Now, at this moment in New Jersey, I come to a conclusion about my actions as a young man when Vietnam was a dirty word to me. I wish that I had entered into the Marine Corps and led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my Marines well and that the Vietcong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with my men. From the day of my birth, I was programmed to enter the Marine Corps as a fighting man, but then my eyes locked onto the headlights of the sixties and took me far afield of the man I was supposed to be. Now I understand I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty. I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones, but lacked the courage to act on: America is a good enough country to die for even when she is wrong.
So I looked for some conclusion, a summation of this trip to my teammate’s house. I wanted to come to the single right thing, a true thing that I may not like, but that I could live with as a man. After hearing Al Kroboth’s story of his walk across Vietnam and his brutal imprisonment in the North, I found myself passing harrowing, remorseless judgment on myself. I had not turned out to be the man I had once envisioned myself to be. I thought I would be the kind of man that America could point to and say, “There. That’s the guy. That’s the one that got it right. The whole package. The one I can depend on.” It had never once occurred to me that I would find myself in the position I did on that night in Al Kroboth’s house in Roselle, New Jersey: an American coward spending the night with an American hero.
AT MY THIRTIETH HOMECOMING AT THE CITADEL, my team reassembled itself in Charleston for our own personal reunion. Eleven of us met in the field house, toured our old locker room, looked around the recently restored Armory, then walked out and viewed the Friday-afternoon parade. As we were watching, Caldwell Warley, a recent graduate and my friend John Warley’s eldest son, came up to me and said, “Conroy, I thought it was illegal for you to come on this campus. Didn’t the legislature pass a law or something?”
That same Friday night, my team and I went to root for the opening basketball game of the Citadel Bulldogs. To further complicate the emotions of the gathering of my team, The Citadel was playing its first game against Francis Marion University, which had just hired my young cousin, Ed Conroy, as its head basketball coach. It was easy for the Conroy family to root against Francis Marion, but it was impossible for us not to want the very best for young Ed.
My father had driven down from Atlanta for both the team reunion and Cousin Ed’s first game against his alma mater, where he had been a brilliant point guard twenty years after my Citadel career had ended. My aunt and uncle, Carol and Ed Sr., had flown in from Iowa with the same set of dual loyalties aflame in their psyches as the other members of the family. Even when I lived in Europe, it was a matter of honor for me to look up the scores of Citadel games before I read another entry in the International Herald Tribune.
My team sat in the stands beside the locker room where we had dressed for four years. We stood and cheered when the Bulldogs burst out to the court led by a seven-foot Russian kid whom the cadets called BRK, for Big Russian Kid. He was the first legitimate seven-footer the Citadel basketball team had ever recruited. There were not many cadets in the stands, which stood in stark contrast to our era when we could count on five hundred cadets to attend all of our games. We were told that the status of athletes had deteriorated badly since our time, and that the Corps resented the athletes with a bitterness that seemed almost incurable.
“How do they expect The Citadel to attract athletes if the Corps hates them and tries to run them out?” Bridges asked.
“They have to be rocks like we were,” Mohr said.
“They just don’t make men the way they used to,” Barney said.
The wives groaned in a collective chorus. They had heard most of the stories of this star-crossed team, and now they would be able to put faces and stories together. My teammates had married beautiful, accomplished women, and the children they had helped raise would make America a better country.
“Where were you women when we really needed you? In 1967?” I asked the wives.
“We were out looking for you boys,” Kennedy’s wife, Cynthia, said.
Francis Marion came out to the floor, and I stood to cheer my cousin Ed’s entrance into the world as a head basketball coach. Ed walked over, and I went down to the court to embrace him. “This feels funny, Ed,” I said. “How’s your team?”
“We’ll give The Citadel a game,” he said. “I like some of my players a lot.”
“These guys are my team, Ed,” I yelled up into the stands to my teammates. “This is my cousin Ed, guys. This is the team from the history books—the one they all talk about. The Citadel powerhouse from the mid-sixties.”
“Conroy was full of shit even back then,” Cauthen said.
I was never happier to see a basketball game begin, but it was a bad omen when Francis Marion controlled the opening tip from our big center. Instantly my teammates smelled trouble for the Bulldogs as we whispered among ourselves that the Citadel team seemed listless and uninspired. The Citadel’s coach, Pat Dennis, considered one of the young hotshots when he had taken on the job, was encountering the same difficulties as had the twenty-five head coaches who preceded him, with the notable exception of Norman Sloan. Though young and dedicated and gifted, Pat was trying to balance the exigencies of putting a winning team together with the expectations and pressures his players felt being part of a military college. Coaching at a military college is the hardest coaching job in America, and my team watched the effects of years of stress settle into the lines around Pat Dennis’s eyes.
The game became a metaphor of Citadel basketball itself. We watched five Citadel men who were fighters, who would go to the wall for their college, and who would never quit or throw in the towel. They were kids just like we had been; they were cadets just like we had been. They were exhausted and in a kind of unnameable despair, and they looked like they did not think they were supposed to win, just like us.
