The Lords of Discipline

by Pat Conroy

He mounted me like a horse and rode me as I crawled across the cement. He beat my ass with sharp, stinging slaps. My knees began to bleed against the bathrobe. Fox jumped off me when I reached the gallery and joined the other crawlers as we braved a gauntlet of feet and the voices of the cadremen screaming out of the void above us. They kicked us and insulted us all the way to our rooms.

  A boy dropped down in front of me and was crawled over by some of his classmates. I tried to rise to my feet, was kicked down by an unseen assailant, rose again, and helped the boy stumble into my room where we both collapsed on the floor in the darkness.

  We lay there in absolute silence listening to the havoc outside on the galleries. He began crying and I began crying. We lay there weeping for several minutes, until we heard the cadre ordering us out for showers. I couldn’t lift myself off the floor. My arms rebelled when I tried to get to my feet. Rolling onto my side, I faced the stranger beside me.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. I was still crying.

  “Yes. I think so,” he answered. “Thanks for helping me.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” I said.

  “It’s awful. It’s simply awful.”

  “Where’s my roommate?” I asked, looking around the room.

  “I don’t know your roommate. I don’t even know you.”

  “My name’s Will.”

  “Thanks again, Will.”

  “What’s your name?”

  We lay face to face, tears on our cheeks.

  “My name is Tradd,” he said. “I’m from Charleston.”

  “We’ve got to get up, Tradd. The animals are calling again.”

  Again, I tried to lift myself up off the floor, but I still could not summon enough strength to support my own weight. Tradd got slowly to his feet and began helping me rise. Elements of both our friendship and our survival were mysteriously contained in those tender, solicitous moments, as I put my arm around his shoulder and we leaned against each other. Through the long tyranny of that night, something had begun to stir and kick inside us. We were crying, but we were not quitting. Invisibly contained in both of us were the seeds that would ensure the propagation of the system.

  “To the showers, people!” a voice commanded outside on the galleries. “Clean your loathsome bodies, dumbwads.”

  The sound of the enemy’s voice again brought me erect and ready to face them again. Tradd and I stared at each other with a sense of impending loss.

  “Can we be friends, Tradd?” I asked. “I don’t have any friends here.”

  “We already are,” he answered.

  Then we exited the room and joined the long line of plebes being driven in single file to the shower room.

  In the shower room, we stripped naked and ran through two lines of jeering upperclassmen, who shoved us roughly into the cold water that sprayed from the six nozzles. They permitted us to remain under the water for only a few seconds, then forced us out of the shower, handed us bars of soap, and ordered us to lather up. They sent us sprinting back to our rooms with the soap caked all over our glistening bodies. The sweat and the soap and the stench combined to make our skin feel lizard-like. I stumbled back into the room and began trying to clean off the soap in the small sink by the door.

  I was completely naked when the first sergeant and the company commander burst into my room.

  “Room, attention!” I cried out, and went into a brace.

  “Where’s your roommate, McLean?” Blasingame asked. “Pop off.”

  “I don’t know, sir,” I answered. “I haven’t seen him since after mess, sir.”

  “Did you see him anytime tonight?” Maccabee asked. “Pop off.”

  “I didn’t see anybody tonight, sir.”

  “No one saw Clearwater on the quadrangle, McLean. And he’s not at the hospital.”

  “Do you know where he is, Mr. McLean? Pop off,” Blasingame said. “Pop off loud and clear, scumbag.”

  “No, sir.”

  The first sergeant went down on one knee and peered into the shadows beneath the lower bunk bed. Then he walked to my roommate’s clothes press and opened it suddenly. It was empty. When he opened my press, I saw the frightened eyes of my roommate, Harvey Clearwater, blazing with something that went beyond even terror, looking past the first sergeant directly at me. He was asking me to help him, to deliver him in some way from the wrath of the cadre and the fury of the system. But I knew something about the system now and I dropped my eyes and did nothing.

  “Sir, I don’t belong here, sir. I just don’t belong here,” Harvey pleaded.

  “You fucking worm,” Blasingame said disgustedly. “You hid in a press while your classmates were on the quad.”

