"Are you all right?" I asked. I was still crying.

"Yes. I think so," he answered. "Thanks for helping me."

"I can't believe this is happening to me," I said.

"It's awful. It's simply awful."

"Where's my roommate?" I asked, looking around the room.

"I don't know your roommate. I don't even know you."

"My name's Will."

"Thanks again, Will."

"What's your name?"

We lay face to face, tears on our cheeks.

"My name is Tradd," he said. "I'm from Charleston."

"We've got to get up, Tradd. The animals are calling again."

Again, I tried to lift myself up off the floor, but I still could not summon enough strength to support my own weight. Tradd got slowly to his feet and began helping me rise. Elements of both our friendship and our survival were mysteriously contained in those tender, solicitous moments, as I put my arm around his shoulder and we leaned against each other. Through the long tyranny of that night, something had begun to stir and kick inside us. We were crying, but we were not quitting. Invisibly contained in both of us were the seeds that would ensure the propagation of the system.

"To the showers, people!" a voice commanded outside on the galleries. "Clean your loathsome bodies, dumbwads."

The sound of the enemy's voice again brought me erect and ready to face them again. Tradd and I stared at each other with a sense of impending loss.

"Can we be friends, Tradd?" I asked. "I don't have any friends here."

"We already are," he answered.

Then we exited the room and joined the long line of plebes being driven in single file to the shower room.

In the shower room, we stripped naked and ran through two lines of jeering upperclassmen, who shoved us roughly into the cold water that sprayed from the six nozzles. They permitted us to remain under the water for only a few seconds, then forced us out of the shower, handed us bars of soap, and ordered us to lather up. They sent us sprinting back to our rooms with the soap caked all over our glistening bodies. The sweat and the soap and the stench combined to make our skin feel lizard-like. I stumbled back into the room and began trying to clean off the soap in the small sink by the door.

I was completely naked when the first sergeant and the company commander burst into my room.

"Room, attention!" I cried out, and went into a brace.

"Where's your roommate, McLean?" Blasingame asked. "Pop off."

"I don't know, sir," I answered. "I haven't seen him since after mess, sir."

"Did you see him anytime tonight?" Maccabee asked. "Pop off."

"I didn't see anybody tonight, sir."

"No one saw Clearwater on the quadrangle, McLean. And he's not at the hospital."

"Do you know where he is, Mr. McLean? Pop off," Blasingame said. "Pop off loud and clear, scumbag."

"No, sir."

The first sergeant went down on one knee and peered into the shadows beneath the lower bunk bed. Then he walked to my roommate's clothes press and opened it suddenly. It was empty. When he opened my press, I saw the frightened eyes of my roommate, Harvey Clearwater, blazing with something that went beyond even terror, looking past the first sergeant directly at me. He was asking me to help him, to deliver him in some way from the wrath of the cadre and the fury of the system. But I knew something about the system now and I dropped my eyes and did nothing.

"Sir, I don't belong here, sir. I just don't belong here," Harvey pleaded.

"You fucking worm," Blasingame said disgustedly. "You hid in a press while your classmates were on the quad."

"You shit on your classmates, Clearwater," the first sergeant said. "That's the only unforgivable sin at the Institute. Get out of there, scumbag. We're going to give you your own personal Hell Night."

Harvey climbed out of the press trembling violently. They shoved him out of the room and into the darkness on the gallery.

I finished washing the soap from my body. When I was done I put on a fresh pair of underwear and fell into the bottom rack without pulling down the covers. I was not the same boy who had awakened to reveille that morning. That boy was a stranger to me now and he could never be recalled. The system had transformed me into an original astonished creature. I had learned things about myself and others out there on the quadrangle that I had never known before. The cadre had ripped civilization from my back as though it were nothing more than strips of skin. They were going to change all of us into men by reducing us to children again, by breaking down every single vestige of civilization and society that we had brought to protect and sustain us. They would tame us like beasts of the field before they remade us in their own fierce image.

