“Gentlemen,” I said, and I must have used that word fifty times in that single hour, making it a strong runner-up to “honor” itself, “the last part of the code is the most difficult to live by. To turn in a friend, a classmate, a roommate, or an upperclassman for an honor violation is the most demanding and crucial part of the code. It is also the severest test of its efficacy, its credibility. But for this part of the code, the honor system would not work. I have often wondered if I were put to the test whether I could actually turn in a good friend of mine. I honestly don’t know. I have never been tested and hope I never am.
“But I will tell you a story that reminded me of the honor system. Several years ago in New York City a woman by the name of Kitty Genovese was beaten, raped, and stabbed to death in the New York City streets. It was later proven that at least thirty-eight people heard her cries for help, her screams, heard her begging the killer to spare her life. Not one of those thirty-eight people went to help her. Not one of those thirty-eight people called the police. Not one of them shouted at the murderer from their windows. Not one of them did anything. Anything at all. Kitty Genovese might as well have been raped and killed in the Gobi Desert for all the help she received from her fellow man. The most common excuse given by each of those thirty-eight people when they were later interviewed was that they did not want to get involved. A woman bled to death because no one wanted to get involved.
“The word involved caused me to think of the honor system. The Institute is a special environment that requires involvement. It’s not enough that you do not steal. The Institute demands that you do not tolerate other thieves in your midst. It says that the Corps is responsible for the administration of the code. It says that you are responsible for the actions not only of yourself, but also your neighbor. Because of your living under the code, we hope that other men and women can put their trust in you. If the Institute, indeed, is something special, then the code is the central fact of that specialness. The Institute does not give you a choice about whether you wish to be honorable or not. The code is imposed upon you for your four years at the Institute. It is the written moral manifesto of how you’ll behave. When you graduate, the code goes with you and the code lives as long as you live.
“You have chosen a strange school, gentlemen,” I said to the plebes but I no longer saw them and had the strange sensation of talking only to myself. “There is much good and much bad in this college. I think the honor system is good. It is the one thing I believe in with all my heart. I think the integrity of the Corps is good. And I know this: If Kitty Genovese had screamed outside of Number Four barracks instead of that street in New York City, she might have been seriously hurt in the stampede to murder her attacker. Gentlemen, from this moment until you withdraw or graduate from the Institute, you are subject to the Code.”
Chapter Ten
Before I came to Carolina Military Institute, I had never once heard of the obscure and thinly elongated country of Vietnam. But long before my senior year I became acutely aware of the distinct and extraordinary possibility that I might die in Vietnam for reasons that were rather unclear to me. Since I had never seen a Vietnamese in my life, it amazed me that somewhere, on the planet’s largest continent, lived an Oriental man, perhaps plowing with a team of oxen or digging an irrigation ditch on the green fringes of an impenetrable jungle, who might one day kill me.
The thought did not altogether displease me. It would have been odd indeed if I had not fallen victim to some of the more lurid fantasies of the military mythology. I even had moments of wanting to die heroically in battle to fulfill my father’s legacy or to prove the Institute wrong about my fitness as a cadet. When I was eighteen and nineteen there was some awful gravitational or lunar force within me that embraced the notion of a valiant death by fire. In my freshman year, I was so impressed and overwhelmed by a unit of Green Berets who came to the Institute to demonstrate the newest counterinsurgency techniques that I tried to enlist in their ranks that very day. A lantern-jawed sergeant talked me into staying until I graduated from the Institute because the Green Berets needed qualified officers and the pay was much better. The reprieve gave me three more years to consider myself in light of Asia, North America, duty to my country, duty to myself, and war. It gave me time to think, study, and ask questions; in other words, it gave me the time to obtain that most fascinating and life-changing of commodities—a college education. But I never forgot that I had once tried to sign up with the Green Berets. War is a religious conviction to an eighteen-year-old boy, and though it later became hard for me to relate to that boy, I had at least to acknowledge the sincerity of his passionate, blazing idealism and his total willingness to sacrifice his life for his country.
But the Institute changed me, slowly, imperceptibly, as any good college would. There was a lot of time to think in the barracks and to talk with classmates, a lot of time to change one’s mind. I did not view myself as the dangerous sort. I viewed myself quite artlessly as a prince among men, a real sweetheart, and my entrance into the masculine province of the Corps had only served to strengthen my conviction that I was at least as virtuous as the majority of my fellow human beings. I looked upon the Corps as a captive microcosm of the entire human race and thought if I could study them properly and learn all the secret rites and neuroses of the cadets, then in some profoundly inclusive way I could discover the most illuminating sanctities, dilemmas, and mysteries of the human spirit. As a soldier I would have learned much more about an aggrieved and singularly bewildered species, but by then due to the strangeness of our times, of Will McLean, born and bred to be a military man, had decided he would never be a military man. He had also resolved in his own mind, through beginning to believe in his own convictions, through his own slow unravelings of the great questions of his time, his own readings and interpretations of those readings, and his own colloquies and interrogations with his secret self, that he had no quarrel, absolutely none, with the Vietnamese.
