“I learned how to kill a man using only my thumb.”
“Pig!” I screamed out so it could be heard throughout R Company.
“Oink,” he screamed back.
“Pig.”
“Oink.”
“Pig.”
“Oink, oink, oink, oink.”
Chapter Five
On Thursday, I received an invitation to meet with General Durrell in his office after lunch. I put on my full-dress salt-and-pepper uniform, shined my shoes and brass, and stood before the mirror as Mark expertly wrapped me in the scarlet sash required when a cadet had an audience with our remote and distinguished president. An invitation from the General was not an invitation at all. In the complex vernacular of military euphemism, it was an inescapable summons. I had sent back word through the orderly of the guard that I would be delighted and honored to accept the General’s invitation.
Delighted, honored, and extremely agitated, I arrived at the General’s office at precisely 1300 hours. Generals made me very nervous, and I avoided all encounters with them when humanly possible. But Bentley Durrell was not only a general, he was a sublime prototype of the species. On campus, General Durrell was known simply as “The Great Man.” People actually referred to him in that grandiose way, even in his presence. He was the Institute’s living memorial, their single, undeniable totem of distinction in international affairs. Seventeen nations had honored him; fourteen universities had granted him honorary degrees. The museum of the Institute on the third floor of the library overflowed with mementoes that traced the course of his exploits in the Second World War and the Korean conflict. Some considered him the greatest South Carolinian since John C. Calhoun. The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell’s ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals.
If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms. Normally, he spoke slowly and his modulation had an icy control to it, but I had witnessed many times when he had caught fire and when he did, when he arrived at a subject that consumed him, then you could see the eyes change, not the color, but the light behind the eyes, which flared whenever an article of his unwavering faith arose in a speech or a conversation. During speeches to the Corps, the indisputable power of his own rhetoric would affect him so viscerally that he would dance along a thin, precarious edge of control in constant danger of plunging headlong into much darker and more radical passions. When praising the nation or the nobility of the founding fathers’ vision, we had known him to break down almost completely, not to weep of course, but to falter, his voice breaking, his emotions poised unsteadily in a miraculous duet between virility and tears. It was the only hint that there was fury beneath the form.
Otherwise he possessed the markings of the military thoroughbred. His hair was a distinguished gray of that special silver that only seems to grow on the heads of powerful, supremely confident men. It was close-cropped and stayed in place even in high winds. His nose was long and finely shaped; generals are a long-nosed, strong-jawed race. He was bred to wear the stars. The Presidency of the Institute was a fitting destiny for a man who had received his grandfather’s cavalry sword as a christening gift. He wore the sword whenever he reviewed the troops at Friday afternoon parade. He had kept it on his wall when he was a cadet officer at the Institute. Though he had had a congressional appointment to West Point, he had chosen to attend the Institute instead, in affirmation of his belief in the South and in Southern ways. By spurning the Point, he was following in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather. He had graduated from the Institute with extraordinary distinction and, crowning a brilliant Army career, became the first four-star general who had ever graduated from The College. As the most famous and successful of all graduates of the Institute, he offered an example to all of us of the hope and promise and possibility that life offered on the other side of graduation. And the administration constantly reminded us that Bentley Durrell had once entered the Gates of Legrand as a freshman, had once marched anonymously in the ranks of plebes, had once slept beneath the arches of second battalion. There had been a time when Bentley Durrell had been recognizably human before he walked off campus and into the history of his times. It was thought that after he returned from World War II, he would become either President of the Institute or President of the United States. He waited for his country and the Republican party to call him from his South Carolina plantation, but both decided to call Dwight David Eisenhower instead. General Durrell, it is said, never quite forgave either for their bad judgment or inferior taste. And when the Board of Visitors asked him to assume the Presidency of the Institute, he accepted with magnanimity and a certain desperation.
When I entered his office, I saluted him sharply, snapped my heels together in a satisfying, phony click, and fixed my expression in a fierce cadet’s scowl that I hoped would pass for high seriousness. In my full dress, I looked like one of Napoleon s grenadiers, even though I felt like the king of the penguins.
The General waved me into my seat with a magisterial sweep of his long slender arm. Then he studied me at his leisure. He settled back into his chair behind his vast mahogany desk without his eyes ever leaving mine. From the intensity of his gaze, it was apparent that he was accustomed to staring other men into submission. He was an athlete of the stare; he enjoyed the sport. I did not and I diverted my eyes about the room. There was a cold symmetry to General Durrell’s office, a rigorous attention to detail that was both fastidious and obsessive.
“Do you think we can go all the way this year, Mr. McLean?” the General said, his soft, lethargic voice brushed by the sweet cadences and slurred elisions of the upcountry.
“All the way, sir?” I asked.
“Yes, I want to know if we can go all the way, if we can grab the brass ring.”
“All the way to what, sir? I don’t understand what you mean, sir.”
“That’s perfectly obvious, Mr. McLean,” he said, smiling and folding his hands neatly on his desk like a schoolboy. “I want to know if our basketball team can go all the way and win the Southern Conference championship.”
