by Pat Conroy
“I hate this fucking war, man,” the man shouted, appealing to the crowd. “Talk’s bullshit. Action’s what’ll get their attention.”
I moved in behind him and pulled a wallet out of his back pocket. His police badge was standard issue. I lifted it up high so the other students could see that Jordan had guessed right. The students, chastened already by their expulsion, hissed until the lead character actor of the afternoon drama skulked away into the ranks of his brethren.
“Everybody sure they want to be here?” Jordan said. “There’s no shame in getting out of here now.”
“They’ve no right to do this,” a graduate student named Elayne Scott said. “How can they kick me out of my own school for sitting down in the Student Union?”
“I’m for the Vietnam War,” a pretty girl named Laurel Lee said and I laughed when I recognized one of Ledare’s Tri Delts. “But my mama and daddy taught me right from wrong and this is all wrong.”
Then the order was given and the arrests were made.
Chapter Thirty-seven
When we left jail the next morning, we had become emblematic of our times, part of that troubling despoiled era when Americans quit listening to one another.
Two hundred students and five television cameras met us as we came out into the dazzling sunlight of a state where summer had come early. Shyla and Capers hugged us in triumph, for the benefit of the cameras, then they hustled us off to a quiet enclave on Blossom Street where the SDS was planning its next move. The radicals who had only tolerated Jordan and me before now treated us as if we had proven ourselves in some fearful test of spite and venom. We were being cast as brothers in a circle we did not even like. But the night in jail had scared us and being lionized and fussed over felt good, providing the balms that calmed our jangled spirits. The marijuana was free and so was the Jack Daniel’s.
I was high and happy when Shyla motioned to us to follow her. She led us to a backyard picnic table where Radical Bob had gathered a council of war for a meeting outside to ensure our conversations were not recorded. He was arguing that Jordan and I could not be trusted to attend this war council just because of a single arrest and a starring role in a demonstration that had spun out of everyone’s control. He was afraid the movement had become the venue and training ground of amateurs who were freelancing without a revolutionary philosophy to ground them. Already that day, a hundred disheveled students had stormed the administration building in a spontaneous riot that had neither purpose nor leadership.
“Action without philosophy is anarchy,” Radical Bob said.
“What?” I said. “Every time you open your mouth, Bob, it sounds like you learned your English at a Berlitz session.”
“Who asked you?” Radical Bob shot back. “Just because you and Jordan went out and played heroes yesterday, it certainly didn’t help make this war one day shorter.”
“I noticed that none of you got arrested with us,” Jordan said, looking around at the twenty-two veterans of SDS who sat in the yard around the picnic table. Many were passing joints back and forth, some so small it was as if they were trading pubic hairs pinched between thumbs and forefingers. On this day, except for Bob, the group was deferring to Jordan and me. By becoming front-page news, we had suddenly become valuable members of this very small South Carolina club.
“They risked everything, Bob,” Shyla said. “And they lost everything. They got arrested along with all those other students. It’s no surprise when people like you and me get arrested. It happens every day. But this was an uprising of anonymous students—no organization at all. Pure heroism, a battle cry of the common man. In one unplanned action, these students did more than the SDS has done in a year. Admittedly, they didn’t know what they were doing. But it was brilliant.”
“They shouldn’t be a part of the action tonight,” Bob said.
“I don’t agree,” Shyla said.
“You want to come with us?” Bob turned to me angrily. “Then come on, motherfucker.”
“Is it nonviolent?” Jordan asked.
“Of course. We’re trying to end a war, not start one.”
Jordan looked over at me and said, “I’m too drunk to say no. Besides, I don’t have any exams tomorrow.”
“Or anywhere to go,” I said. “They emptied our dorm room and chained it shut. We’ve got the rest of our lives to do what we want.”
“Count us in,” Jordan said.
At two the next morning, Capers Middleton, dressed in paramilitary regalia, broke a small window of a lavatory on the first floor of a Main Street building housing the Selective Service Office of South Carolina. He slipped through the darkness and came to the small door leading off an alleyway where a group of college students who would soon become known as the Columbia Twelve had gathered.
