Born to be a soldier

I was born to be a soldier: Not that I was particularly brave or even destined for a distinguished military career, but I think there is something inherent in most Southern boys that predisposes them to the profession of arms. And I simply got a bigger dose of it than most.

As early as I can remember, I was surrounded by, and fascinated with, all manner of things military.

Growing up in South Carolina - particularly along the once scorched-earth route that followed Union General William Tecumseh Sherman - it seemed that everywhere was once a battlefield and everyone was somehow connected to it.

Swords, rifles, flags, daguerreotypes, and photographs of young uniformed men filled the local museums, historic homes, and even the attics of friends and family-members. Books about French knights, Confederate cavalrymen, and German paratroopers lined the dens of senior male relatives. Portraits of Southern Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson graced the foyers of banks, libraries, and government office buildings. Models of British warships were displayed on the credenzas of my dad’s business acquaintances. And in Dad’s Gervais Street office hung a picture entitled “The Surrender,” a parodist’s portrayal of Union General Ulysses S. Grant relinquishing his sword to Lee.

Beyond that, most every man in my world - Dad, Dad’s friends, my friends’ dads, my uncles, older cousins, and ancestors as far back as my family knew - had at the very least served a hitch in active or reserve service. If they had not it was because they were medically disqualified, not because they chose not to serve.

In any other region of the country such a record of service would qualify a family as being considered a “military family.” In the South, however, it was simply ordinary duty, and no family was considered a military family unless the patriarch had logged at least twenty years of service and retired.

But the South was military. It always has been. And military tradition, though rarely expressed albeit acknowledged by Southerners, permeates every inch of the Southern social fabric from deer drives to debutante balls to the pageantry associated with college football games.

Though I didn't realize it at the time, the approach my parents took with me even had martial overtones.

Dad taught me before I was six-years-old – “Love your country.” “Love your flag.” “Never raise your hand against someone senior to you.” “Never start a fight.” “Never run from a fight.” “Always fight fair unless your sister or your mom are attacked.” Then I was exhorted to pick up the biggest stick available and crush the attacker’s skull.

Dad also told me stories about Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion and how he and his men would burst upon the British columns, striking quick, and then disappearing into the Carolina swamps where the British soldiers were unable to track them. Marion and his guerillas were particularly fascinating to me as at least one of their hideouts had purportedly existed in the area where we vacationed at my Uncle Bob’s “lake house” on the Santee. Marion's exploits – combined with Uncle Bob's twisted tales of “untamed Injuns” and others-not-like-us who lived on nearby islands and ventured out only to murder children in their beds – was enough to convince me that a soldier was the most important man in the world.

The first stories I remember being read to me were from the Childcraft book series. Mom read those to me: Always the tales I wanted to hear about ear-ringed pirates operating along the Eastern Seaboard, English princes commanding grand battalions in the era of Marlborough, and American patriots on horseback splashing across backcountry streams.

The first books I bought (which I still own) were The Golden Book of the American Revolution and Great American fighter pilots of World War II.

And, of course, I can't remember not playing with plastic submachine guns, G.I. Joes, and those miniature green soldiers.

At Kat’s Hotel – an inn in downtown Aiken so-named by my sister, Annette, and me because our Aunt Kat worked there as a receptionist – I spent hours in the pool pretending I was a Navy frogman infiltrating an enemy-held beach. My mission included swimming from one end of the pool to the other, slowly surfacing, eyes first, then my nose and only just enough to breathe while I reconnoitered older girls who were usually sunning in a row of chaise longues.

I even dreamt of one day forming an underwater commando unit with some of my neighborhood buddies. We would be called the sea devils.

Like all Southern boys, we built forts, played “army,” and sometimes crawled into a neighbor's garaged boat and pretended we were patrolling the South Pacific with John Kennedy and PT-109.

Even sports had a martial flavor for us. We often played pickup games of baseball, basketball, and football; inevitably arguing over which team would be called the “Fighting Gamecocks” - the mascot of the University of South Carolina and the nom d’ guerre bestowed upon Continental Army General Thomas Sumter by one of his opponents, British Colonel Banastre Tarleton.

At night, lying in bed, I consciously divided my world into six parts: I was at the center, safe and strangely contented by the sounds of crickets, dogs, and distant train whistles. North was where the Yankees lived, and, as I understood it then, they were our natural enemies. To the south was Charleston where South Carolina earned its “Palmetto State” sobriquet in a fiery exchange between the Royal Navy and our coastal defenders. To the near west was the city center of Columbia, still scarred in some places from Sherman’s invasion a century before. To the near east was Fort (Andrew) Jackson where the distant “wooomp” of grenades and mortars was “a constant” as young army recruits trained for combat in Vietnam. And above me was the infinite sky where, in my mind, unseen American fighters pilots were holding back the hordes of Russian bomber pilots who wanted to kill us all.

Often I would lie awake listening to the distant “woomps” and contemplating my own future as a soldier. At eight and nine-years old, I was afraid of one day being killed in action. But more horrifying to me was the idea that a man who did not serve his country might somehow be considered less-than-a-man.

