by Pat Conroy
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 s
avagery 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.
When all else failed, they turned his classmates against him, the plebes who were his brothers and protectors under the system. They encouraged us to show contempt for him, to abandon him. They rewarded us for betraying him.
And it was easy to hate him in those first months. I needed someone whom I could visibly and openly hate, so I joined my classmates in vilifying Bobby Bentley and soon the freshmen despised him as much as the upperclassmen did. We hated him for his weakness, his frailty, his stained pants, and the smell that was always on him. He was unclean and he wore the odor of urine like some debased cologne. Often they would not let him change his pants for days. His stench belied the silence or anonymity of his approach. In a line of plebes, you could always smell the presence of Bobby Bentley.
So the freshmen began refusing to give him shirt tucks or help him get ready for parade. We neglected to tell him of meetings with the cadre or the time of required formations. When we left the campus for general leave on Saturday night, we left him behind in the barracks. We assumed the roles of his torturers, his tamers, and heaped all our repressed fury at the cadre on him. We abandoned Bobby Bentley because we saw ourselves in his affliction and did not like to be reminded that he was one of us, that he, too, represented our class, our virility, our sad, abused history. In a school where your only solace comes from the support and friendship of your classmates, the solitude of Bobby Bentley became awe-inspiring, mythic, and unbearable. At first we thought we had created an island, an unclean one, an untouchable; but that was not true. We had become a cadre in reserve, a platoon of Iscariots. My classmates and I, with our zealous endorsement of the cadre’s contempt for Bentley, had indeed helped create something unseen in the class of 1967.
We had created the first man in our class.
On a rainy night in October, they lined up all his classmates facing him. There were thirty-eight of us who had survived through the first month. They ordered us to spit in the face of Bobby Bentley. We all did it; all thirty-seven of us. When it was my turn, his face was covered with spit and his eyes were tightly closed. I spat. I spat into his face and went back to the end of the line.
By the middle of October the cadre was getting desperate. They ordered all the plebes to talk individually with Bentley. The Taming had failed. They wanted us to talk some sense into his head, to tell him that he was hurting the image of our class, that his presence was bringing the additional wrath of the cadre on all our heads. Ten of my classmates had preceded me before I entered his room on the third division to encourage him to quit the Institute. He was writing a letter home when I entered his room. Looking up, he smiled at me and asked me to sit down.
“Where’s your roommate, Bobby?” I asked. There was a strong stench of urine in the room. He noticed that I noticed it.
“I haven’t had a roommate since plebe week. No one wants to room with a guy who pisses in his pants,” he answered. “They won’t let me send my uniforms to the laundry anymore. Except for the two I wear to class.”
“They told me to talk to you, Bobby.”
“I know, Will.”
“Why don’t you just get the hell out of here, Bobby? I mean, you’re just causing trouble for the rest of us. They’re starting to give sweat parties in your name, man. And it’s perfectly obvious you don’t belong here. Three-year-old kids don’t do what you do, Bobby. You ought to have more pride than to stick around wetting your pants in front of them.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I really am. But I just can’t help it, Will. It’s embarrassing. I feel terrible about it. The doctors say it’s nerves. Nerves. Every night I tell myself that tomorrow will be different, that I won’t do it tomorrow. But every day’s the same. I’m as disgusted with myself as the cadre is. I don’t blame you or them for wanting me out.”
“Then why don’t you go?”
“Because it’s my choice to stay. It’s not yours and it’s not theirs.”
“You don’t belong here, Bobby.”
“My daddy paid his money just like everybody else’s daddy.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
“The other freshmen scream at me when they come up to talk to me, Will. At least most of them do. They come up to my room and treat me like they were the first sergeant. They call me pussy and dumbhead. Alexander even slapped me when I told him I was staying. But they don’t know what it’s like to be me. I don’t blame them, you see. I’d do the same thing and say the same thing if I were them. I just can’t help my nerves. It’s just so embarrassing. I get this feeling in my stomach every time I hear the bugle blow at reveille. I know it’s going to start again. I keep telling myself to take it one day at a time, not to let them get me down, that I can take anything for nine months. I need to prove to myself that I’m as tough as they are. Do you understand that, Will?”
“No.”
“Then why are you here, Will?”
“Because I’m an asshole. And I’m sorry I came up here to bother you, Bobby. I would never have done something like this last year. I wasn’t like this last year. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“Does your roommate St. Croix want me to leave?”
“No, I don’t think so, Bobby. He’s afraid that if you leave, they’ll start concentrating on him.”
Bobby Bentley laughed, and I realized that I had never seen him laugh before, never seen most of my classmates laugh or even smile. I left that room feeling an excruciating shame for having willingly embraced my role as an inquisitor representing the cadre. I vowed that from that night on I was not going to be one of Bobby Bentley’s problems. I certainly had enough of my own.
Three days later the entire freshman class of R Company met in the first division alcove room to discuss the problem of Bobby Bentley. It was the first official meeting we were allowed to conduct without the supervision of the cadre. It was our first moment of institutional democracy and the first time I had seen many of the faces of my classmates relaxed and unbraced.
John Alexander
, by far the sharpest knob militarily, conducted the meeting with brisk efficiency. In the very first month, he had emerged as the natural leader of our class, and the cadre was already saying that he was excellent material for regimental commander. He began the meeting with a voice indicating a high seriousness of purpose: “At ease, men. We all know why we’re here tonight. I’ve talked with several members of the cadre and they want us to help figure a way to run Bentley out of the Corps. He’s hurting the image of our class and specifically he’s hurting the image of R Company. Now I know all of us are in agreement that we want to prove that the class of 1967 is the best class ever to come through the Institute. In order to prove that, men, we just can’t have a freshman peeing in his damn pants like a baby every time he comes to formation. I have a suggestion and I’d like to run it by you. I suggest we go up to his room right after this meeting. We go up there as a class and tell him that we voted unanimously that he’s not worthy to be in our class. Then let’s pack his bags and escort him bodily to the front gate. If he tries to resist, then we might have to become a little physical.”
“Good, idea, John,” a voice rang out.
“All right,” three others agreed.
“Are there any objections?” Alexander asked.
I tried to speak, but I remained silent. In silence, I had long ago decided, was my deliverance. I wanted to walk through the plebe year unnoticed, drawing no controversy, and making no enemies. I had seen what the cadre did to plebes who made themselves too visible. The freshmen in that room were working themselves up into a mob. We were about to break out of the room when a voice objected.
“I object.”
We turned toward the voice, and I got my first view of Mark Santoro, sitting in a chair beside the window. Behind me stood the musclebound freshman I had heard some of my classmates call “Pig.” They were the only two Yankees left among the freshmen in R Company.