David helped tutor in Euclidean geometry, a required subject and perhaps the most difficult. Three months later he was sworn in as a naval cadet on the beautiful banks of the Hudson River at West Point.
David did not realize that he had jumped from the frying pan into the fire; the sadism of petty officers is a mild hit-or-miss thing compared with the calculated horrors visited on new cadets—“plebes”—by cadets of the senior classes, especially by the seniormost, the first classmen, who were walking delegates of Lucifer in that organized hell.
But David had three months to find this out and to figure out what to do, that being the time upper classes were on the briny, practicing warfare. As he saw it, if he could last nine months of these hazards, all the kingdoms of the Earth would be his. So he said to himself, if a cow or a countess can sweat out nine months, so can I.
He arranged the hazards in his mind in terms of what must be endured, what could be avoided, and what he should actively seek. By the time the lords of creation returned to stomp on the plebes he had a policy for each typical situation and was prepared to cope with it under doctrine, varying doctrines only enough to meet variations in situation rather than coping hastily on an improvised basis.
Ira—“O King,” I mean—this is more important to surviving in tough situations than it sounds. For example, Gramp—David’s Grampaw, that is—warned him never to sit with his back to door. “Son,” he said to him, “might be nine hundred and ninety-nine times you’d get away with it—no enemy of your’n would come through that door. But the thousandth time—that’s the one. If my own Grampaw had always obeyed that rule, he might be alive today and still jumping out bedroom windows. He knew better, but he missed just once, through being too anxious to sit in on a poker game, and thereby took the one chair open, one with its back to a door. And it got him.
“He was up out of his chair and emptied three shots from each of his guns into his assailant before he dropped; we don’t die easy. But ‘twas only a moral victory; he was essentially dead, with a bullet in his heart, before he got out of that chair. All from sitting with his back to an open door.”
Ira, I’ve never forgotten Gramp’s words—and don’t you forget ’em.
So David categorized the hazards and prepared his doctrines. One thing that had to be endured was endless questioning, and he learned that a plebe was never permitted to answer, “I don’t know, sir,” to any upperclassman, especially a first classman. But the questions ordinarily fell into categories—history of the school, history of the Navy, famous naval sayings, names of team captains and star players of various athletic sports, how many seconds till graduation, what’s the menu for dinner. These did not bother him; they could be memorized—save the number of seconds remaining till graduation, and he worked out shortcuts for that, ones that stood him in good stead in later years.
“What sort of shortcuts, Lazarus?”
Eh? Nothing fancy. A precalculated figure for reveille each morning, a supplementary figure for each hour thereafter, such as: five hours after six o’clock reveille subtracts eighteen thousand seconds from the base figure, and twelve minutes later than that takes off another seven hundred and twenty seconds. For example at noon formation one hundred days before graduation, say at exactly twelve-oh-one and thirteen seconds, figuring graduation at ten A.M. which was standard, David could answer, “Eight million, six hundred and thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and twenty-seven seconds, sir!” almost as fast as his squad leader could ask him, simply from having precalculated most of it.
At any other time o’ day he would look at his watch and pretend to wait for the second hand to reach a mark while in fact performing subtractions in his head.
But he improved on this; he invented a
David did not realize that he had jumped from the frying pan into the fire; the sadism of petty officers is a mild hit-or-miss thing compared with the calculated horrors visited on new cadets—“plebes”—by cadets of the senior classes, especially by the seniormost, the first classmen, who were walking delegates of Lucifer in that organized hell.
But David had three months to find this out and to figure out what to do, that being the time upper classes were on the briny, practicing warfare. As he saw it, if he could last nine months of these hazards, all the kingdoms of the Earth would be his. So he said to himself, if a cow or a countess can sweat out nine months, so can I.
He arranged the hazards in his mind in terms of what must be endured, what could be avoided, and what he should actively seek. By the time the lords of creation returned to stomp on the plebes he had a policy for each typical situation and was prepared to cope with it under doctrine, varying doctrines only enough to meet variations in situation rather than coping hastily on an improvised basis.
Ira—“O King,” I mean—this is more important to surviving in tough situations than it sounds. For example, Gramp—David’s Grampaw, that is—warned him never to sit with his back to door. “Son,” he said to him, “might be nine hundred and ninety-nine times you’d get away with it—no enemy of your’n would come through that door. But the thousandth time—that’s the one. If my own Grampaw had always obeyed that rule, he might be alive today and still jumping out bedroom windows. He knew better, but he missed just once, through being too anxious to sit in on a poker game, and thereby took the one chair open, one with its back to a door. And it got him.
“He was up out of his chair and emptied three shots from each of his guns into his assailant before he dropped; we don’t die easy. But ‘twas only a moral victory; he was essentially dead, with a bullet in his heart, before he got out of that chair. All from sitting with his back to an open door.”
Ira, I’ve never forgotten Gramp’s words—and don’t you forget ’em.
So David categorized the hazards and prepared his doctrines. One thing that had to be endured was endless questioning, and he learned that a plebe was never permitted to answer, “I don’t know, sir,” to any upperclassman, especially a first classman. But the questions ordinarily fell into categories—history of the school, history of the Navy, famous naval sayings, names of team captains and star players of various athletic sports, how many seconds till graduation, what’s the menu for dinner. These did not bother him; they could be memorized—save the number of seconds remaining till graduation, and he worked out shortcuts for that, ones that stood him in good stead in later years.
“What sort of shortcuts, Lazarus?”
Eh? Nothing fancy. A precalculated figure for reveille each morning, a supplementary figure for each hour thereafter, such as: five hours after six o’clock reveille subtracts eighteen thousand seconds from the base figure, and twelve minutes later than that takes off another seven hundred and twenty seconds. For example at noon formation one hundred days before graduation, say at exactly twelve-oh-one and thirteen seconds, figuring graduation at ten A.M. which was standard, David could answer, “Eight million, six hundred and thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and twenty-seven seconds, sir!” almost as fast as his squad leader could ask him, simply from having precalculated most of it.
At any other time o’ day he would look at his watch and pretend to wait for the second hand to reach a mark while in fact performing subtractions in his head.
But he improved on this; he invented a
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