Forcing the door open, Capers put his fingers to his lips and led the rest of us into the interior of the building through the back staircase. The action had been planned for weeks and everyone performed their duties perfectly in the first minutes of the break-in. Keys stolen from the busy janitors opened the right locks. The boys carried heavy buckets of cow’s blood and the girls brought all the incendiary material needed to burn the draft file of every boy in South Carolina.
Shyla went to the first file cabinet and with not a single wasted moment pulled out the files and splayed them flat on the floor. Jordan and I followed her, covering each one with cow’s blood. Capers led the group that was piling draft files into the center of a vast, colorless room. The pile grew higher and higher as Capers urged everyone to work faster. He checked his watch, nodded, and Radical Bob doused the files with gasoline. When Capers was exhorting everyone to superhuman effort I noticed an edge to his voice and stopped what I was doing. My nostrils were overwhelmed by gasoline, and I was exhausted from a lack of sleep. I looked over and saw Shyla’s face, which looked like a nun’s in ecstasy. In fact we all looked like a religious band about to ignite a heretic in some bizarre and surreally modern auto-da-fé. Alarms went off in me for no reason and I studied the faces of these friends and complete strangers, trying to fight off a sense of panic. Backing away from the long rows of files, I grabbed Jordan by the shoulders as I saw Radical Bob light a match and the others flick cigarette lighters and move toward the mountain of draft files.
“Let’s burn the whole goddamn building down,” Radical Bob said.
“No,” Shyla said. “Just the files.”
“Bob’s right,” Capers said. “If we’re serious about the revolution, let’s do the building. Let’s do the whole town. Let’s bring the war home. Show them what the Vietnamese people are going through.”
“Shut up,” Shyla said. “We’re nonviolent. Nonviolent.”
“Speak for yourself,” Radical Bob said and the room erupted in flame and light and a hundred sirens went off outside as cops and firemen burst into the room. An army of cops swarmed over us, knocking us to the floor with billy clubs and fists. Two enormous men sat on me and handcuffed me, laughing when I howled in pain as they tightened the cuffs hard enough to cut the flow of blood into my wrists.
“Fucking pigs,” Capers was screaming. “Fucking pigs. Who ratted?”
“I told you to keep your goddamn friends out of it,” Radical Bob said. “Everything about this was amateur hour.”
“We did nothing wrong,” Shyla said. “We tried to strike a blow for peace. We didn’t totally succeed, but they know we’ve been here.”
“Oh shit,” I heard Jordan moan. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“We didn’t think this one through,” said Jordan. “This is a federal crime. We’ve stepped into some deep shit.”
The day of our arraignment, we were taken in paddy wagons to the federal courthouse and had to run the gauntlet of news reporters and cameramen to enter the courthouse door. Mike was there and he knew exactly what to look for. His Nikon was set correctly when General Elliott, resplendent in his creased, perfectly fitting Marine uniform, broke out of the crowd and walked
swiftly down the stairs to meet his son. A detective was leading Jordan up the stairs, pulling the handcuffs that bound him. When the general backhanded Jordan to his knees, Mike got the photo. The general, in his iconic fury, looked every inch the figure of indignant, long-suffering authority striking down the long-haired flouter of rules and law on the steps of a hall of justice. The photograph was a flawless cameo of almost biblical power of a father reestablishing authority in his own home. Stricken and on his knees, Jordan’s agonized expression reflected the shame and humiliation of a childhood that had gone on too long. In the nation’s mind, General Elliott represented America to adults, but to us he stood for everything that was tyrannical and immovable and dissembling in the American spirit turned leprous by Vietnam. Jordan on his knees carried all the power of deep symbol: his face registered the traces of betrayal that his generation felt. Mike’s photo was the last ticket on a point of no return. Like a beaten Christ-figure, Jordan rose to face his father, walking up the step that separated them, staring into his father’s eyes.