  “You shit on your classmates, Clearwater,” the first sergeant said. “That’s the only unforgivable sin at the Institute. Get out of there, scumbag. We’re going to give you your own personal Hell Night.”

  Harvey climbed out of the press trembling violently. They shoved him out of the room and into the darkness on the gallery.

  I finished washing the soap from my body. When I was done I put on a fresh pair of underwear and fell into the bottom rack without pulling down the covers. I was not the same boy who had awakened to reveille that morning. That boy was a stranger to me now and he could never be recalled. The system had transformed me into an original astonished creature. I had learned things about myself and others out there on the quadrangle that I had never known before. The cadre had ripped civilization from my back as though it were nothing more than strips of skin. They were going to change all of us into men by reducing us to children again, by breaking down every single vestige of civilization and society that we had brought to protect and sustain us. They would tame us like beasts of the field before they remade us in their own fierce image.

  All through the four battalions, hurt and confused and frightened and exhausted freshmen were thinking similar thoughts. Some of them were already planning to leave; some of them would last a month; others would leave at the Christmas break. But the extraordinary power of the plebe system was demonstrated most remarkably by the fact that there were four hundred boys who arrived at the exact same decision as I did that night in their own time and for their own reasons. Four hundred terrified boys vowed to themselves that no matter what happened, they would not quit.

  “I will not quit. I will not quit,” I said over and over to myself.

  The last thing I remember before falling into a deep, dreamless sleep was the screaming of my roommate, Harvey Clearwater.

  I never saw him again.

  My college education had begun.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The rebel within was also born on Hell Night. On that night he took to the hills and began his long patient war of attrition against the man I was in danger of becoming. From the moment I crawled off the fourth battalion quadrangle, this lean anonymous guerrilla began a fierce and insistent rear guard action against my acceptance of the Institute’s scheme of forging men out of boys.

  I tried to join the flow. I wanted to participate in the plebe system as a believer, to become inflamed with the zealotry and esprit that sustained my classmates during those first dispiriting months. But the guerrilla within asserted his presence if not his primacy from the very beginning, and a small bloodless war, without strategies or anthems, began to rage for the control of my interior. This lonely, unconsenting rebel battled against the patriarchal influences that had shaped my childhood: the American South and the Catholic Church. These were the two pillars of authority upon which my life had been built, and I had learned their rituals well—their worship of order and tradition, their strict codes, their punishment of anarchy, and contempt for the man or woman who stood alone. They had not prepared me for a time in my life when I would stand alone. Yet the malnourished hill fighter, chalking slogans on the rocks and carrying on his isolated, unseen war, grew in stature during that first week. In the aftershock of Hell Night, the urgency of his protest brought r
einforcements sprinting into the hills carrying news of my disaffection. Slowly, he began to threaten the whole rigidly structured, tight-assed fabric of my civilization. In the melancholy city within, the boulevards were wide and laid out in symmetrical grids, the bells of cathedrals rang on time, the cops never smiled, and the jails overflowed with silent, abused separatists. But the presence of the guerrilla, the single voice in my sad country who said “no,” gave me hope that the plebe system would not mark me darkly, irretrievably. During sweat parties in that first month, losing my voice and surrounded by the cadre, I would feel him stealing up to an overhang to watch me with patient intensity. I shivered with gratitude when I heard him deep in the forests singing of my liberation, celebrating my passionate difference from the rest of them. I knew nothing about the duality of man’s nature when I was eighteen, but I knew about the presence of my guerrilla, and as the months wore on, I knew that I would have to deal with his ascendancy. And I was certain that one day he would feel strong enough to storm the city and liberate it.

  For the first month I made my own way and kept my mouth shut. I learned what was expected of me and I performed it with ardor and enthusiasm. I did the pushups, held out my rifle, ran the stairs, endured their screaming, suffered at mess, returned for the sweat parties after mess, memorized my plebe knowledge, and secretly began to study the system in order to learn its effect on me. I wanted to unlearn the system while I was still a part of it. Something in my character made it impossible for me to accept the validity of this long trial by humiliation. If this was an efficacious process for the training of men, I wanted no part of manhood, I was perfectly content with being a boy. I conducted my survey in private, and I learned some things that would be of value my whole life. There was an amazingly limitless capacity for ruthlessness at the heart of the family of man. Nothing I learned that year or in the years that followed made me doubt the absolute truth of that natural law I discovered during the first month of the plebe system. I saw enough cruelty in that month to last a lifetime, but I was to see a lot more.