I had originally planned to come to the Institute because I had wanted to become a fighter pilot. I wanted to be winged and silver and unseen in the dizzying heights of the stratosphere, where I would drop from the safety of cumulus and prey on enemy fleets and cities whose surprised citizens would speak not a single word I could comprehend. Nor would I even hear their cries of pain and death. Pilots are granted the luxury of not witnessing the results of their terrible passage, their rapacious encounters with earth; they are far removed from the carnage, grief, and destruction that their visitation inevitably brings to the targeted population. I wonder how many humans have died because sons wanted to prove themselves worthy of their fathers? I used to dream constantly of diving toward the earth, machine guns blazing, rockets streaking from beneath my wings, companies of enemy soldiers falling on their bellies in fearful adoration of my swift approach. This was the cyclical dream of the future aviator when the only wars I won were fought at night.
Yet even before I came to the Institute I knew I could not be an aviator, despite my promise to my father. The vision in my right eye began to go bad in my final year in high school, and aviators have perfect eyes. It was the first absolute proof that I saw the world differently from my father, and by extension, from all aviators and Marines. When I took another eye test at the Institute, hoping to get a waiver on the requirement for 20/20 vision, the doctors found an additional flaw: color blindness of the red-green variety. It was further proof that I looked upon the world differently from others.
Later I would think of this myopia and color blindness as my salvation from a predestined course. The black, horn-rimmed glasses that I wore for driving were the first signal that my destiny was not inalterably preordained. It was the beginning of a long, convoluted crystallization that would prevent me from serving in Vietnam. At first it had nothing to do with the war itself; I thought it had to do with my not being able to fly. Because of my father’s legendary heroism on Iwo Jima, I did not want to be a grunt. Nor did I want to die in a
country of whose troubled existence I had only so recently learned. But in the committed, engaged milieu of the Institute, my decision not to enter the military was looked upon with alarm by both cadets and the administration. Because there was a war going on and because the Institute was losing a number of its graduates each month, my refusal to sign an Army contract my junior year was seen as a betrayal of the Institute and an act of minor sedition against my country.
The Institute took a remarkably proprietary attitude about the war. At first, the war stimulated enrollment and conferred a sense of mission on the school, a stature and an eminence it did not enjoy during those rare times when the United States was not trading the blood of its sons for the blood of other, darker, sons. Nothing made the college prouder than the death of a graduate in combat. We kept a tally of those fallen heroes and felt that we were in direct competition with the service academies as to who would have the most graduates killed in Vietnam. Careful records were kept, and when Captain David Foxworth Johnson was killed while leading a night patrol in October of 1966, we pulled ahead of West Point for the first time. When the Regimental Adjutant announced this fact, the mess hall ignited in a spontaneous chant from the Corps, “We’re Number One. We’re Number One. We’re Number One.” It was done with the highly oxygenated, disingenuous, high-humored esprit of boys still young enough to laugh at death. The black, grisly humor of the barracks even viewed the death of heroes with a gruff and vigorous irreverence. Until we began to recognize the names of the graduates killed, until we began to hear the names of our friends included on the fatality lists. Then the war became ugly and serious; then, and only then, did it become real.
Yet even then humor remained the one legitimate response to diffuse the horror of those weekly reports from the front. Often it would appear as graffiti on latrine walls. One could trace the political and sociological history of the Institute by collecting the most representative and angrily comic examples of graffiti from its latrines.
In 1966 most of the graffiti were partisan editorials about the war in Vietnam. One grouping was a series of suggestions for ways to end the war: train packs of piranhas to swim up North Vietnamese rivers and chow down on anything with slanty eyes and a rice base; invite the leaders of North Vietnam, China, and Russia to America for peace talks and make them eat in the Institute mess hall—they’d all be dead in forty-eight hours; parachute the Bear into Hanoi alone—give him a day or two to rack ass and shape the place up; parachute John Alexander into Hanoi—he’d be such a pain in the ass the North Vietnamese would voluntarily leave Hanoi.
Beneath this series of proposals scribbled in an angry, almost illegible prose was this sentence: You chicken shit fucks, how dare you make fun of the war when our boys are getting it every fucking day.
But even this was not the final word. Even this furious anonymous cadet had merited a response: Big deal, hero—I’m getting it from Third Battalion Mary every fucking day.
The latrine walls became a battleground between cadets who wanted the war treated with reverence and those who insisted on treating it with skepticism, with the Corps’s supernatural gift for reducing sacred topics to absurdity. In the Corps that often was an act of reverence in itself.
In 1964 they began to hang the portraits of graduates killed in Vietnam in the library. This was a commendable idea in the early stages of the war, but by 1966 the bottom floor of the library was a depressing gallery of toothy, clean-cut young men cut down in various horrible ways before they had reached their twenty-fifth birthdays. The librarian discovered that the cadets had begun to gravitate to the second floor, so as to study in an area not haunted by those sweet doomed faces who had left the Corps only a brief time ago. The cadets began calling the library’s first floor “the body bag.” When the librarian asked the General for funds to build a special addition on the library to house the portraits, word was in the barracks that afternoon that the librarian had requested a building the size of a gymnasium as the only structure large enough to handle the number of projected fatalities from the war. The Institute was doing its job well and preparing its two thousand sons in the barracks to die prettily for their country. And there was this splendid reward for dying: You got your portrait in the library.
