny Vaughan is waiting for Al Kroboth. And he gets down there, and they embrace, and then Johnny says, “Al, I heard you lost your Citadel ring.”

  And Al said, “The Vietcong stole it.”

  And then, what to me is one of the great moments in Citadel history—Johnny Vaughan took off his Citadel ring and said, “I’m not letting you go back to America without wearing a Citadel ring.”

  Al said, “No, Johnny, I can’t do it. I’ve lost too much weight. I’ll lose it.”

  Johnny said, “No, no. Listen to me, I’m not letting you go back to America without wearing a Citadel ring.”

  And he took Al’s hand, and he put his ring on Al Kroboth’s hand.

  Class of 2001, I brought an audiovisual aid for you today. I wanted to bring the type of alumni you are capable of turning yourselves into. I would like Al Kroboth and Johnny Vaughan to stand up and meet the Class of 2001. Where are you guys? [Mr. Kroboth and Mr. Vaughan stand to the audience’s applause.]

  In closing, Class of 2001, I cannot thank y’all enough for doing this for me. I did not exactly pencil this speech into my schedule of coming attractions, and you do me the highest honor by bringing me fully into my Citadel family. And I was trying to think of something I can do because a graduation speaker needs to speak of time—time passing. Usually, I tell graduation classes I want them to think of me on their fortieth birthday, but I got something else I want to do for y’all because I’m so moved at what you’ve done for me. I would like to
invite each one of you in the Class of 2001 to my funeral, and I mean that. I will not be having a good day that day…but I have told my wife and my heirs that I wanted the Class of 2001 to have an honored place whenever my funeral takes place. And I hope as many of you will come as you possibly can, because I want you to know how swift time is, and there is nothing as swift—and you know this—from the day you walked into Lesesne Gateway until this day—a heartbeat, an eye blink. This is the way life is. It is the only great surprise in life.

  So I’m going to tell you how to get to my funeral. You walk up…You find the usher waiting outside, and here’s your ticket…You put up your Citadel ring. Let them check for the 2001, and each one of you, I want you to say this before you enter the church at which I’m going to be buried. You tell them, “I wear the ring.”

  Thank you so much.

  Farewell Letter

  BY BERNIE SCHEIN

  MARCH 8, 2016

  My dearest Pat,

  I know we’ve said good-bye to each other more times in the last several weeks than either one of us might have imagined only a short time ago. Such is the nature of the obsessive-compulsive Jew who can’t let go and an Irish Catholic blowhard with a heart so big I imagine it now dwarfing the universe. They’ll love you up there: Peg and Don, Stannie, Mom and Dad, Gene, Doug, Tommy, Nancy Jane, all your loved ones. You’re regaling all of them right now, I have no doubt, they’re so happy to see you.

  You had to have been dying to see them, since you did.

  Frankly, my guess is your arrival on the scene at St. Peter’s has even God opening His arms with a grin to match yours, and a heartfelt embrace. If He hadn’t needed a good laugh and some personality up there, you’d probably still be here driving all of us crazy.

  When we last said good-bye to each other, I told you my heart and soul will always be with you, as yours will always be inside me. The advantage there, as I’ve reminded you on countless occasions, is yours. Needless to say, mine will make you a better person.

  Your love, so inspired, so generous and warm and such a pain in the ass, that’s what I’ll miss, Bubba. That’s what I’ll miss. Your humor, which is so pathetic. Please, some new material, you’ve got time up there, mentally telegraph it to my imagination. God, did we laugh.

  And lord, did we cry. My friend, my friend. My soul mate, my inspiration, my muse, my devil’s advocate. You care so much, I feel it. Yes, you could be a jerk, we all know that, but in the final analysis, when all is said and done…I remember we were talking to James Dickey’s sister, Pat Dickey, in your study in Atlanta, about “character,” about seeing people accurately. At that moment you challenged me to look around your library and tell you the most important book of your youth. (Famous All Over Town had not yet been written.) You’re laughing at that last comment right now, from heaven. Yes, heaven, where the dead come alive and have a great time laughing at us all, mere mortals, stupid people, fretting over nothing, right? Tell me, are we endlessly, over the long haul, fretting over trivia? You’ll tell me when I see you, which I hope and pray is a fucking long, long time from now. I don’t miss you that much. This whole thing scares the hell out of me. As for the book that most influenced you, let’s let that hang for a while. We’ll come back to that.

  We had great conversations, you said during our last good-bye. We did, we did. Except when you wanted to talk too.

  I know, you can’t help it. I’m funny. But indeed we did, profoundly deep ones in our shallow age: we talked about everything, about ideas, yes, but they could bore us if disconnected from people. Boy, did we talk about people, about who we are, about what motivates us, about Beaufort, our country, our society, friends, enemies, your stupid relationship with The Citadel, your stupid relationships with everyone, even your relationships with old friends like Freddie who you hadn’t seen in forty years. All played, even until the end, a prominent role in your mind.