Then, General Elliott spit in his son’s face and the world they had in common went into sudden, irrevocable eclipse. The war and what it did to the soul of America played itself out in that brief encounter between father and son. It was the undoing of Jordan Elliott. He crossed over into a borderland of hurt where no one could follow. In jail he forgot all about Vietnam and turned to what he could do that would most hurt his father. What could he do to break him? I had never before heard anyone pray with greater urgency, and Jordan was praying for the death of his father.
When I was released into the custody of my parents, my father rose to the occasion of my defense. The legal peril I had brought down on myself inspired him to sobriety, and he handpicked the best criminal lawyers in the state to defend me. In private, he and my mother fought ferociously over our methods and tactics in protesting American involvement in Vietnam, but in public they were just as vehement in supporting my actions against all comers. The more they studied the Vietnam War, the softer their defense of those policies became. By the time my trial began, both Lucy and the judge had turned indefatigable and fierce in protecting me. Shyla’s parents backed her with the same quiet zeal. Though Capers’ parents disapproved of his every move, they too stood beside their radicalized, long-haired boy.
Among the students arrested at the Russell House, almost every parent showed up to support their children when the gathering of lawyers, prosecutors, and judges took place in the high-windowed courthouses. Every single parent, except for General Elliott.
To him, the matter was a simple one. We were all guilty of giving comfort and aid to the enemy; we were guilty of treason.
When Jordan walked out of jail, the general was waiting for him, but this time he did not strike Jordan in front of the cameras. Instead of driving home to Pollock Island, General Elliott drove Jordan directly to the grounds of the South Carolina State Mental Hospital on Bull Street. A military doctor, an associate justice of the State Supreme Court, and the general himself all signed a document declaring that Jordan Elliott was mentally incompetent to stand trial and was to be hospitalized for mental observation starting on that day. South Carolina had the simplest rules in America for locking up its incompetents and lunatics.
The trial took place in Columbia in early December. The passions loosed on America by the killings at Kent State had vanished and were replaced by an exhaustion that settled softly into the body politic. The whole country felt worn down and handicapped by years of force-fed tragedy.
Outside on the courthouse steps, the last great antiwar rally in South Carolina was in session as I drove up with my parents and brothers to face the consequences of my actions the previous May. No matter how hard I tried to re-create those events in my mind, I could not figure out what drove me to such egregious defiance of authority. I had been called an all-American boy for so long that it was part of my own secret self-image. I had never received a speeding ticket in my life, never flunked a pop quiz, and never given my parents a moment’s worry about my grades. After leading an exemplary student life, I now faced a thirty-year prison sentence. I had thrown my diploma down the toilet because I had gotten angry at the deaths of four students I had never met, who went to a college I had never heard of, in a state I had never driven through in my life. The trial simply terrified me, and even Shyla’s bravado could not dim the sense of indistinctness and flatness I saw when I looked to the future.
But under the harsh light of cameras again, outside the court with my father looking magisterial, my mother beautiful, and my brothers loyal, I whispered thanks to my family for sticking by me.
When the bailiff cried out for the court to rise, Judge Stanley Carswell walked out of his chambers with long, deliberate strides. He looked severe until he sat down and smiled. He studied us for a brief moment, shook his head sadly, then got down to the business at hand. He entertained several motions, then said, “Will the prosecution call its first witness.”
The prosecutor was a veteran of the pure Southern textbook variety. He was portly, loquacious, and had one of those midland accents that conjured up salted hams hanging from dark rafters in a smokehouse. Sitting between Capers and me, Shyla elbowed both of us when the prosecutor’s sweet tang lifted through the crowd. He began, “Your Honor, I would like to call as the first witness for the State of South Carolina, Mr. Capers Middleton.”