All through the four battalions, hurt and confused and frightened and exhausted freshmen were thinking similar thoughts. Some of them were already planning to leave; some of them would last a month; others would leave at the Christmas break. But the extraordinary power of the plebe system was demonstrated most remarkably by the fact that there were four hundred boys who arrived at the exact same decision as I did that night in their own time and for their own reasons. Four hundred terrified boys vowed to themselves that no matter what happened, they would not quit.

"I will not quit. I will not quit," I said over and over to myself.

The last thing I remember before falling into a deep, dreamless sleep was the screaming of my roommate, Harvey Clearwater.

I never saw him again.

My college education had begun.

Chapter Seventeen.

The rebel within was also born on Hell Night. On that night he took to the hills and began his long patient war of attrition against the man I was in danger of becoming. From the moment I crawled off the fourth battalion quadrangle, this lean anonymous guerrilla began a fierce and insistent rear guard action against my acceptance of the Institute's scheme of forging men out of boys.

I tried to join the flow. I wanted to participate in the plebe system as a believer, to become inflamed with the zealotry and esprit that sustained my classmates during those first dispiriting months. But the guerrilla within asserted his presence if not his primacy from the very beginning, and a small bloodless war, without strategies or anthems, began to rage for the control of my interior. This lonely, unconsenting rebel battled against the patriarchal influences that had shaped my childhood: the American South and the Catholic Church. These were the two pillars of authority upon which my life had been built, and I had learned their rituals well-their worship of order and tradition, their strict codes, their punishment of anarchy, and contempt for the man or woman who stood alone. They had not prepared me for a time in my life when I would stand alone. Yet the malnourished hill fighter, chalking slogans on the rocks and carrying on his isolated, unseen war, grew in stature during that first week. In the aftershock of Hell Night, the urgency of his protest brought reinforcements sprinting into the hills carrying news of my disaffection. Slowly, he began to threaten the whole rigidly structured, tight-assed fabric of my civilization. In the melancholy city within, the boulevards were wide and laid out in symmetrical grids, the bells of cathedrals rang on time, the cops never smiled, and the jails overflowed with silent, abused separatists. But the presence of the guerrilla, the single voice in my sad country who said "no," gave me hope that the plebe system would not mark me darkly, irretrievably. During sweat parties in that first month, losing my voice and surrounded by the cadre, I would feel him stealing up to an overhang to watch me with patient intensity. I shivered with gratitude when I heard him deep in the forests singing of my liberation, celebrating my passionate difference from the rest of them. I knew nothing about the duality of man's nature when I was eighteen, but I knew about the presence of my guerrilla, and as the months wore on, I knew that I would have to deal with his ascendancy. And I was certain that one day he would feel strong enough to storm the city and liberate it.

For the first month I made my own way and kept my mouth shut. I learned what was expected of me and I performed it with ardor and enthusiasm. I did the pushups, held out my rifle, ran the stairs, endured their screaming, suffered at mess, returned for the sweat parties after mess, memorized my plebe knowledge, and secretly began to study the system in order to learn its effect on me. I wanted to unlearn the system while I was still a part of it. Something in my character made it impossible for me to accept the validity of this long trial by humiliation. If this was an efficacious process for the training of men, I wanted no part of manhood, I was perfectly content with being a boy. I conducted my survey in private, and I learned some things that would be of value my whole life. There was an amazingly limitless capacity for ruthlessness at the heart of the family of man. Nothing I learned that year or in the years that followed made me doubt the absolute truth of that natural law I discovered during the first month of the plebe system. I saw enough cruelty in that month to last a lifetime, but I was to see a lot more.

If the cadre had been aware of my skepticism they would have run me out of the barracks within twenty-four hours. There was no toleration of dissenters in "the system." "The system" was a phrase we heard from the time we rose at reveille until we fell exhausted into our beds at night. The plebe system. The Fourth Class system. Through the system, we would learn of our inner reserves of strength, our innate capacity to resist violence. This was the sacred text of our orthodoxy. Since I did not have the courage to quit, my time in the system became an inquest into the nature of aggrieved innocence.

I had come to the Institute to pay homage to the career of my father and my promise to him on his deathbed. Like most sons of domineering men, I had a compulsive need to test the quality of my manhood by marching resolutely into the territory he had carefully marked out as his own. I had to test myself in the military environment before I could strike out independently. But my father would have laughed his way through the plebe system and laughed at the son who took it so seriously. He would have mocked the son who cried secretly into his pillow each night. My tears would have shamed him.

