Homage to Charleston

Ain't life strange?
There I was last week, standing inside The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, last week, watching all these young men and women in uniform going through drills designed to break them down while bonding them.
Later, they returned to their barracks for more physical stress, that ended with each company crawling to a circular pile with their arms overlapping one another in this mound of connected humanity. A horn sounded, then they stood up in a line, and the upperclassmen came by and introduced themselves to these young men and women, one at a time, and for the first time since the freshman class of The Citadel reported to campus last August, these freshmen - or "knobs" - were called by their first names and treated as equals.
A few hours later, in full dress whites, the freshmen marched out the front gate of The Citadel, down to King Street where they turned right and marched on to Marion Square, which used to be the parade ground for the original Citadel.
As we, the parents of these freshmen, stood around waiting, a guy walked up to me and said, "What's going on here? Are we expecting a UFO to land, like in 'The Day the Earth Stood Still?"
I laughed and said yes, we were expecting to hear from Klaatu, accompanied by his protector robot Gort, arrive shortly where we would all say in unison: "Klaatu barad nikto"
OK, you have to have been a fan of the original movie - starting Michael Rennie - to understand that.
Or just be a nerd.
In fact, what we were waiting on was almost as strange: some 630 (out of about 750 who showed up as freshmen at The Citadel back in August; clearly, The Citadel continues to find ways to weed out those who don't belong) who completed their knob year.
This was "Recognition Day,'' which some Citadel grads say remains one of the most meaningful days of their lives. I had one grad tell me "Matriculation Day (the first day on campus) was the more frightening day of my life; Rec Day is the most rewarding."
Why these kids - my oldest son included - should choose this Spartan lifestyle for college is beyond me.
Some didn't choose, of course. Some were made to go for various reasons - family tradition, or in the hope that some kind of discipline would be instilled in their lives. Less than half of the graduates of The Citadel actually go into full-time military service.
But many chose to go there, seeking a military atmosphere and pursuing a military career. Or some have already done a tour of active duty in the military and are now going to college before getting back into the military.
Of course, my own experience with the military was much different. I was on the tail end of the Viet Nam war. I remember lottery numbers. The year before I turned 18 and would be eligible for the draft, my lottery number would have been "5."
That was incentive to stay in school, because if you were in school, you could avoid the draft.
It wasn't that we weren't patriotic. It's just that by this time, the "war" didn't seem to make much sense. It seemed like all it was about was young men going and trying to survive for two years. Many of these young men got there and learned to drink and do drugs as a way of escaping the reality of what they were facing.
For me, I feared submitting to the level of authority required to be part of the military. I was definitely a child of the late 1960s, early 1970s.

But here I stood, watching this parade of young, fresh-faced kids march through Charleston, S.C., led by a small bag-pipe playing band that played one of the most inspirational tunes I can think of: "Scotland the Brave." If I were to ever go to war, I'd want it to be to the soundtrack of "Scotland the Brave."

And as I stood there watching line after line of young, uniformed men and women march by, I couldn't help but think of these lines:

".... It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

 

Indeed, for all we say and all we think and all we know, there is a feeling - at least in the hearts of most men (and I can only speak to the heart of a man), that "war is glorious after all."