but they never broke O‘Brien. They never cracked the veneer of his hostility and bitterness. He fought The Citadel with every waking breath and with all the resources available to him. No matter how much pressure the upperclassmen exerted against him, nothing seemed to phase O‘Brien. When the battalion commander tried to have a serious, man-to-man talk with him, O‘Brien laughed in his face. The shocked battalion commander, who was accustomed to being treated like an anthropomorphic god by freshmen, decided to present the case of O‘Brien to the Commandant’s Department and The Boo.
The Boo gave O‘Brien an order for failure to follow verbal commands. On the first day of tour formation The Boo went up to O‘Brien and congratulated him heartily for being the first member of his class to walk tours. This was akin to being congratulated for being the first to contact whooping cough. The Boo then asked O‘Brien what exactly was eating him, why he could not adapt to the system, and why he had gained such widespread notoriety in a brief two weeks. O‘Brien listened to The Boo stoically. He said “Yes, Sir” in the proper places. He was neither disrespectful nor obsequious. But after a five minute conversation, The Boo knew intuitively that O‘Brien was trying his damndest to separate himself from the Corps of Cadets.
The Boo moved him to Fourth Battalion in an effort to save him. Had O‘Brien been a typical knob, this strategy might have been effective. But O‘Brien was a super-knob whose reputation traveled before him, spreading the word of his spurious deeds and exploits before his arrival. When he entered Fourth Battalion, he was a marked man. He was given no chance. The Corps had marked O‘Brien for execution. In the harsh law of the Corps, the freshman who completely rebelled against the system was driven out of The Citadel by any means necessary. The hazing of this marked freshman grew more and more severe until the freshman neared the breaking point. He was given individual attention by packs of sergeants and corporals who surrounded him, shouted in his ear, abused him physically and verbally, and terrified him into leaving the school. The Citadel can be a vicious world. What I have described will not be understood by those men who graduated from The Citadel at an earlier period. The Citadel was more refined then. The hazing was not brutal. But after the second world war, a theory circulated around the military men of the college that the tougher the environment, the more resilient and more durable the leader produced. So graduates who sent their sons to The Citadel after the war never fully understood why their sons could not accept a system they had found to be so stimulating to their young manhood. In the early 1960’s, the plebe system was a kind of inquisition. When O‘Brien came along, General Tucker was effecting changes in the fourth class system which were resented bitterly by the Corps. The changes came too late to make any substantial difference in the fate of Mike O‘Brien. O‘Brien faced daily harassment by red-faced squad leaders. They stepped on his formation shoes (which is worse than having someone step on your mother’s face if you are a freshman). They tried to get his classmates to give him the cold shoulder. Through all of this, O‘Brien remained as passive as a cigar store Indian. He arrived at The Citadel physically hard. As time passed, he became harder.
The upperclassmen stuck O‘Brien with over fifty demerits the first month of school. He served confinements until, as he put it, “his ass was one big callous.” Tour formation always found him with a rifle slung carelessly over his shoulder. Seniors would stop him on his way to class to rack him for some real or imagined offense. The pressure was so intense and his reputation among the Corps so malignant that O‘Brien soon had nothing to lose. On one famous occasion, when the upperclassmen pulled a crackdown on the knobs,
The Boo gave O‘Brien an order for failure to follow verbal commands. On the first day of tour formation The Boo went up to O‘Brien and congratulated him heartily for being the first member of his class to walk tours. This was akin to being congratulated for being the first to contact whooping cough. The Boo then asked O‘Brien what exactly was eating him, why he could not adapt to the system, and why he had gained such widespread notoriety in a brief two weeks. O‘Brien listened to The Boo stoically. He said “Yes, Sir” in the proper places. He was neither disrespectful nor obsequious. But after a five minute conversation, The Boo knew intuitively that O‘Brien was trying his damndest to separate himself from the Corps of Cadets.
The Boo moved him to Fourth Battalion in an effort to save him. Had O‘Brien been a typical knob, this strategy might have been effective. But O‘Brien was a super-knob whose reputation traveled before him, spreading the word of his spurious deeds and exploits before his arrival. When he entered Fourth Battalion, he was a marked man. He was given no chance. The Corps had marked O‘Brien for execution. In the harsh law of the Corps, the freshman who completely rebelled against the system was driven out of The Citadel by any means necessary. The hazing of this marked freshman grew more and more severe until the freshman neared the breaking point. He was given individual attention by packs of sergeants and corporals who surrounded him, shouted in his ear, abused him physically and verbally, and terrified him into leaving the school. The Citadel can be a vicious world. What I have described will not be understood by those men who graduated from The Citadel at an earlier period. The Citadel was more refined then. The hazing was not brutal. But after the second world war, a theory circulated around the military men of the college that the tougher the environment, the more resilient and more durable the leader produced. So graduates who sent their sons to The Citadel after the war never fully understood why their sons could not accept a system they had found to be so stimulating to their young manhood. In the early 1960’s, the plebe system was a kind of inquisition. When O‘Brien came along, General Tucker was effecting changes in the fourth class system which were resented bitterly by the Corps. The changes came too late to make any substantial difference in the fate of Mike O‘Brien. O‘Brien faced daily harassment by red-faced squad leaders. They stepped on his formation shoes (which is worse than having someone step on your mother’s face if you are a freshman). They tried to get his classmates to give him the cold shoulder. Through all of this, O‘Brien remained as passive as a cigar store Indian. He arrived at The Citadel physically hard. As time passed, he became harder.
The upperclassmen stuck O‘Brien with over fifty demerits the first month of school. He served confinements until, as he put it, “his ass was one big callous.” Tour formation always found him with a rifle slung carelessly over his shoulder. Seniors would stop him on his way to class to rack him for some real or imagined offense. The pressure was so intense and his reputation among the Corps so malignant that O‘Brien soon had nothing to lose. On one famous occasion, when the upperclassmen pulled a crackdown on the knobs,
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