When I called my mother after the second week I wept as soon as I heard her voice. She sounded kind and gentle and I had forgotten what it was like to talk to someone who loved me. I told her that it was dreadful, that I had made a terrible mistake, that I wanted to quit and come home, and that the Institute was a monstrous, unspeakable place. My mother knew me well and she uttered the exact words that would make me stay. She was sure, she told me softly, that I was more of a man than any of the cadre who were mistreating me and that I would certainly want to prove that to them and to myself. I think I could have faced my own doubts about my masculinity, but under no circumstances could I face my mother's. Early on, I had contracted that dread affliction of oldest or only children-I lived for the absolute approval of my parents.

Slowly, as the days passed, the plebes in R Company began to recognize each other. We began to make the friendships and form the alliances that would ease the passage through that difficult year. The real terror of Hell Night was that we had suffered in such complete solitude. That we suffered so friendlessly, exiled among complete strangers. Only when we began to make cautious overtures to each other did any of the system's mystique accrue to us. Our survival lay in our solidarity. We began to study each other's faces and transmit unseen signals as we gave each other shirt tucks or passed on the galleries. When classes started, we spoke in whispers before chemistry professors cleared their throats or while math professors copied algebraic formulae on blackboards. When we got the opportunity to talk in those first weeks, we did not talk about where we came from or what our sisters were like or how our fathers earned their bread; no, that was the world we had forsaken, that was the free zone outside the Gates of Legrand. We talked of survival and strategy. We were learning the art of being victims, studying the craft of endurance. In those early conversations were the first intimations that we were becoming a class.

I tried to find out who these boys were, and what had drawn them to the Institute. I discovered that the Institute drew its sons from every state in the Union but it was primarily a Southern school, dedicated to the task of making Southerners. Southerners possess a simple yet magnificent obsession with all things military, and they love authority in all forms, masculine or feminine. They love to wear uniforms, shoot guns, wage war, march in parades, salute flags, and hold fast to traditions that should have died centuries before. Southerners have much in common with the rest of mankind. Even the Yankees, most of whom had been rejected by the military academies, spent their years at the Institute perfecting the unctuous skills of Southern gentlemen.

All of us were white Caucasians in the class of 1967. Six hundred Protestants, one hundred Catholics, three Jews, two Greeks, one Puerto Rican. We came from the Carolinas, the green hill country of the Blue Ridge, from cruciform towns with a single intersection, from the blue dusted mountains of Tennessee and the Gold Coast of Florida, from lowcountry towns set like elegant tables upon the green linen of marsh. Six from California, eight from Texas, and one from Idaho. Nine came from New York, three from New Jersey, twelve from the Virginias; but most came from the southeast empire, most from the Carolinas.

All of us had gathered to become Institute men. There was only one task of the fourth class system-to turn us into the exact images of the cadre who abused us-to make us want to be like them.

I did not want to be like them.

That was what made me different from my classmates, and I soon began to feel isolated from them and some of them to be wary of me. Most of them had been fully aware of the severity of the plebe system when they chose the Institute, and they welcomed its testing of their fortitude. Many of them planned to make the military their life's work. They had enrolled willingly at the Institute because of the system, not in spite of it. Their genuine enthusiasm contrasted starkly to my rejection of every indignity we suffered at the hands of the upperclassmen. To them, the excesses of the plebe system were salutary and character-building. Torture was simply an effective test of their bloom and vitality. It was the system and we had all agreed to abide by its laws. So I quit talking, even to my classmates, about my grievances against the system. I just kept my eyes open and tried to figure things out alone.

