On the last night I would ever be a cadet, I walked the old city of Charleston as an act of homage and gratitude. My time in the city was up and the long seasoning was complete. Tomorrow I would walk across the stage beneath the gaze of colonels for the last time. I could bear the tonnage of their gaze no longer. My education at the Institute was finished. I knew what I had to do now and what I had to watch out for and whom I had to fear. I could write my own Blue Book now and its rules and codicils would be my own. I would think my own thoughts, not theirs.
But I would not forget the lessons of the Institute. The Institute was my destiny, my character, and my metaphor. I would walk along the dark galleries, from arch to arch, from cadre to merciless cadre, from taming to taming, from system to unconscionable system as long as I lived. The landscape would change, and the faces, and the names, but there would be no leaving of the barracks for me.
About the Book
Years before it became a center of controversy for its traditional exclusion of women, South Carolina´s venerable military academy The Citadel inspired novelist Pat Conroy (who is one of its graduates) to craft a powerful and vivid story he called "The Lords of Discipline." The novel takes place at the fictional Carolina Military Institute, and the author specifically notes that he based his story in details drawn from the experiences of cadets at many other such schools. The burden of tradition and mystique in an old Southern military school are unmistakable, but it is a world Conroy has come to understand, and serves as a fascinating setting for his story.
Will McLean does not belong to the social circle of young men who usually attend the Carolina Military Institute. He is an outsider, a young man wounded by his relationship with his father, and something of a rebel. Will is also a survivor, and he carefully makes his way at the Institute in the early 1960s, bonding with three other cadets amid the brutal hazing and almost threatening camaraderie that are part of life at the school. Particularly disturbing are the activities of a secret group of privileged cadets known only as "The Ten." When he is ordered to look out for the Institute´s first black cadet, Will can no longer ignore the corruption and violence around him, a stand that will bring him face-to-face with the force of the Institute´s fierce pride and brutalizing tradition.
Conroy´s story is rich and explosive, and Will McLean is a charming, deeply compelling hero -- an English major in military academy full of warrior wannabes, striving to be a man in a world of overgrown boys. The alluring atmosphere of the privileged enclave of Charleston is very much a part of this story, and it is well captured, with the witty detachment of an outsider. The riveting narrative of "The Lords of Discipline" is couched in the sensuous detail and affecting humanity that define Conroy´s writing at its best. Critic Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Star, has called the novel "a work of enormous power, passion, humor and wisdom."
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