The Boo (12 page)

3. The offense was most graciously intentional.

FORM CORRECT D.D.T. Ex. Off.        /s/ Bobbie

               ALIAS “THE TRACKER”

               CADET SLOB 1st CLASS

               O. G. NUMBER 3 BARRACKS

MIKE

Mike O‘Brien did not want to come to The Citadel in the first place. He hated the idea of going to a military college. He begged his parents to let him go somewhere else. But his father, a Marine Corps Colonel, thought the discipline and regimented life of The Citadel would be good for his troublesome son. Mike was a free spirit in high school and his father reasoned that the boy needed a period of confinement and control during his college days. In the fall of 1963, Mike entered Lesesne Gate. He entered Lesesne Gate bitterly. From his first day as a plebe, Mike fought the system with unwavering dedication.

He gained notoriety his very first week. In those days only seniors were allowed to walk across the hallowed turf of the parade ground. Mike was caught twice during plebe week sauntering across this forbidden land. In the same week one of his classmates bumped into him during a sweat party and Mike landed a right cross on his jaw. An angular platoon leader was giving Mike a little extra attention one night after mess and was slightly taken aback when Mike called him a “skinny little bastard.” Within two weeks, the name “O‘Brien” had won a permanent niche in campus conversation. O‘Brien stories enlivened bull sessions during evening study period. Seniors from three battalions traveled down to Bravo Company to catch a glimpse of the foolhardy knob who defied the system with such disregard for his own personal comfort. “B” Company upper-classmen devised every torture known to man trying to break O‘Brien’s spirit. They put him “on the wall” for hours at a time. They stuffed him into a steel locker and blew cigarette smoke into the vents. They made him do pushups until he dropped from exhaustion. They humiliated him at mess, starved him at mess, and refused to acknowledge his presence at mess. They screamed obscenities at him; they appealed to his pride and masculinity. They did all these things, but they never broke O‘Brien. They never cracked the veneer of his hostility and bitterness. He fought The Citadel with every waking breath and with all the resources available to him. No matter how much pressure the upperclassmen exerted against him, nothing seemed to phase O‘Brien. When the battalion commander tried to have a serious, man-to-man talk with him, O‘Brien laughed in his face. The shocked battalion commander, who was accustomed to being treated like an anthropomorphic god by freshmen, decided to present the case of O‘Brien to the Commandant’s Department and
The Boo.

The Boo
gave O‘Brien an order for failure to follow verbal commands. On the first day of tour formation
The Boo
went up to O‘Brien and congratulated him heartily for being the first member of his class to walk tours. This was akin to being congratulated for being the first to contact whooping cough.
The Boo
then asked O‘Brien what exactly was eating him, why he could not adapt to the system, and why he had gained such widespread notoriety in a brief two weeks. O‘Brien listened to
The Boo
stoically. He said “Yes, Sir” in the proper places. He was neither disrespectful nor obsequious. But after a five minute conversation,
The Boo
knew intuitively that O‘Brien was trying his damndest to separate himself from the Corps of Cadets.

The Boo
moved him to Fourth Battalion in an effort to save him. Had O‘Brien been a typical knob, this strategy might have been effective. But O‘Brien was a super-knob whose reputation traveled before him, spreading the word of his spurious deeds and exploits before his arrival. When he entered Fourth Battalion, he was a marked man. He was given no chance. The Corps had marked O‘Brien for execution. In the harsh law of the Corps, the freshman who completely rebelled against the system was driven out of The Citadel by any means necessary. The hazing of this marked freshman grew more and more severe until the freshman neared the breaking point. He was given individual attention by packs of sergeants and corporals who surrounded him, shouted in his ear, abused him physically and verbally, and terrified him into leaving the school. The Citadel can be a vicious world. What I have described will not be understood by those men who graduated from The Citadel at an earlier period. The Citadel was more refined then. The hazing was not brutal. But after the second world war, a theory circulated around the military men of the college that the tougher the environment, the more resilient and more durable the leader produced. So graduates who sent their sons to The Citadel after the war never fully understood why their sons could not accept a system they had found to be so stimulating to their young manhood. In the early 1960’s, the plebe system was a kind of inquisition. When O‘Brien came along, General Tucker was effecting changes in the fourth class system which were resented bitterly by the Corps. The changes came too late to make any substantial difference in the fate of Mike O‘Brien. O‘Brien faced daily harassment by red-faced squad leaders. They stepped on his formation shoes (which is worse than having someone step on your mother’s face if you are a freshman). They tried to get his classmates to give him the cold shoulder. Through all of this, O‘Brien remained as passive as a cigar store Indian. He arrived at The Citadel physically hard. As time passed, he became harder.

