By Scott Graber
It is Friday morning, brisk and bright. This morning I’m cleaning up after sharing breakfast and conversation with three Citadel classmates — three boys I met in August of 1963.
We were incoming freshmen, “knobs” in Citadel parlance, and as we sat in barber chairs being shorn of our long, summer-bleached locks, we instinctively knew this was going to be a tough time. Each of us wondered whether we could withstand the coming storm; and there were those who did not.
Pat Conroy wrote about this particular year in his novel, “Lords of Discipline.” Thereafter his book was turned into a movie and the four of us have gathered together — perhaps for the last time — to view that movie at Beaufort’s Performing Arts Center.
Because John Sams, Buff Stansbury, Jack Healan and I were short; we were put into India Company — where we would endure seven months of punches to the chest, push-ups in the latrine; running in formation thought the campus at midnight; and screaming criticism of our shoes, brass and facial features. None of us did much studying and none of us knows how we survived physics, chemistry and French.
But we did survive, and did graduate, and when we walked back out of the Lesesne Gate we did so with the knowledge we had done something hard, and that this difficult passage had changed us.
But how?
John, Buff and Jack went to Vietnam and fought with distinction. I went to law school and while I was learning torts in Washington, D.C., Vietnam came to an end. I didn’t do any shooting (except at the Army’s Infantry School) and my Citadel-learned lessons never got tested. Not in combat.
John Sams flew artillery shells and c-rations onto quickly built dirt runways never meant to receive a fully loaded airframe. Jack dropped flares on North Vietnamese trucks. And while they flew Buff was on the ground engaging the North Vietnamese face to face. I have always wondered if their bravery was learned by their time at The Citadel; or had it always been there?
John Sams stayed in the Air Force (after Vietnam) and would become a three-star general. Jack Healan flew airplanes for Sea Pines Plantation and eventually took over the development of Amelia Island Plantation, turning a large tract of beachfront (near Jacksonville, Fla.) into a world-class resort. Buff Stansbury got his MBA when he came back from Vietnam, then went to work for the State of Maryland becoming its Chief (commercial property) Assessor.
I have always wanted to know if their professional success had anything to do with lessons learned on the red and gray checkerboard-painted quadrangle of Law Barracks? Were there any lessons learned on “Hell Night” that made them resilient, focused, more determined? Did going through the plebe year crucible (long before the Marine Corps created its “Crucible” on Parris Island) make us better people?
This year’s Conroy Literary Festival is focused on the “Lords of Discipline” and Pat’s uneven, unhappy years at The Citadel.
The “Lords of Discipline” was fiction — there was no secret group within the Corps empowered to terroriz the first Black cadet — but the constant, sustained screaming took its toll. Each of us has memories of midnight “sweat parties” in the latrine; of holding a nine-pound rifle at arm’s length; of those who collapsed in the super-heated bathrooms and were dragged away. Later today (before the movie) there will be a panel discussion about those nights of fear and loathing.
Earlier this morning we identified, by name, the cadet sergeant who went after each of us.
“You don’t belong here, Graber. You will never, as long as I have any say about it, wear the ring. Why don’t you save both of us time by going down to the guardroom and calling your mother …” (This is the sanitized version.)
We all know the old chestnut, “What does not kill you makes you stronger …” But there is that moment when physical testing crosses a line and becomes sadism. There is that experience that leaves a person damaged, not stronger.
At one point Jack Healan sighed and said that “climbing out of the ditch — busted-up and bloody — is more important than successfully jumping the ditch.”
And there is no question that each of us fell into a variety of ditches in the course of our lives. Maybe the lesson we learned (Jack continued) “was getting up, getting out, moving on.”
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