In South Carolina, whatever infinitesimal, barely breathing, white-knuckled spirit of the sixties still existed died at that moment. Capers turned state’s evidence against us. He named every name, told every secret, turned over every file, revealed every conversation, noted every date and expenditure and phone call in his diary, sent dozens of people up and down the East Coast to jail by the power of his testimony. The local chapter of the SDS folded during the first hour he spent in the witness chair. Carefully coached by the prosecutor, he described how J. D. Strom, the head agent of SLED, had recruited him to infiltrate the antiwar movement at the end of his junior year in college. Capers admitted that he had used his friendship with his childhood friend, Shyla Fox, to gain access to the inner circles of radical activity on campus. If it had not been for Shyla, Capers felt that he could never have won the trust of the true believers like Radical Bob Merrill. It was patriotism of the highest order and a fierce anticommunism that caused him to become an undercover agent for the state. His family had descended from one of the oldest and most distinguished in the South and his love of country was second to none. He believed that the radicals he met for the most part constituted no danger to the state whatsoever. In fact, he still loved his friends Shyla, Jordan, and me with all his heart and thought that we were simply immature dupes who were highly suggestible to inflammatory rhetoric we could not understand. During the course of his five-day testimony, Capers used the word “sheeplike” enough times that Shyla wrote a note to me saying Capers was making her feel like a rack of lamb. It was the one note of humor we managed during the course of the trial. And it was that same trial that changed everything about how we felt concerning friendship and politics and even love.
The counsels for the defense tore into Capers Middleton with all the scorn and contempt that the judge would allow. They scoffed at his sincerity when he claimed he acted as he did only because he felt his country was in grave jeopardy. They taunted Capers by reading back the words of his own speeches and by playing videotapes of Capers denouncing the war in the most cutting, withering phrases of mockery. By trying to make a laughingstock out of his masquerade, they only succeeded in bringing out the bristling patriot in Capers. He matched the defense lawyers in their disdain during the taunting sessions of his cross-examination. He refused to acknowledge that he had betrayed us in any way, but sadly would admit that we may very well have broken faith with America.
Then Capers spoke about Shyla without being able to look her in the eye. Above everyone he met in the antiwar movement, Shyla was the most passionate, articulate, and committed opponent of
the war. Her idealism was unquestionable; she had served as his chief lieutenant and he depended on her for an innate genius for strategy and for her fearlessness. He told the court again and again that Shyla was the one person who acted from a deep sense of moral outrage against the Vietnam War. He attributed it to a longing for some earthly paradise that she had developed growing up with a father who had survived Auschwitz and a mother who had watched her family murdered by the Nazis.
Capers saved his most savage offensives for Radical Bob Merrill, the outsider from the great, yawning beast of New York City. Employing the ancient Southern fear of the carpetbagger and the scalawag, Capers wove a damning testimony about Merrill’s subversiveness, his maladroit attempts to get them to move toward more and more radical acts. Bob’s secret blueprint always called for violence. His voice was soft, but his ideas always ended with policemen dead and squad cars on fire. Radical Bob’s most incantatory thought was thrilling and insurrect. His bottom line always was that the antiwar movement, if they were serious, should plan an incursion against the base at Fort Jackson itself.
“These antiwar people are all phonies,” Capers told the court. “Even though I personally thought Radical Bob was crazy and out of his gourd, he did make a valid point. If people really are opposed to a war, they should be willing to give up their lives for that belief. All these folks wanted to do was march with signs, smoke dope, and get laid. My ancestors fought against Cornwallis and Grant. They fought against the Kaiser and Hitler. They fought, they didn’t talk. They took up arms, they didn’t write speeches or compose slogans. Though Radical Bob’s dangerous, he showed me what was wrong with this whole antiwar movement. They have no guts. They lack the courage of their convictions and I’m happy to be the one to expose them for the cowards they really are.”
The second witness for the prosecution did much to change the worldview of Capers Middleton. If a gasp of surprise went up among the shocked remnant of the Columbia Twelve when Capers revealed that he had worked as an agent for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the earth itself seemed to open up when Radical Bob Merrill lifted out of his seat among the accused and took his place beside the judge as a witness for the government. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had recruited Bob as an informant during the troubles at Columbia University, and he had proven so valuable in his infiltration of that uprising that he was the natural choice when the local chapter of the FBI began to worry about subversive activities that arose when the UFO coffeehouse was founded to recruit young disaffected soldiers into the movement. Neither the FBI nor the state of South Carolina had any notion that both had insiders passing out information from the same feebly populated SDS chapter.