The Lords of Discipline (22 page)

When I thought I could not endure another moment, Blasingame ordered us to hit the ground and we obeyed his order gratefully. My body entered the mud with a feeling of exquisite relief. We snaked our way back to the dry land on our bellies, fingering our way through the mud and marsh grass and destroying a large colony of fiddler crabs in our passage. The mud felt delicious and cool.

When we reached solid land again, they lined us up in long squads, laughing at our appearance. Now we were ludicrous, like actors in blackface. They assured us again and again that this ceremony in the marsh was simply an amusing preliminary, that the plebe system had not even begun. A freshman behind me began crying. Two of the cadre cut him out of the platoon and began racking him somewhere behind us. He was still crying when they ran us back to the barracks to face Hell Night. They wanted us showered and fresh for the real test. And as we ran, I could no longer control my terror. I could no longer pretend I was brave or calm or anything but afraid. Of the sixty mud-stained plebes who quick-timed back to fourth battalion, ten of us would be leaving the Institute the next morning. I was not the only freshman suffering from a severe crisis of nerves.

At 2000 hours Hell Night began. They herded us into the large alcove room on the first division, dressed in our bathrobes, underwear, fatigue caps, and flip-flops. They had turned on the radiators in the room that morning and locked the windows. Outside in an airless, humid Charleston night, the temperature was ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit. We could hear the hammering of the radiators furiously working out of season, and the heat in the room dazzled and staggered us simultaneously. Our collective stink after a minute in the room repelled even us. There was something tropical and malarial in the corrupt fragrance in the room.

As I entered, I heard a radio somewhere in the barracks loudly playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I would never hear that song again without feeling the urgent movement of plebes being driven into that dark cell of heat and violence. I would never be able to appreciate the music of the Beatles, never be able to define my coming of age through their joyous lyrics, because of that one radio playing that one song as I moved into the alcove room for the opening ceremonies of Hell Night. The Beatles died for me at that very moment, long before they ripened into the definitive voice of my generation. For in some far more essential way, I was abandoning my membership in that generation by the mere act of entering that room.

Only two members of the cadre, both sophomore corporals, were responsible for herding us into that room, but they packed us in with remarkable economy. It was as though some cynical modern theologian had challenged them to stand sixty freshmen on the head of a pin.

“Tighter. Tighter, dumbheads,” they shouted. “Stick your dick into the asshole of the knob in front of you. Keep your eyes straight ahead. Tighter, people. Tighter.”

We stood in a moist, trembling rectangle of flesh. An immense psychological pressure, palpable and inchoate, was loose in that room. Panic blossomed in grotesque and lurid forms among the freshmen in the sinking half-light of a luminous and mysterious dusk. In the shimmering greenhouse of the alcove, we sweated and waited in melancholy silence for the entrance of the full cadre.

After fifteen minutes, they marched into the room in an immaculate single file, moving with such precision that they seemed otherworldly, superhuman. They were elite and slim and malignant. Their presence was an articulate tribute to the force and puissance of men united by indivisible will, by absolute conviction. They were dressed in freshly starched cotton uniforms. Their grooming was impeccable. They were what we aspired to be. Circling us, they stood at attention, wincing as they caught the smell of us.

I heard someone else enter the room. His footsteps echoed loudly as though he were goose-stepping into the alcove. There was malice in his approach. He mounted a table directly in front of the plebes. Behind me, a freshman breathed hotly on my neck. I could feel the buttocks of the boy in front of me pressed flat against my groin. My arms were pinned to my side by the pressure of arms on my right and my left. Sweat poured down my body, and my eyes burned with salt and fatigue. The atmosphere was so thick and overheated it was like breathing underwater.

The figure on the table was R Company’s first sergeant, Maccabee. He eyed us with contempt for several moments, then screamed out, “Sit down, dumbheads.”

In the crash that followed in blind obedience to that single command, I do not understand why bones were not broken or why someone was not seriously hurt. We landed together in a massive, disarranged pile. My right leg was draped over someone’s shoulder. Someone sat on my left arm. I was sitting astride another boy’s leg. But they let us writhe and maneuver like worms in a can until at last all of us could see the speaker, who stood rigidly on the table slapping his open palm with a swagger stick.