  Truth is all that mattered to you, which I found sometimes a pain in the ass. But we discovered that ignorance is not bliss, that what you don’t know can hurt you, and that sometimes you had to do unto others before they did unto you. And though we created our own reality, that reality made us both a bit paranoid. God, did we hate critics of all types. Unless we were doing the criticizing, which we did all the time.

  We visited Dachau in the summer of ’68, when we assured ourselves with great authority—our own—that we’d change the world. Your conclusion: people were basically evil. Mine: no, their leaders were, but people were generally basically good. We had no idea, back then, our views were affected not so much by Dachau but by the way we felt about our fathers.

  Your life has been as painful as it has been joyful. I know that. Back then I didn’t believe you, when you talked about your father. No one did. Because you lied all the time, hell, you began lying for a living. Pat’s exaggerating, like always, I told everyone. Until you painfully and relentlessly simultaneously sacrificed, discovered, and realized yourself with the truth, the only way you could do it, publicly, through your art, and when you did, you saved and warmed the hearts of the lives of so many people—yes, eventually, even your father’s, the Great Santini’s. You taught your father to love. Let me correct that. He always loved you, the only way life would let him, the only way he knew how. But you taught him to love with love, with humor, with warmth and tenderness. Pat, you taught your father to love. Your father. The Great Santini. And you think he was a war hero? He was, but you, Pat, became his. You had to, it was a matter of survival, and you did it with relentless love. You made him see. You made us all see, Pat, and what you and I discovered was that indeed we were both wrong, after Dachau, weren’t we? The history of the world, all the emotions of every human being who ever lived, is in the heart and soul of each of us. Not either good or bad, but good and bad, and thank God for that. To look the other way, to deny, that is what makes us evil. The truth does liberate.

  Let us return now to your study, your library, in Atlanta, where we are talking with Pat Dickey about “character.” The most important book of your young life?

  Standing right there in front of me, third shelf down. Remember?

  Lives of the Saints.

  Subtitle: “The Autobiography of Bernie Schein.”

  Come on, you know that was funny. You can never keep a straight face with me. No one can. Right?

  Your mom’s love poured out of you your entire life. And the love of so many…I think, Pat, in all honesty, you are a saint. A shithead sometimes, but overall, a saint.

  I love you, Pat. My heart, my soul, forever.

  God’s getting a kick out of you now, probably even more so as you tell Him stories about me. Please, resist that urge. I can hear Him now: “When’s Bernie coming, Pat? We need Bernie here!”

  Please explain that patience is needed here, Pat. That no, we don’t need Bernie, not for a long, long, long time, thank you. And don’t encourage Him just to piss me off.

  I speak now to you, family, friends, admirers:

  Pat asked me, knowing what was coming, to “take care of everybody.” He loved so much, so expansively, which is why he was loved so much. He cared so much. He cared for us all, but of course, no one did he care for like his beloved Sandra, his truly beautiful daughters, so beautiful, in every way. Jessica, Melissa, Megan, and Susannah. He was so proud of you. When he was sick in the hospital and back at home and I was entertaining everyone with my formidable wit, your girls thought: Oh, good, he’s enjoying Bernie’s humor so much, but that wasn’t entirely accurate. He was enjoying your enjoying my humor. While you were enjoying me, looking at me, he was enjoying you, looking at you. He loved so much. And like you, I love him so much. Pat will always be with us, inside us. And I promise you, as I promised him, I will take care of you. In fact, I can assure you, I will probably be a monotonous pain in the ass because even though it no doubt leaves you cringing in despair, it reassures him and makes him happy. So, up yours.

  Kathy, Tim, Mike, Jim, Carol…I’m here,
and I’m here for you to take me out to dinner as often as you like. Too bad we no longer have his credit card, but, hey, Mike just sold a house. What a brother is Pat, what a brother. I adore all of you, all of you. You’re the best, far better, I used to tell him, than he was. He liked that.

  I want to close by saying to everyone whose heart he has touched, whose soul he has comforted, and whose mind he has expanded, to all he has understood, inspired, and loved through words and his actions, to all his family, friends, and readers…

  You have been in the presence of greatness, you have been in the presence of one who dared to be great.

  Pat, you will live forever in our hearts, souls, minds. And I pray we are worthy to live now in yours…

  He was a great artist—a great writer, a great teacher, a great friend—because he was a great audience. Writing, teaching, being a good friend is truly listening, turning your attention on a person so vividly it expands their image and vision of themselves. He made me feel great, not that I didn’t already. Still, that’s what love is, isn’t it?