I saw that the plebe system was destroying the ability or the desire of the freshmen to use the word I . I was the one unforgivable obscenity, and the boys intrepid enough to hold fast to this extraordinary blasphemy found themselves excised from the body of the Corps with incredible swiftness. The Institute was a universe in love with the first person plural, the shout of the uniformed mob, which gave the school its fundamental identity, the source of its strength and invulnerability. The plebe system, then, infinitely reduced, was a grammarian's war between two pronouns and, infinitely extended, contained the elements of the major war of the twentieth century. The person who could survive the plebe year and still use the word I was the most seasoned and indefatigable breed of survivor. He was a man to be reckoned with, perhaps a dangerous one. No doubt, he was a lonely one. I wanted to be that man in my class. I made that pact with myself and broke it time and time again, for I was a son of the South and I had grown up using the word we when I was referring only to myself. It takes a lot more effort to unlearn things than to learn them.

By October the plebe system had changed because the freshmen had changed. They had become inured-or accustomed, at least-to the shouts of the cadre. But when the harassment of the plebe system became familiar, it also became tedious. I thought that even I had become accustomed to being afraid, and I had learned enough about the psychology of the cadre to be immune to their cruelty. It would not be the last time I would be completely wrong about my relationship to the Institute.

My task was fear. Some freshmen lost their fear very quickly; others lost their fear when it was subsumed by their total, passionate faith in the system. But I want to tell you that I never lost any of my fear. I told myself I had, but I was lying to myself. I was humiliated by the discovery of my limitless capacity for terror, for nightmare.

The Coward, though I did not know it before I came to the Institute, had a long and honorable residence in my psyche. I say honorable because I learned to pay homage to this fearful resident within. At times I could overwhelm the Coward and beat him cringing back into the dark interior, but there were other times, when the cadre was in full cry, that he took full possession of the frontier behind my eyes. He occupied me often. He was a guest of the purest fire. Each time during my freshman year that I acted bravely, I was paying ultimate homage to my cowardice. I knew I had to hide my fear. If the cadre discovered it or sensed its undermining presence, then they would come for me and they would come united. Each week the cadre selected one or two freshmen they would run out in the next forty-eight hours. They had chosen twelve boys since Hell Night and all twelve had left school soon afterward. The process was called "The Taming."

Few boys survived the Taming. It was the sport of breaking down plebes absolutely-to discover how much the boy could take before he was reduced to begging and to crawling, before he came completely apart. They broke you in their own time and their own way and they studied you carefully before they made their move. They usually chose the very weak. The boys selected to endure the most pressure of the system were always the most vulnerable and the least equipped to handle it. I was not one of the victims, at least not at first. I was not ugly or thin or obese or pimply. I did not limp or stutter or cry in front of them or lose my temper or pass out after doing twenty pushups. The victims were the very weakest and most sensitive among us, and each cadre member had his own particular victim whom he singled out as his own special project. My life appeared perfectly miserable to me, but what these boys suffered was worthy of epic poetry. And as those early days passed, the plebe system produced moments of magnificent courage among the victims. Some of them even survived the Taming.

I studied my masters with as much thoroughness as the system afforded. From observation and experience I knew which of them to avoid at all costs. Some of the cadre were basically harmless; some were even gentle, affable guys when you met them alone on campus. Some simply held the impartial, impersonal belief that the plebe system was a proven and effective method of turning boys into Institute men. But all of them required that we play the game. I had to learn the delicate and obsequious art form of being a plebe. The cadre was vigilant for the slightest sign of a bad attitude, of unchecked anger or frustration, or that sudden, desperate glazing in a freshman's eyes just before he was ready to crack. They studied us as carefully as we studied them, but with more patience. Slowly, as the year progressed, they discovered what our severest weak points were, and they profited by their diligent attention. They would introduce the marked freshman to horrible situations outside of the framework of the system, and by watching him, they would learn what he was truly afraid of. Then they would use that knowledge callously, and with deadly intent. If they could not discover some central fear, they had a final trick: The whole cadre would come at you alone. Very few indeed could withstand the onslaught of twenty determined men.