During those four years in Charleston we wore the outline of Vietnam etched indelibly on our consciousness. In military science class, we followed battles, skirmishes, and troop movements; we planned imaginary landings of assault troops near Haiphong, envelopments of Hanoi, the mining of rivers, and the limited use of nuclear warheads. So often did I study the map of Vietnam that I retained the image of its shape while dreaming. But I did not dream of maps. I saw myself in a twisted coffin shaped like Vietnam. My body was broken and fitted into the grotesque shape of the coffin, and there were maggots swarming beneath the lids of my decomposing eyeballs as an artist made a preliminary sketch for my portrait that would hang in the Institute’s library. Almost all cadets, no matter how irreverently they referred to the war, were looking forward to leading troops into battle—it was the grand guignol of our generation, the testing ground of valor—and the collective eyes of the Corps were turned in an eagergaze toward Asia with all the blind irrational instincts of rutting boys, as new portraits began to arrive at the library each month, and as we began to recognize the faces in the portraits. I do not remember a single day of my college career when we did not discuss the war. But because we were at a military college, the war became an article of religious faith and to question it was an unforgivable blasphemy. We did not receive a college education at the Institute, we received an indoctrination, and all our courses were designed to make us malleable, unimaginative, uninquisitive citizens of the republic, impregnable to ideas—or thought—unsanctioned by authority. We learned to be safe; we learned to be Americans. Many of us learned too much and many too little, and far too many of us ended up on the walls of the library.
The entire design of our education at the Institute was the creation of the citizen soldier, a moral amphibian who could navigate both the civilian and the military worlds with equal facility. It demanded a limitless conformity from its sons, and we concurred blindly. We spent our four years as passionate true believers, catechists of our harsh and spiritually arctic milieu, studying, drilling, arguing in the barracks, cleaning our rooms, shining our shoes, writing on the latrine walls, writing papers, breaking down our rifles, and missing the point. The Institute was making us stupid; irretrievably, tragically, and infinitely stupid.
I did not know this when I was a cadet; this is the accumulated bitterness of an older man obsessed by memory. At that time I only had a glimmer of this intuition. At that time I only knew that I did not see things exactly as my classmates did. Something was different about me, and I suffered because of that difference. But I did know this: In my senior year I was beginning to learn how to discriminate between an idea that was for me and one that was for all the rest. And I was beginning to understand in a visceral inchoate way that every single thing I had been taught or had learned on my own since I was a child contained the elements of a lie. The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest.
I was reading the News and Courier on the Thursday morning before our first basketball game with Auburn. I had just read Lord Ashley Cooper’s column about his hatred of okra in any form, fried, boiled, baked, or in a gumbo, when I came across a small article about the Institute. General Durrell had announced that the Institute, attuned to the needs of the military, would begin teaching courses in the Vietnamese language and the history of Southeast Asia the following semester. I read one of the General’s quotes to my roommates. “We will need alumni who can interrogate enemy prisoners with dispatch,” the General had said.
“Can you see me interrogating some Vietcong bastard after I take that course?” I asked my roommates while putting the paper down on my desk.
“I wouldn’t interrogate nobody,” Pig said matter-of-factly. “I’d just cut their fucking balls off. It’s an international language.”
“Pig, why don’t you go out and organize an International Committee for Idjits?” Mark said.
“You almost flunked French, Will,” Tradd said. “So you know you aren’t going to take any silly course in the Vietnamese language.”
“Man, I’m a born interrogator,” I disagreed. “I’ll prove it to you. Tradd, you sit in that chair and pretend you’re the meanest fucking Vietcong who ever lived. Good. Put your hands behind your back like you were tied up. Now, here’s the scene,” I said, speaking directly to Pig and Mark, ignoring the prisoner. “This important Vietcong prisoner is brought to my tent. He’s a tiny little fucker. He’s been wounded in a fire fight and he knows Ho Chi Minh personally. We’ve got to extract information from him. So the brass calls for the best master of the Vietnamese language in the whole fucking army, Colonel Will McLean, who has risen in the ranks faster than anyone in the history of the American military.”
“Oh, sure, Will,” Tradd groaned.
“Fat chance, Toecheese,” Pig chimed in.
“Riii-gght,” Mark added.
I ignored them and continued, “Will is a changed man after graduating from the Institute and spending two years in the jungle fighting gooks and acting with incredible courage. Who wouldn’t be changed after winning two Congressional Medals of Honor and having personally captured General Giap after a firefight on the outskirts of Hanoi? The men in his outfit look upon Will as his roommates in college did, not as simply the greatest man who ever lived . . . no, that does not adequately describe their adoration of him. They look upon him quite simply as a god, a god among men. They affectionately refer to him as Colonel Will, that fighting fucking fool.”