  If the cadre had been aware of my skepticism they would have run me out of the barracks within twenty-four hours. There was no toleration of dissenters in “the system.” “The system” was a phrase we heard from the time we rose at reveille until we fell exhausted into our beds at night. The plebe system. The Fourth Class system. Through the system, we would learn of our inner reserves of strength, our innate capacity to resist violence. This was the sacred text of our orthodoxy. Since I did not have the courage to quit, my time in the system became an inquest into the nature of aggrieved innocence.

  I had come to the Institute to pay homage to the career of my father and my promise to him on his deathbed. Like most sons of domineering men, I had a compulsive need to test the quality of my manhood by marching resolutely into the territory he had carefully marked out as his own. I had to test myself in the military environment before I could strike out independently. But my father would have laughed his way through the plebe system and laughed at the son who took it so seriously. He would have mocked the son who cried secretly into his pillow each night. My tears would have shamed him.

  When I called my mother after the second week I wept as soon as I heard her voice. She sounded kind and gentle and I had forgotten what it was like to talk to someone who loved me. I told her that it was dreadful, that I had made a terrible mistake, that I wanted to quit and come home, and that the Institute was a monstrous, unspeakable place. My mother knew me well and she uttered the exact words that would make me stay. She was sure, she told me softly, that I was more of a man than any of the cadre who were mistreating me and that I would certainly want to prove that to them and to myself. I think I could have faced my own doubts about my masculinity, but under no circumstances could I face my mother’s. Early on, I had contracted that dread affliction of oldest or only children—I lived for the absolute approval of my parents.

  Slowly, as the days passed, the plebes in R Company began to recognize each other. We began to make the friendships and form the alliances that would ease the passage through that difficult year. The real terror of Hell Night was that we had suffered in such complete solitude. That we suffered so friendlessly, exiled among complete strangers. Only when we began to make cautious overtures to each other did any of the system’s mystique accrue to us. Our survival lay in our solidarity. We began to study each other’s faces and transmit unseen signals as we gave each other shirt tucks or passed on the galleries. When classes started, we spoke in whispers before chemistry professors cleared their throats or while math professors copied algebraic formulae on blackboards. When we got the opportunity to talk in those first weeks, we did not talk about where we came from or what our sisters were like or how our fathers earned their bread; no, that was the world we had forsaken, that was the free zone outside the Gates of Legrand. We talked of survival and strategy. We were learning the art of being victims, studying the craft of endurance. In those early conversations were the first intimations that we were becoming a class.

  I tried to find out who these boys were, and what had drawn them to the Institute. I discovered that the Institute drew its sons from every state in the Union but it was primarily a Southern school, dedicated to the task of making Southerners. Southerners possess a simple yet magnificent obsession with all things military, and they love authority in all forms, masculine or feminine. They love to wear uniforms, shoot guns, wage war, march in parades, salute flags, and hold fast to traditions that should have died centuries before. Southerners have much in common with the rest of mankind. Even the Yankees, most of whom had been rejected by the military academies, spent their years at the Institute perfecting the unctuous skills of Southern gentlemen.

  All of us were white Caucasians in the class of 1967. Six hundred Protestants, one hundred Catholics, three Jews, two Greeks, one Puerto Rican. We came from the Carolinas, the green hill country of the Blue Ridge, from cruciform towns with a single intersection, from the blue dusted mountains of Tennessee and the Gold Coast of Florida, from lowcountry towns set like elegant tables upon the green linen of marsh. Six from California, eight from Texas, and one from Idaho. Nine came from New York, three from New Jersey, twelve from the Virginias; but most came from the southeast empire, most from the Carolinas.

  All of us had gathered to become Institute men. There was only one task of the fourth class system—to turn us into the exact images of the cadre who abused us—to make us want to be like them.

  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.”