The Taming took different forms. In the second week they discovered quite by accident that Graham Craig was afraid of heights. He was a hot-tempered boy from Greensboro who had won the undivided attention of the cadre by quitting the Institute and then returning two days later. The Taming began. Maccabee noticed that Craig could not bring himself to look at the quadrangle from the fourth division. Craig admitted to vertigo. They put him inside a mattress cover, threw it over the side of the fourth division, and tied it to the railing on the gallery, one hundred ten feet above the concrete. Disoriented, Craig struggled until his head popped out of the mattress cover. He fainted when he saw where he was, an act highly amusing to the upperclassmen. They let him spend the night hanging over the railing. He never looked out again. The bag never moved and Craig resigned the next day Jeff Lieckweg feared snakes. He was from Cleveland and had never seen a snake alive until his squad sergeant, Muller, brought his pet boa constrictor with him when he inspected Lieckweg's room one morning. The snake terrified him. Lieckweg could not keep his mouth shut, could not bring himself to stop answering the upperclassmen insolently. He always looked angry and he always was. That night they tied his hands behind his back and lowered him by a rope tied to his feet into an open elevator pit. As they lowered him into the shaft, they told him they had dropped twelve copperheads into the shaft that day. They suggested he lie perfectly still when he reached the bottom of the shaft and perhaps the snakes would not strike at him, perhaps they would not notice him. But it would be a shame if they lowered him on top of one or two of the snakes. That would be very bad, the cadre agreed. There were no snakes in the pit and Lieckweg never reached the bottom. He was screaming so loud halfway down that there was no need for any further taming and he left the barracks that night.

Masturbation was forbidden by the Blue Book. It may have been the most often violated law in history. But the cadre amused themselves by catching freshmen in the act of masturbating. Bill Agee, a fat, miserable boy from Fort Lauderdale, was caught masturbating every single night for two weeks. "I can't help it. I can't help it," he would cry out to the upperclassmen. The cadre made him walk around the campus wearing one white glove. You could see Agee clear across campus, spot him instantly among five hundred other freshmen, and keep careful watch on his comings and goings. It was a very public humiliation and everyone on campus, including the faculty and the President's wife, knew what the single white glove signified. Agee was degraded slowly, in degrees, and finally, long after he became the campus joke, he left R Company in tears. He was wearing one white glove when he walked out of the Gates of Legrand.

Rodney Aimar was a painfully thin, fragile boy from Anderson, South Carolina. He could not perform a single pushup when he arrived at the Institute. He could only do ten after a month of sustained harassment. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before they broke Rodney, but he proved surprisingly resilient. He seemed absolutely impervious to their screaming, and he showed no inclination to leave. In fact, he confessed to his classmates that there was nothing they could do to run him out. He had planned to come to the Institute since he was a little tyke. That was his phrase, "a little tyke." He fully intended to stay. He also said you didn't have to be able to do pushups to be tough. If you had it inside, you could take anything the cadre could dish out. That was before the cadre found out about Rodney Aimar and bugs. They let his classmates watch his Taming. They tied him naked to his rack, which they had pulled out onto the gallery where we were braced in a straight line to watch him. His frail body struggled against the ropes. None of us knew what they were going to do. Fox had gone to a bait farm and bought a thousand crickets. They emptied box after box of the crickets over the body of Rodney Aimar. They gagged him so his screams would not attract a tac officer or the Bear. On his face, on his genitals, on his chest, until his body almost disappeared beneath the swarm. We did not see Rodney Aimar after that night.

I am not sure when I first heard the name of Bobby Bentley of Ocilla, Georgia, or when I became aware that the cadre had vowed to run him out of R Company by Thanksgiving. I heard his name often during plebe week, echoing along the galleries, a name shouted contemptuously by beardless corporals. Before I ever saw him I knew that they had selected him for the Taming. But Bobby Bentley was different from the rest. He refused to quit the Institute even under the most monstrous pressure. He was a study in courage I will never forget.

Later I would learn that many of the same boys who suffered most grievously in the plebe system became the most brutal and sadistic of upperclassmen. The Institute had allowed them to find the courage that was hidden within them. Beneath the fat and bone, beneath the terror, the blade of the system had hit upon an undiscovered vein of iron. The system had surprised and honored them by alerting them to the existence of an enormous interior strength and capacity for survival. I witnessed the magnificent courage of the weak and then watched them turn into the defiled images of their tormentors. But that happened to others; it did not happen to Bobby Bentley.