The upperclassmen stuck O‘Brien with over fifty demerits the first month of school. He served confinements until, as he put it, “his ass was one big callous.” Tour formation always found him with a rifle slung carelessly over his shoulder. Seniors would stop him on his way to class to rack him for some real or imagined offense. The pressure was so intense and his reputation among the Corps so malignant that O‘Brien soon had nothing to lose. On one famous occasion, when the upperclassmen pulled a crackdown on the knobs, and all the fury of sergeantdom was released on the heads of the freshmen, several people choked back thoughts of homicide when someone noticed O‘Brien laughing in the middle of the sweat party. One sergeant pulled O‘Brien out of the shower room and stood him up against the wall. By this time, O‘Brien was laughing hysterically. The upperclassmen momentarily forgot about their party. They sent all the other freshmen to their rooms. O‘Brien quit bracing suddenly, tilted his cap over his nose in a rakish angle, leaned against the wall, and lit up a cigarette. The upperclassmen stood aghast, too mad to speak, too surprised to respond in a legitimate manner. O‘Brien smoked his cigarette slowly and thoughtfully. Then he looked at a platoon sergeant—an emaciated, spindly platoon sergeant—and said, “Smith, you are so ugly. I bet you never had a date in your life. Look at your body, Smith. My god, son, you have the worst body I have ever seen in my life.” O‘Brien took another drag on his cigarette. He then turned to another sergeant and said, “McMillan, you are big crap around this school, but you would be
nothing
in any other school in the country. Wouldn’t that be a damn joke. McMillan in a fraternity.” O‘Brien did fairly well in his denunciation of the powers above him, until he called the company commander a “fat pig.” Then the rulers of Fourth Battalion closed their broken ranks and swarmed all over O‘Brien once again. Yet it was one of O‘Brien’s finer moments as a cadet.

From the initial moment he walked on to The Citadel’s campus, O‘Brien’s one purpose in life was to leave Lesesne Gate as quickly as possible. Demerits piled up on him like ants on a dead grasshopper.
The Boo
looked at scores of white slips on O‘Brien every day.
The Boo
and the rest of the Commandant’s Department knew that O‘Brien’s days within the Corps were numbered. When
The Boo
talked to O‘Brien, the boy stated that he despised the school, but his father refused to let him leave. Finally in sheer desperation, O‘Brien walked out of his room on a Saturday when he was supposed to be serving confinements. The guard tried to stop him, but O‘Brien said he was going to watch a tennis match. The guard pulled him for skipping confinements. When O‘Brien had to write an ERW explaining his actions, he stated that he was in his room and had served all confinements that day. Seventy cadets saw him at the tennis match. O‘Brien won his freedom from The Citadel by committing an intentional honor violation.

The man who stormed into Courvoisie’s office the day of O‘Brien’s resignation was a tall, handsome soldier. He was square-shouldered, well-proportioned, and angry as hell. A silver star hung from his blouse. Colonel O‘Brien foamed in repressed anger.

“My name is O‘Brien,” the Colonel said.

“Courvoisie, Sir,”
The Boo
replied.

“Why does my son have to resign. He’s made it this far. Why don’t you let him finish the year?”

“Colonel, your son has been in trouble all year long. He’s been trying to leave The Citadel ever since he got here.”

“Well, why wasn’t my wife or I notified about it. We thought Mike was doing well up here.”

Colonel Courvoisie challenged. “I have personally sent four letters stating that your son had exceeded the limit of demerits, and asking that you encourage your son to shape up, so he could remain at The Citadel.”

“You never sent those letters to my house,” Colonel O‘Brien replied angrily.

Colonel Courvoisie asked Mrs. Petit to bring in the file on Mike O‘Brien. In the file were four letters concerning excess demerits and three letters concerning punishment orders. Colonel O‘Brien looked at the letters and mumbled something about the wife “always taking the boy’s side.”

Courvoisie told Colonel O‘Brien that The Citadel is not the right school for every boy. Mike O‘Brien left The Citadel that day without a single regret and without looking back.

THE BALLAD OF LARRY LATINI

Of all the great, muscled jocks who ripple their way southward to wage battle on The Citadel gridiron, none has inspired the number of legends or neared the proportions of an epic hero as Larry Latini. Larry looked like an uprooted oak tree. His muscles were like the knots of a dock rope and his temper was quick and volcanic. Upperclassmen knew instinctively that the Italian boy who stood before them on plebe night could break a human head like a ripe cantaloupe, so they treated him gingerly on that night and all the other nights of his freshman year. One thing almost everyone agreed on the instant he came in sight; Larry was a man.

Like many kids from tough neighborhoods, Larry knew the ins and outs of street fighting and gang warfare well. His gang ruled “the turf” of his home town and much of its success was due to Larry’s affinity for smashing the noses and splintering the jaws of rival gang members who ventured into forbidden territory. Football rescued him from the gang. He made the delightful discovery that football was a socially acceptable form of head hunting. So he began to remove limbs, gouge out eyes, and kick out the teeth of any lineman intrepid enough to challenge his charge across the line for the opposing quarterback. His prowess on the football field brought him to The Citadel.

Any boy weaned on the streets with a big city gang is going to have certain basic problems in adjusting to the regimen of Citadel life. Larry thought it stupid to follow every rule of
The Blue Book,
so he refused to adhere to some of them. This brought him in direct contact with
The Boo,
who ruled the turf around the Commandant’s Department. Larry first gained fame the summer between his freshman and sophomore year. He drove in Lesesne Gate one night and decided it was ridiculous to drive all the way around the parade ground. He had learned in physics class that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Adhering to this principle, he jumped the curb by the library and drove his car across the parade ground to first battalion. It was not a bad idea except he failed to notice the shadow of
The Boo
in the sallyport.
The Boo
ranted at Latini for a good thirty minutes. The legend had started.