Then Maccabee began to speak in a deep, pitiless voice: “Gentlemen, I am your first sergeant and I want you to prepare for the ram.”

He slapped his swagger stick loudly against his open palm.

“It is my responsibility, gentlemen, to turn this pile of maggot-sperm into Institute men. From what I have seen already from this putrid mound of dogshit, I think I have been assigned a hopeless task. But with the help of this cadre and this swagger stick I’m going to do my best to make sure that Romeo Company remains the best goddam company in the Corps. To accomplish this, gentlemen, I’m going to jack this swagger stick up your foul assholes every time I get near you this year. I’m going to be a monster who screams at you during every waking moment. I’m going to be watching every single move you make this year, gentlemen. For tonight we begin the long agonizing journey that will transform you from worthless scumbags into full-fledged Institute men. The cadre has an awesome responsibility to uphold. We are responsible to all the men who wear the ring not to allow any diarrhea to survive the plebe system. No diarrhea, I repeat, gentlemen. No diarrhea will wear the ring. That is my personal vow to you.

“There are sixty of you in this room tonight. When your class graduates in four years, there will be only twenty survivors from this room. Most of you will leave the first year. Some of you will not measure up academically; some of you will leave for honor violations; and some of you”—he paused dramatically—“will leave tonight.

“I will tell you what we, the cadre, expect from you. We expect—as you were—we demand absolute unquestioning obedience from you at all times. If you hesitate, if you question, if you refuse, then the full fury of this cadre will descend upon you in terrible force, and together we will drive you out of this school in forty-eight hours. No knob can withstand the power and the fury of the brotherhood when it is directed at him alone. Your only chance for survival is to band together in a tight, impregnable brotherhood of your own, to protect each other, to care for each other, and to lean on each other from this day forward until the day you graduate.

“As for myself,” he continued, his cold eyes loathing us, “I would like to see every single one of you abortions pack your bags tonight and run home to your mother’s skirts. This is the worst looking bunch of knobs that has entered the Institute in twenty years. But, gentlemen, I assure you that if you make it through the plebe system of Romeo Company, you could walk through the Gates of Hell and think you were entering Paradise instead. When you scumbags return to your rooms tonight, if you have enough strength left in your puny bodies to pick up a pen, I want you to write a letter to your mother and give her your love. Then I want you to write a letter to your girl friend and give her your heart. Then I want you to get down on your knees, say a prayer to God, and give him your soul.”

Then he screamed, “Because, shitheads, as of this very moment, your asses belong to Maccabee!” Saliva ran from his mouth to his chin. He was beating the swagger stick furiously into his palm as though his left hand was boneless, nerveless tissue.

“Look up, dumbheads!” he commanded, his voice breaking with anger. Our necks moved simultaneously and we stared at the ceiling of the room. The sweat changed directions and began to flow into our ears.

“Do you see the hand of God coming down from heaven to help you, scumbags? Do you see the heavenly host coming to your rescue? No, dumbheads. You don’t see anything. Because there’s nothing to see, maggot-shits. No power on heaven or earth can help you now. You are beyond all help. You belong to me and me alone and I want each one of you to know that I’m a fucking maniac. I am stark raving mad and if it were up to me, if the fucking Commandant’s Department would let me have my way, I’d pump this room full of DDT and let all of you die like the roach turds you really are. I’ve been insane for so long, criminally insane, douchebags, psychotically out of my fucking tree, that it gives me kind of a warm feeling all over when I think about sticking my swagger stick up your fucking asses and have it come out all slick with your blood and intestines. But the reason you don’t see the hand of God coming out of the heavens to help deliver you from this fucking madman first sergeant who’s in control of your destiny is that God has ceased to exist for any of you. He doesn’t care a fucking thing for a single one of you. He’s dead for you all. Your new God is your first sergeant, the great god Maccabee. Look at me now, dumbheads. Stare into the crazy wild eyeballs of your new God. I am your God and you will obey my commandments or I’ll jack it up your filthy asses.