Of course, the debacle in Vietnam would ultimately change that concept for most people.

In my mind, the call to arms, regardless of the outcome, was the most noble opportunity a man could ever have.

When I was a little older - like so many other Southern boys whose schoolwork begins to take a back seat to mischievous pursuits - I was parentally threatened with being shipped off to a military prep school.

I had mixed emotions about military school. Most of me had no desire to go. The thought of a shaved head, institutionalized corporal punishment, and a female-free environment was not attractive in the least. On the other hand, there was something secretly appealing about flashing swords, brass-buttoned tunics, and learning more about the heroes with whom I had become so enamored.

In the end, my independent nature and a steady girlfriend overcame my warrior dreams. I promised to work harder in the classroom, my grades gradually improved, and my formal training in the art of war was postponed. But I always knew, as did my friends and all other Southern boys, that military school was an option for substandard performers.

Ironically, it was during that same period that I remember my friends and I discussing the prospect of soon being old enough for the draft. About six or eight of us were sitting on the steps outside the gym at our high school. One or two of my buddies said they would run away to Canada. I was horrified. How could anyone be so shameless? To me, running away from duty was worse than death. “My country, right or wrong,” I said, accurately believing that I was the only one in my little group familiar with Commodore Stephen Decatur’s oft’ quoted toast to the nation.

As a teenager, I loved to fish, hunt, camp, and hike: For the sport, yes. But my soul was feeding on something far greater. For me it was a communing with my ancestors and the living land: As I fished the lowcountry's broad rivers and inlets, I saw them as navigable waterways for 18th Century sloops-of-war. In the backcountry where my friends and I followed deer tracks, sun-browned fields and green treelines were seen as dramatic backdrops for British dragoons and skirmishing colonials, and in the shadows of every misty thicket moved the imaginary figures of red-skinned men with paint-streaked faces.

Naturally, I took most of it for granted: Assuming that all American boys, not just Southern boys, were exposed to the same. I was wrong.

A few years later, when I entered Uncle Sam's Marine Corps, I discovered that there was a markedly greater sense of “duty as the sole reason for joining the military” among new Southern recruits than those of other regions. Not to say that the latter weren't committed warriors: They were. But their initial reasons for enlisting ran the gamut from needing money for college to skirting the law to desiring to wear a dashing uniform to looking for adventure. Southerners, on the other hand, joined because it was simply the thing that Southern boys do.

Years later, my friend John Temple Ligon, a Southerner and a former Army Ranger officer who won numerous combat decorations in Vietnam, took issue with me on this.

“Sure there is a military tradition in the South,” he said. “But to suggest that non-Southerners are somehow not as noble or committed is simply not fair. The guys I served with from Philadelphia and New York performed as well as anyone else.”

True. They did, they do, and they forever will, because all Americans are part of a greater American military tradition. And the idea of “duty as the sole reason for joining” in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 is no longer the dominion predominated by Southerners.

The Iraqi city of Fallujah was recently stormed and taken by U.S. Marines and Army forces, led by 23-year-old rifle platoon commanders and 30-year-old platoon sergeants shouting commands in hearty Brooklyn brogues and Indiana accents. They are there for the same reasons Marine Brig. Gen. John Kelly stated during the drive to Baghdad in 2003: To “kill them all before they get bus tickets to New York City.”

But Southern boys, whether soldier or civilian, are unique in that they cannot escape being grafted into a society that almost demands service of it’s young men. It is a society wherein grown men secretly feel a sense of shame at not ever having served. It is a society that, since its inception, was built upon a contrasting foundation of sadism, chivalry, and organized aggression unlike that experienced by any other region in North America. Like it or not, it was a foundation that enabled the South to secede from the Union and hold off a quantitatively superior federal army and navy for four terrible years.

In his book, Long Gray Lines, author Rod Andrew, Jr. contends that the idea of a uniquely Southern military tradition is a prominent – though not universally accepted – theme in the history of the South.

According to Andrew, “Some historians claim that due to geography, frontier conditions, incessant warfare, slavery, and cultural notions of honor, the South developed into a remarkably militaristic society, fond of military display, preoccupied with war and notions of martial glory, and holding up military service and military training as honorable activities for males.”

In his book, The Lords of Discipline, best-selling author Pat Conroy summed it up best when he penned the line, “no Southern man is complete without a tenure under military rule.”

For me, it was two things. We visited my cousin who was in the Navy in San Diego when I was five years old. He took me on a tour of his ship. My mother bought me a subscription to National Geographic every year while I was growing up. I never wavered from wanting to join the Navy to see the world.

As with all younger brothers, I pestered my older sister to distraction. She started saying she was going to forge my name on a Marine Corp enlistment contract when I graduated high school. I beat her to it. When I turned seventeen at the beginning of my senior year of high school, I joined the Navy Reserves. I graduated high school on Friday and was on active duty on the following Monday. Later that Fall, we had the Tonkin Gulf Incident.

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