My cousin Ed proved that night that he was a coach to be reckoned with. The Citadel was favored to win against Francis Marion, but Ed’s team was playing as though they had not received that news bulletin. My cousin had infused his team with his own easy confidence. The exhaustion and the malaise that had plagued our team hit this Citadel team in the middle of the second half. They made a late run, but Francis Marion got the win. Pat Dennis and his players looked stricken as they made their way off the court, and in the stands, my teammates and I hurt for them, having once walked in their shoes.
On Saturday evening, we gathered in the dining room of the Lodge Alley Inn, well dressed, successful, and middle-aged. It was the first time we had come together as a team since our final meal in Charlotte when we lost to Richmond in overtime. Thirty years had passed through us all with bewildering, merciless swiftness. We had come together because John DeBrosse had found me to seek forgiveness for a layup he had missed dozens of years ago. DeBrosse had no idea that I had thought about that team and that season almost every day of my life. We toasted each other all night, lifting our glasses time and again, dining on veal and grouper, then more toasts.
On both Friday and Saturday, we met in a large suite I had rented in the Lodge Alley Inn. We talked, and the stories began to flow. We made Bridges perform his dead-ringer imitation of Mel entering the locker room at halftime, and he could still do that hunched, loping walk of Mel’s while smoking a cigarette with a perfection of detail. When Bridges, without breaking character, walked between all the players and the wives, carrying a towel folded on his left wrist, we were laughing as hard as we had in the locker room during the Old Dominion disaster, only this laughter was high-spirited and unsuppressed.
I watched as my father sat and talked with Al and Patty Kroboth. It was important for me to get to know my father after the surprising mellowing that took place after the publication of The Great Santini. My father had dedicated the r
est of his life to proving that I was wrong about him as a father and that my fictional portrayal of him in that novel had been both libelous and wrongheaded. The transformation of Don Conroy into a reasonable facsimile of a father was the great miracle of my adult life, and I wanted my teammates to share my joy in the metamorphosis.
“Hey, Conroy, did you invite Mel to this?” Tee Hooper asked.
“I wrote him a letter,” I said. “He never answered it.”
My father said, “After hanging around you and your teammates, Pat, my heart goes out to Mel. This isn’t a group I’d pay money to see again.”
“The door’s over there, Pop,” I said. “Use it any time you like.”
“My son is a little bit on the sensitive side, if you haven’t noticed,” Dad said.
“Noticed, Colonel?” Barney said. “We lived with the boy. He obviously had no direction in his youth. No discipline.”
“I was too soft on all my children,” Dad said, playing to the crowd. “I was too tenderhearted for my own good. I should’ve cracked the whip a time or two.”
“Nothing would’ve worked with Pat, Colonel,” Barney said.
From across the room, DeBrosse yelled, “Hey, Conroy, I want this book to be fair to everyone, okay? I don’t want you to go after Mel or anyone else.”
“Conroy fair?” Cauthen said. “You guys see what he did to his old man?”
“Old man?” Halpin laughed. “How ’bout what he did to our college, El Cid?”
“Let’s go back to what he did to his poor old man,” said Dad. “It’s tough on a fella when his son turns out to be a Judas.”
“Boys, what’s he going to do to us?” Barney asked.
Connor said, “It makes me sick to think of it.”
I went to the middle of the room and handed out a present to each of my teammates, putting a cassette in the VCR. We sat with the women in our lives to watch the only piece of film I had discovered of my team in action during that dismal year. When I first began the project, I thought I would retrieve the film of all our games and simply study them for salient details. The Citadel had thrown our game films away years ago, and so had every other college team we played. A researcher from Loyola of New Orleans managed to come up with a five-minute segment of our game with Loyola, and because it was the game that my voice revealed itself, the film held great significance for me.
In the grainy film of a handheld camera, the year suddenly materialized as my team, so beautiful in their prime, were seen running up and down the court. Tee and DeBrosse were having trouble containing two terrific Loyola guards; the Blue Team was on the court again in a 1–2–2 press both tentative and weakly conceived. Zinsky made two lovely jump shots, and we rewarded him with a round of applause. DeBrosse threw it out of bounds and we booed him soundly. Our team’s tragedy was unfolding for all of us to study in agonizing detail. Dan Mohr threw up a textbook hook shot, and Bridges ripped a rebound from the boards. The referees called fouls right and left, mostly on us. DeBrosse hit a jumper and so did Hooper, but Loyola seemed to be scoring at will.
Suddenly Kroboth was in the game, and so was I, and there was Greg Connor.
“Green Weenies to the rescue,” Barney cried.
“The hell with the Green Weenies,” Dan Mohr said.
His wife, Cindy, said, “I’ve never heard you use language like that, Dan!”
“Then you don’t know the guy, Cindy,” Cauthen said.
“Eat me, Zipper,” said Dan.
I hit Tee with a pass on a fast break and he was fouled driving to the basket. Then after Loyola missed a shot, Connor rebounded it and I took it down the court and drove the lane. I was looking for someone to pass it to, found no one, twisted my body away from their center, and sent a silly, hopeless shot over my head, without looking.