“Here is your new bible,” he said, holding aloft a copy of the Blue Book, which contained the rules and regulations of the Institute. “And here is what your new, insane, knob-destroying God thinks of your old Bible.”

He threw his swagger stick to the floor and drew his long sword from his shining scabbard. Upon the wooden table by his feet lay a thick black Bible. He plunged his sword into the Bible with a deep, savage thrust, then lifted the skewered book aloft and held it high above his head. The Bible had been soaked in lighter fluid. With his free hand he lit a match, touched it to the book, which exploded into flames. The pure bright sacrilegious fire illuminated the grinning faces of the cadre, who had turned their faces toward the macabre light. The first sergeant moaned as he watched the thin leaves burn in sequence from Genesis to Kings, from Revelations toward Mark. Ash floated up to the ceiling in glowing black fragments. The freshmen watched. We had come to a place where a twenty-year-old boy roared out his own divinity, and the Bible was put to the sword and the torch to illustrate the preeminence of discipline. We were entering into the dark country of the plebe system now, and we were entering it afraid.

Then with extraordinary swiftness and efficiency, they were pushing and kicking and shoving us out the door toward the quadrangle. No lights were on in the barracks. The intense heat of the night air was deliciously cool after the steaming alcove room. The other three companies in the battalion had already completed their preliminary ceremonies, and their freshmen were already lined up in braced squads on the quadrangle. Our cadre divided us into squads often and put us into the plebe brace for the first time since we had arrived, with our chins rammed painfully against our necks and our spines rigid. The brace was the symbol that the plebe system had officially begun.

After aligning us, the cadre slipped quietly out of sight. The barracks was completely dark. There was not a single sound in fourth battalion. The silence roared in our ears. Screaming had become a natural part of our environment. Without it, something was not right. There was something wicked in the air. Nothing had alarmed me quite so much since I had come to the Institute as the volatile dissonance of that exquisite soundlessness. There was not a single upper-classman on the quadrangle. My neck was already sore from the effort of pulling my chin hard against the upper vertebrae. The mosquitoes found us and began stinging the back of my legs, bringing back memories of the marsh. Somewhere in the barracks, the cadre watched and bided their time. I seized the opportunity to gather my wits with the acrid smell of the burning Bible still in my nostrils.

At the front sally port, the Officer of the Guard, with deliberate clumsiness, performed an elaborate ceremony locking the front gate. We heard it clang shut, the heavy key twist, and the lock slam into place. Now, the outside world could not enter fourth battalion to witness the second phase of Hell Night. Nor could any of us leave.

The loudspeaker switched on and an unseen musician played “Home, Sweet Home” on a harmonica. The harmonica whined and quavered. Normally I would have thought this touch very amusing, but I had noticed a serious diminishment of my sense of humor in the past two days.

When the music stopped there was a brief pause. Someone tapped on the microphone three times. Then he cleared his throat. A voice, pure and dutiful, spoke with resolution.

“Gentlemen,” the voice said, as I tensed, “this is your regimental commander.”

“It’s coming,” I thought, “it’s coming now.”

I looked to the right and left without moving my head. I wanted to prepare myself. I wanted to make sure the cadre was not stealing up on us from the side. I saw nothing. I did not know what was going to happen but I could feel the amazing tension in the barracks. I could sense the invisible readiness of the cadre.

Then the voice continued: “The plebe system for the class of 1967 is
now
in effect.”

And they were on us.

The cadres of the four companies exploded out from their hiding places beneath the stairwells. They came in one violent full-throated roar of havoc. The lights were thrown on simultaneously. The light, so sudden, entered our retinas like acid. They fell on us in a crazed venomous pack. They seemed to be everywhere at once. Light and sound, light and fear, they boiled out onto the quadrangle in rabid, delirious bands. First the dark, then the light, then the screams, then their hot breath against our necks and ears, then the cry of them, the terrible roar of them abusing us, loathing us, hitting us, violating us, breaking us down to creatures less than human, less than they were. Disorder reigned in the bitter heat. I lost all control, and in that first moment, something began to die in me while something new and extraordinary began to live.