“I hope so, sir. I think we’ll have a pretty good team, sir,” I answered, relieved that the subject was basketball.
“A pretty good team is not good enough and neither is your answer. I suggest that you answer, ‘We’ll have a great team, sir, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t win the national championship.’ ”
“We’ll have a great team, sir, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t win the national championship,” I replied with the required brio, although I could think of a hundred reasons why we wouldn’t win that championship.
“Splendid! Splendid!” he cried out. “It’s all in the mind, Mr. McLean. The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism. I saw it when I led troops into battle. I never lost a single battle in my career as a field commander, because the word ‘retreat’ was not a part of my vocabulary. I didn’t know what it meant and neither did my men. The exact same thing applies to athletics. So do you think we can go all the way this year?”
“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t win the national championship, sir,” I repeated, feeling even more idiotic.
“That’s the spirit, Mr. McLean. You said it with even more enthusiasm the second time. Keep repeating it over and over again, and it will become an article of faith to you and your teammates. I want that kind of enthusiasm to infect the Corps this year and every year. I despise negativism, don’t you, Mr. McLean?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yet you are rather well known on campus for your negative attitude, Mr. McLean. If you despise negativism as you just professed to do, what do you think inspired this reputation?”
r /> “I have a reputation for being a little sarcastic, General. I didn’t know I had a reputation for being negative.”
“Sarcasm might be even more insidious and dangerous than negativism. Now I would like to get to the point of your visit with me this afternoon. I want you to tell me what you know about honor, Mr. McLean. I want you to define honor in your own terms. I want to ascertain if our concepts of honor are significantly different.”
“May I ask you why, sir?” I asked.
“You may not ask anything, Mr. McLean,” the General said pleasantly. “You may simply define honor for me.”
“I’m not sure I can define it in my own words, General.”
“And yet you expect to speak to the freshmen for an hour next Wednesday about the honor system.”
“Sir, I can define honor as the dictionary defines it or the honor manual. I know all those words and all those definitions. I just can’t define honor in my own words yet. The words were all written by someone else.”
“Then you are not certain what honor is?”
“No, sir, I’m not certain what honor is. I’ve been thinking about it all summer, but I’m not absolutely sure what it is or who of my friends has or does not have it.”
“That is a major difference between you and me, Mr. McLean. A major difference. I have never had to look up a definition of honor. I knew instinctively what it was. It is something I had the day I was born, and I never had to question where it came from or by what right it was mine. If I was stripped of my honor, I would choose death as certainly and unemotionally as I clean my shoes in the morning. Honor is the presence of God in man. It distresses me deeply that you are having a problem. It gives me cause to wonder about your ability to infuse the freshmen with the necessary zeal required for them to become exemplary graduates of the Institute. You must remember that the goal of the Institute is to produce ‘the Whole Man.’ The Whole Man, Mr. McLean. It is a noble concept. But the man without honor cannot be the Whole Man. He is not a man at all.”
“Sir, I do know this,” I replied, meeting his gaze directly for the first time. “When I was elected to the honor court, I made a vow to myself, to uphold the honor system as it is written. That is what the cadets of fourth battalion elected me to do, and I’m going to represent them to the best of my ability. I admit to being confused about honor and I admit to not liking some parts of the system. But if a cadet is tried before me this year and the prosecution proves to me that the cadet is a liar, a thief, or a cheat, or one who tolerates lying, stealing, or cheating, then I am going to vote guilty. I’m going to vote to have him removed from the Corps of Cadets.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to applaud this decision, Mr. McLean. You are merely doing your duty and I’ve never had any difficulty in the performance of duty. And I would like you to specify which parts of the honor system you do not happen to like.”
I hesitated a moment, then said, “I don’t like the Walk of Shame, sir.”
He gave a short laugh and responded, “You know, of course, that I instituted the Walk of Shame when I returned as President.”
Blushing, I answered, “Yes, sir, I know that.”
“And you are also aware that the number of honor violations has decreased by sixty percent since my return to the Institute.”
“Yes, sir,” I said as he rose and walked to the rear door of his office. From what appeared to be a small, well-appointed anteroom, he ushered two cadets into the office: John Alexander, the second battalion commander, and his exec, a spaniel-eyed boy named Wayne Braselton, whose identity was irretrievably fastened to the destiny of the fiercer, more charismatic Alexander. John Alexander was a splendid looking cadet, erect and arrogant, with an instinct for survival in the Corps that was as uncanny as it was disingenuous. They walked to the two leather chairs on the right side of the General’s desk and sat facing me, not the General. Their faces were austere, inquisitorial. Then I heard the General’s voice again: “Mr. McLean, you know your classmates, Cadet Alexander and Cadet Braselton, I’m sure. They asked to meet with you in my presence. These two cadets are concerned about the efficacy of allowing a senior private to address the incoming freshmen. They feel strongly that a cadet officer would make a much better impression on the freshmen. Is this not correct, gentlemen?”
