Posted on 11/14/2006 1:31:33 PM PST by pabianice
An Honest Confession by an American Coward
by Pat Conroy
(Pat Conroy's novels include: The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and Beach Music. He lives on Fripp Island, South Carolina.)
This essay is from his forthcoming book, "My Losing Season."
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The true things always ambush me on the road and take me by surprise when I am drifting down the light of placid days, careless about flanks and rearguard actions. I was not looking for a true thing to come upon me in the state of New Jersey. Nothing has ever happened to me in New Jersey. But came it did, and it came to stay.
In the past four years I have been interviewing my teammates on the 1966-67 basketball team at the Citadel for a book I'm writing. For the most part, this has been like buying back a part of my past that I had mislaid or shut out of my life. At first I thought I was writing about being young and frisky and able to run up and down a court all day long, but lately I realized I came to this book because I needed to come to grips with being middle-aged and having ripened into a gray-haired man you could not trust to handle the ball on a fast break.
When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth's house in New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated.
After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still.
"Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar demonstrator."
"That's what I heard, Conroy," Al said. "I have nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought was right."
"Tell me about Vietnam, big Al. Tell me what happened to you," I said.
On his seventh mission as a navigator in an A-6 for Major Leonard Robertson, Al was getting ready to deliver their payload when the fighter-bomber was hit by enemy fire. Though Al has no memory of it, he punched out somewhere in the middle of the ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. He doesn't know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days, nor does he know what happened to Major Robertson (whose name is engraved on the Wall in Washington and on the MIA bracelet Al wears).
When Al awoke, he couldn't move. A Viet Cong soldier held an AK-47 to his head. His back and his neck were broken, and he had shattered his left scapula in the fall. When he was well enough to get to his feet (he still can't recall how much time had passed), two armed Viet Cong led Al from the jungles of South Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi. The journey took three months. Al Kroboth walked barefooted through the most impassable terrain in Vietnam, and he did it sometimes in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained, and he slept in bomb craters with his two Viet Cong captors. As they moved farther north, infections began to erupt on his body, and his legs were covered with leeches picked up while crossing the rice paddies.
At the very time of Al's walk, I had a small role in organizing the only antiwar demonstration ever held in Beaufort, South Carolina , the home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station. In a Marine Corps town at that time, it was difficult to come up with a quorum of people who had even minor disagreements about the Vietnam War. But my small group managed to attract a crowd of about 150 to Beaufort's waterfront. With my mother and my wife on either side of me, we listened to the featured speaker, Dr. Howard Levy, suggest to the very few young enlisted Marines present that if they get sent to Vietnam, here's how they can help end this war: Roll a grenade under your officer's bunk when he's asleep in his tent. It's called fragging and is becoming more and more popular with the ground troops who know this war is bullshit. I was enraged by the suggestion. At that very moment my father, a Marine officer, was asleep in Vietnam. But in 1972, at the age of 27, I thought I was serving America 's interests by pointing out what massive flaws and miscalculations and corruptions had led her to conduct a ground war in Southeast Asia .
In the meantime, Al and his captors had finally arrived in the North, and the Viet Cong traded him to North Vietnamese soldiers for the final leg of the trip to Hanoi. Many times when they stopped to rest for the night, the local villagers tried to kill him. His captors wired his hands behind his back at night, so he trained himself to sleep in the center of huts when the villagers began sticking knives and bayonets into the thin walls.
Following the U.S. air raids, old women would come into the huts to excrete on him and yank out hunks of his hair. After the nightmare journey of his walk north, Al was relieved when his guards finally delivered him to the POW camp in Hanoi and the cell door locked behind him.
It was at the camp that Al began to die. He threw up every meal he ate and before long was misidentified as the oldest American soldier in the prison because his appearance was so gaunt and skeletal. But the extraordinary camaraderie among fellow prisoners that sprang up in all the POW camps caught fire in Al, and did so in time to save his life.
When I was demonstrating in America against Nixon and the Christmas bombings in Hanoi, Al and his fellow prisoners were holding hands under the full fury of those bombings, singing "God Bless America." It was those bombs that convinced Hanoi they would do well to release the American POWs, including my college teammate. When he told me about the C-141 landing in Hanoi to pick up the prisoners, Al said he felt no emotion, none at all, until he saw the giant American flag painted on the plane's tail. I stopped writing as Al wept over the memory of that flag on that plane, on that morning, during that time in the life of America .
It was that same long night, after listening to Al's story, that I began to make judgments about how I had conducted myself during the Vietnam War.