He was thin to the point of emaciation and looked as though his body had been assembled from the discarded produce of a vegetable garden: arms of celery, legs of asparagus, and spine of broccoli. But Bobby was not a physical weakling like Rodney Aimar. Bobby could do pushups all night long and hold his rifle straight out in front of him as long as any of us. His sin was a weakness of another variety. He had the unfortunate tendency during the height of sweat parties to urinate in his pants. This had happened once during plebe week, twice the next week, four times the next, until finally, he pissed in his pants every time an upperclassman screamed at him. Within a week he was the prime target for removal in R Company. The cadre swarmed all over him. They went to work on Bobby Bentley from Ocilla, Georgia, with a savagery that passed swiftly into legend. Even the most tolerant and easy-going members of the cadre recognized the fact that Bentley was an embarrassment to the integrity and efficacy of the system. He rapidly became a symbol to them, and it soon became a joke among the other companies that the R Company cadre could not run out a boy who pissed in his pants during every formation. It became a point of honor during the month of October that Bobby Bentley be removed from the Corps. The level of cruelty directed at this frail plebe was extraordinary, and there were boys who left our class because they could not stand to watch what the cadre was doing to him.

But there was something in Bentley the cadre had not reckoned with, something that we, his classmates, had not guessed. At some point during that first month, after pissing all over himself at each formation, after being humiliated beyond the limits of human decency and having drawn packs of upperclassmen who made it a sport to scream at Bobby Bentley and watch him foul himself-this plebe, in the middle of a most intense agony, made a simple, awesome decision. Bobby Bentley decided he was going to stay.

But the cadre could not allow someone afflicted in the manner of Bobby Bentley to survive the plebe system. If they could not run out someone like him, a boy who could not even control his bladder, then how could they strike fear in the hearts and minds of other marginal plebes? For Bobby was not only surviving the plebe system, he was surviving the Taming.

Beginning in September, there was a sweat party every night in that despised hour after dinner and before evening study period. Each night they made Bobby Bentley piss in his uniform pants. They put a bucket beside him in formation. They made him wear his raincoat on sunny days. They forced him to wear diapers and rubber pants, made him come to formation in a bathing suit, made him speak in baby talk, suck on a pacifier, and drink his milk from a baby bottle. He stimulated the cadre's creative powers as they conjured up new and inexorable methods to assault the human spirit. He became their obsession, their failure.

When all else failed, they turned his classmates against him, the plebes who were his brothers and protectors under the system. They encouraged us to show contempt for him, to abandon him. They rewarded us for betraying him.

And it was easy to hate him in those first months. I needed someone whom I could visibly and openly hate, so I joined my classmates in vilifying Bobby Bentley and soon the freshmen despised him as much as the upperclassmen did. We hated him for his weakness, his frailty, his stained pants, and the smell that was always on him. He was unclean and he wore the odor of urine like some debased cologne. Often they would not let him change his pants for days. His stench belied the silence or anonymity of his approach. In a line of plebes, you could always smell the presence of Bobby Bentley.

So the freshmen began refusing to give him shirt tucks or help him get ready for parade. We neglected to tell him of meetings with the cadre or the time of required formations. When we left the campus for general leave on Saturday night, we left him behind in the barracks. We assumed the roles of his torturers, his tamers, and heaped all our repressed fury at the cadre on him. We abandoned Bobby Bentley because we saw ourselves in his affliction and did not like to be reminded that he was one of us, that he, too, represented our class, our virility, our sad, abused history. In a school where your only solace comes from the support and friendship of your classmates, the solitude of Bobby Bentley became awe-inspiring, mythic, and unbearable. At first we thought we had created an island, an unclean one, an untouchable; but that was not true. We had become a cadre in reserve, a platoon of Iscariots. My classmates and I, with our zealous endorsement of the cadre's contempt for Bentley, had indeed helped create something unseen in the class of 1967.

We had created the first man in our class.

On a rainy night in October, they lined up all his classmates facing him. There were thirty-eight of us who had survived through the first month. They ordered us to spit in the face of Bobby Bentley. We all did it; all thirty-seven of us. When it was my turn, his face was covered with spit and his eyes were tightly closed. I spat. I spat into his face and went back to the end of the line.