“Yes, sir,” Alexander answered forcefully, with Braselton nodding his vigorous assent. “We feel that the training cadre is composed of specially selected elite men whose personal appearance and devotion to military excellence provide a high standard for the plebes to emulate. Mr. McLean is well known in the Corps for not taking the military part of the Institute seriously. We feel that this attitude could only harm the freshmen and undermine the plebe system. We feel that a substitution for Mr. McLean should be made for the good of all concerned. If necessary, Mr. Braselton or I will assume Mr. McLeans responsibilities of helping to indoctrinate the freshmen in the honor system.”
“Gee, thanks a lot, John,” I said, trying to control my anger. “What a grand, selfless gesture on your part. But I think the freshmen will survive a single hour’s exposure to my grossness.”
“There’s a principle involved here, Mr. McLean,” the General replied. “One that I do not think you are grasping. If we allow a private to influence the thinking of the recruits, then a precedent has been set. But if we continue to uphold our standards, the highest standards of any military college in the world, I cannot help but think that our system is growing stronger and that our vigilance will be rewarded. I agree that our cadre should be composed only of the most select cadets in the Corps. I owe that to the freshmen, to their parents, to the men of the line.”
“That was very well put, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Alexander said with Braselton nodding passionately.
The General did not mind Alexander’s saying so; in fact, he was radiant and positively enchanted by Alexander’s oily compliment. If I ever attend a convention of generals, I hope to control the Chapstick concession to offer some small relief to the obsequious legions of ass-kissers who spend their days pandering to the egos of generals. Every general I had ever known required the presence and the gentle, insincere strokes of these self-serving acolytes of flattery and I simply could not understand it.
“Sir,” I spoke directly to the General, “Cadet Alexander and I are not friends.”
“That is true, sir,” Alexander replied. “I do not like what Mr. McLean represents in the Corps of Cadets.”
“What exactly does Mr. McLean represent?” the General asked, leaning toward Alexander and cupping his hand over his right ear.
“He represents the negative attitude, sir. He makes fun of the traditions of the school. . . sacred traditions like the ring and the uniform and even the cadet prayer. I myself heard him give a profane and disgusting rendition of the cadet prayer while R. Company was forming up to march to chapel.”
“A profane rendition of the cadet prayer?” the General said with a gasp.
“It wasn’t that profane, General,” I whined.
Braselton, sensing the kill, suddenly burst out, “And his appearance is a disgrace, sir. That is how I would put it after careful thought. He goes out of his way to wear a uniform that is wrinkled and brass that’s scratched. And his shoes are a joke throughout the Corps. That’s how I would put it, sir. After careful thought. His shoes are a joke.”
“What do you say in your defense, Mr. McLean?” the General asked.
“Sir, you and all my classmates know that I have not performed splendidly in the military part of Institute life. This is my fourth straight year as a private. But I have heard you say before, General, that the ideal cadet excels militarily, academically, and athletically. I have a better academic record than these two cadets, and I’m captain of this year’s basketball team. So using your own criteria for measuring the model cadet, I have done well in two areas of achievement and these two have excelled in only one. Therefore, I feel I’m just as well qualified to address the fr
eshmen as they are.”
“It is Mr. McLean’s attitude that we object to, General,” Alexander interjected. “I think you can see from the way he tries to attack Mr. Braselton and me personally that his attitude leaves much to be desired. We question his love of the Institute and his devotion to the Corps. This is not a personal attack on Mr. McLean, and we think it is immature of him to consider it such.”
“Sir,” I answered, looking at the General. “The members of fourth battalion selected me as their honor representative. Me, Will McLean. The cadets could have selected Mr. Alexander or Mr. Braselton. For whatever reasons, they chose to select me instead. The members of the honor court then chose me to be vice chairman of the court. I have never taken the military seriously. But I’m taking my position in the honor court very seriously. The Corps entrusted me with the responsibility of serving on the honor committee without conferring with these two gentlemen. It appears presumptuous to me for these two gentlemen to try to interfere with the will of the Corps.”
“I believe we are acting in the best interest of the Corps, General,” Alexander said.
“I appreciate your concern, Mr. Alexander, and I will take what you say under consideration.”
“I resent Mr. McLean’s implication that he is more honorable because he happened to win a popularity contest among cadets, General.”
“I’m sure Mr. McLean was not impugning your honor, Mr. Alexander. Good day, sir. And thank you for sharing your views so openly. It takes courage to criticize one of your classmates man to man.”
The two cadets saluted and left the room. It struck me as both odd and symbolic that we should be ushered in and out of the General’s presence through different doors. Before he left, Alexander shot me a languid, supercilious look. I grinned at him, and with the General’s back to me as he escorted them to the door, I shot Alexander the bird. It might have been the first finger thrown in the august confines of that room.
The General returned to his seat, smiling, folded his hands beneath his chin, and immobilized me with the withering crossfire of his eyes again. Then the smile vanished and the voice, husky and controlled, filled the room again. My anger had passed when the two cadets departed and my instinctive fear of the General returned to fill up the void.