DeBrosse shouted, “The play summed up Conroy’s whole career.”
Luckily, the center fouled me, and I watched the young stranger disguised as me use his father’s archaic underhand free throw and swish it through the net. We watched the rest of the film mesmerized by the strange magic of image and lost time. Even in this film, we could see the proof of our team’s downfall and evidence of its fate. In its last seconds, I was dribbling full speed on a fast break when Kroboth filled the left-hand lane, and I laid a sweet pass behind my back which Al bobbled. The ball went out of bounds forever. The Zapruder film of our lost youth went black, and we turned back to our middle-aged selves again.
With me that evening was Cassandra King, a lovely blond novelist I had met in Birmingham, Alabama, at a Hoover Library writers’ conference. I had liked her instantly and had praised her first novel, Making Waves in Zion, when it was published. We were both locked in loveless marriages at the time, and it would be years before our paths crossed again. When they did, I never wanted to be with anyone else. I had met the woman I wanted with me when I died. Since none of my teammates had known my first two wives, I wanted and needed their approval of Sandra. I had been delighted by all the women they had married, without exception. When I began this book, I was the only divorcé on the team. All night, I watched Sandra talking to the wives and the boys I had once played basketball with when I had not yet been born to myself and had no clue who I was or how I was going to find my place in the world.
Teena Bridges came up first and said, “Sandra is a doll, Pat. I’d keep this one.”
Sandra Cauthen said, “A keeper. Don’t let this one get away.” Cindy Mohr and Barbara Connor both said, “Sandra’s precious. Just precious.” In the old-speak of southern talk, the word “precious” is like money you can take to the bank. Sandra King and I were married the following May.
Toward the end of the evening, I was standing in the kitchen with my arms around Tee Hooper and Dave Bornhorst, listening to my team. The talk of teammates seemed at that moment like all the wonder I ever needed to know. I felt a great calming come over me. Dave squeezed me and bent down to kiss me on the cheek. “You look so happy, Pat. You look like you’re in heaven.”
Tee Hooper hugged me, then said, “Do you feel it, Pat? I feel it for the first time. We actually are like a team. Like a real team.”
BEFORE THIS REUNION, THE CITADEL authorities had decided it was still too dangerous for me to be on campus. My whole team was greatly disturbed by my thirty-year war with our college, and so was I, though I entertained few illusions about it ever getting better. My first book, The Boo, which I self-published in 1970, was a boyish defense of Lieutenant Colonel T. N. Courvoisie, the assistant commandant of cadets in charge of discipline. A year after I graduated, General Hugh Harris fired Colonel Courvoisie, and the word went out among the alumni that “Courvoisie was bad for discipline.” It is a bad, poorly executed, and greatly flawed book, but The Boo was a setting forth, a point of departure, a timid announcement that I was a boy to be reckoned with, and that I’d be heard from again. The book’s message was limpid and simple; its statement flat out and not marked by ambiguity. It declared in an adolescent voice that The Citadel had treated Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Nugent Courvoisie abominably and I demanded that something be done about it. The book was banned on campus for six years, and all I succeeded in doing to Colonel Courvoisie was to turn him into a pariah. When I reprised his role in my life as The Bear in The Lords of Discipline, I deepened the Boo’s estrangement with the college he loved with all his heart. For thirty years the Boo and I were unwelcome at The Citadel.
When Shannon Faulkner came roaring out of her South Carolina life by becoming the first woman to challenge The Citadel’s all-male admission policy, I was living in San Francisco and had no desire to test The Citadel’s ire after the explosiveness of my college’s reaction to the publication of The Lords of Discipline. The administration hated my novel and everything in it. Though I had managed to write myself out of any relationship with my college, it caught me by surprise when I made it worse than it ever had been.
In a lecture tour of colleges in the early nineties, I spoke one night at the R
hode Island School of Design and was surprised that I was speaking at the Coast Guard Academy the following evening. Since The Lords of Discipline, my name was anathema at all military schools. The poor English professor who had invited me was distraught when he met me at the airport.
“I had no idea you were so controversial,” he said. “The commandant of the Coast Guard is flying up from Washington. He’s going to be sitting in the first row. He swears he’ll fire me if you say anything that irritates him.”
“Relax, professor. I’ve never talked to a whole corps. We’ll have a blast.”
And so we did. I addressed the freshmen in the morning, and before I began speaking, I looked out into the exhausted sea of plebes and said, “What in the hell are all you girls doing here?” Fully a quarter of the class was female.
The female cadet who was one of my escorts stepped up and said, “Congress passed a law in 1974 admitting females to all the academies.”
“I had no idea,” I said. “This is amazing.”
That night I told stories of my life as a cadet at The Citadel, and those midshipmen became the most animated, rollicking audience I have ever spoken to. The commandant rushed up to the podium after the speech and asked me to fly down with him to the Pentagon to meet his staff. He invited me to address the Coast Guard Academy every year. The night was so successful it made me mourn for the loss of The Citadel in my life.