In the darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, lying in the third-floor guest bedroom, I began to assess my role as a citizen in the '60s, when my country called my name and I shot her the bird. Unlike the stupid boys who rapped themselves in Viet Cong flags and burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate against the war without flirting with treason or astonishingly bad taste. I had come directly from the warrior culture of this country and I knew how to act. But in the 25 years that have passed since South Vietnam fell, I have immersed myself in the study of totalitarianism during the unspeakable century we just left behind. I have questioned survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, talked to Italians who told me tales of the Nazi occupation, French partisans who had counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and officers who survived the Bataan Death March. I quiz journalists returning from wars in Bosnia, the Sudan, the Congo, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala , San Salvador, Chile, Northern Ireland, and Algeria.
As I lay sleepless, I realized I'd done all this research to better understand my country. I now revere words like democracy, freedom, the right to vote, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I see America 's flaws? Of course. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. My country let me scream to my heart's content - the same country that produced both Al Kroboth and me.
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 I'd led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my troops well and that the Viet Cong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with us.
From the day of my birth, I was programmed to enter the Marine Corps. I was the son of a Marine fighter pilot, and I had grown up on Marine bases where I had watched the men of the corps perform simulated war games in the forests of my childhood. That a novelist and poet bloomed darkly in the house of Santini strikes me as a remarkable irony.
My mother and father had raised me to be an Al Kroboth, and during the Vietnam era they watched in horror as I metamorphosed into another breed of fanatic entirely. I understand now that I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty for my country. 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 good enough to die for even when she is wrong.
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. 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 who 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.
18 - Release Date: 11/4/2006
It's never too late.
Here's one Vietnam vet that welcomes you to the fold.
ping
F(*% him. Let him tell it to his grandchildren.
No one should pass by without reading this!
I appreciate you!
Well, that's pretty amazing.
Now, as then, it will be the bureaucrats that will pull defeat from the jaws of VICTORY.
Stick to cooking, Conroy.
He'll never get a book published again.
Or, to put it another way:
"There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again. You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you WON'T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, "Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana."
I agree, I am sick of decrepit old bastards, like me, regretting that they didn't have the balls to serve, and now they want to be a hero. I served, my friends served, my cousins and fellow corner cowboy's are heroes.
I imagine there of lots of folks like me who just plain got lucky. When I was 18 my lottery number was 356. I suppose if it had been lower I would have been drafted and gotten to see SE Asia with some of my classmates. While I was a student in Boulder, Colorado I remember seeing guys pack their bags the day we drew numbers and go to Canada (the really low numbers). I remember thinking I wasn't sure what I would have done. Years later, while in Med School and looking for a way to pay for it I took an Army Scholarship and so I did my time as an officer in the '90s. But all those years ago in Boulder, I did protest, I got gassed, I read the Ellsberg Papers.
From this perspective, it is a shame we gave up on a fight we were winning and millions suffered because of our nations lack of resolve in war. I have been on both sides, as I suspect a good number of us have.
After reading "The Great Santini" years ago,I still remember thinking that Pat Conroy was a great writer but he had nothing to say worth reading.Some things don't change.I hope some day the cowardly '60s types will just be quiet.
Some very mixed feelings about Pat Conroy.
First, I am a member of The Citadel Class of 1970. Served in Vietnam, and still a deployable Reservist by God's grace.
Conroy was a senior private when I reported in the fall of 1966. He helped us lowly plebes get through Knob year by advising us to take it all with a grain of salt.
Heard no more of Conroy until his novels started coming out. Then there was "The Lords of Discipline", an ill disguised calumny upon The Citadel much like Calder Willinghams' "End as a Man", though much more cleverly worded. Recalling my years as a cadet, this work was pure fiction.
Then in 1995: the lawyers' initial attempt to gender-integrate the Corps of Cadets using the tragically tubby Shannon Faulkner. Cadets' resistance so enraged Conroy that he spat and fumed like Gloria Steinem. I wondered then why he didn't just turn his Citadel ring.
But then in 1998 came the Lewinsky affair, and Conroy actually conceded in an editorial column that society has need for lawgiving institutions of values such as The Citadel. Semi-welcome home, Pat.
But in 2002 Conroy marked the passing of his Marine father by publically trashing the man's memory, gloating that the old man could no longer threaten to whip him. Real class act, our Pat.
"Confessions of an American Coward" accomplishes little. Conroy bares his soul, praises those he once reviled (I was unaware of Pat's antiwar activities until now), and demands forgiveness by virtue of his brilliant prose.
Lt. Col. T.N. Courvoisie, '38 (rest his grand soul) said it best:
"Conroy, you couldn't lead a squad across a street!"
Excellent. Thanks.
Well, I'm the only person I know that was blown off by a recruiter. It was 1981, I was fresh out of college and I was considering being an officer. He wanted me to be a private. A year earlier and I would have been gold.
I like Conroy's cookbook. It's one of the best books I have read. But his dad ruined him for everything but drama.
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