By the middle of October the cadre was getting desperate. They ordered all the plebes to talk individually with Bentley. The Taming had failed. They wanted us to talk some sense into his head, to tell him that he was hurting the image of our class, that his presence was bringing the additional wrath of the cadre on all our heads. Ten of my classmates had preceded me before I entered his room on the third division to encourage him to quit the Institute. He was writing a letter home when I entered his room. Looking up, he smiled at me and asked me to sit down.

"Where's your roommate, Bobby?" I asked. There was a strong stench of urine in the room. He noticed that I noticed it.

"I haven't had a roommate since plebe week. No one wants to room with a guy who pisses in his pants," he answered. "They won't let me send my uniforms to the laundry anymore. Except for the two I wear to class."

"They told me to talk to you, Bobby."

"I know, Will."

"Why don't you just get the hell out of here, Bobby? I mean, you're just causing trouble for the rest of us. They're starting to give sweat parties in your name, man. And it's perfectly obvious you don't belong here. Three-year-old kids don't do what you do, Bobby. You ought to have more pride than to stick around wetting your pants in front of them."

"I'm sorry about that," he said. "I really am. But I just can't help it, Will. It's embarrassing. I feel terrible about it. The doctors say it's nerves. Nerves. Every night I tell myself that tomorrow will be different, that I won't do it tomorrow. But every day's the same. I'm as disgusted with myself as the cadre is. I don't blame you or them for wanting me out."

"Then why don't you go?"

"Because it's my choice to stay. It's not yours and it's not theirs."

"You don't belong here, Bobby."

"My daddy paid his money just like everybody else's daddy."

"That's not what I mean and you know it."

"The other freshmen scream at me when they come up to talk to me, Will. At least most of them do. They come up to my room and treat me like they were the first sergeant. They call me pussy and dumbhead. Alexander even slapped me when I told him I was staying. But they don't know what it's like to be me. I don't blame them, you see. I'd do the same thing and say the same thing if I were them. I just can't help my nerves. It's just so embarrassing. I get this feeling in my stomach every time I hear the bugle blow at reveille. I know it's going to start again. I keep telling myself to take it one day at a time, not to let them get me down, that I can take anything for nine months. I need to prove to myself that I'm as tough as they are. Do you understand that, Will?"

"No."

"Then why are you here, Will?"

"Because I'm an asshole. And I'm sorry I came up here to bother you, Bobby. I would never have done something like this last year. I wasn't like this last year. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."

"Does your roommate St. Croix want me to leave?"

"No, I don't think so, Bobby. He's afraid that if you leave, they'll start concentrating on him."

Bobby Bentley laughed, and I realized that I had never seen him laugh before, never seen most of my classmates laugh or even smile. I left that room feeling an excruciating shame for having willingly embraced my role as an inquisitor representing the cadre. I vowed that from that night on I was not going to be one of Bobby Bentley's problems. I certainly had enough of my own.

Three days later the entire freshman class of R Company met in the first division alcove room to discuss the problem of Bobby Bentley. It was the first official meeting we were allowed to conduct without the supervision of the cadre. It was our first moment of institutional democracy and the first time I had seen many of the faces of my classmates relaxed and unbraced.

John Alexander, by far the sharpest knob militarily, conducted the meeting with brisk efficiency. In the very first month, he had emerged as the natural leader of our class, and the cadre was already saying that he was excellent material for regimental commander. He began the meeting with a voice indicating a high seriousness of purpose: "At ease, men. We all know why we're here tonight. I've talked with several members of the cadre and they want us to help figure a way to run Bentley out of the Corps. He's hurting the image of our class and specifically he's hurting the image of R Company. Now I know all of us are in agreement that we want to prove that the class of 1967 is the best class ever to come through the Institute. In order to prove that, men, we just can't have a freshman peeing in his damn pants like a baby every time he comes to formation. I have a suggestion and I'd like to run it by you. I suggest we go up to his room right after this meeting. We go up there as a class and tell him that we voted unanimously that he's not worthy to be in our class. Then let's pack his bags and escort him bodily to the front gate. If he tries to resist, then we might have to become a little physical."

"Good, idea, John," a voice rang out.

"All right," three others agreed.

"Are there any objections?" Alexander asked.