The Lords of Discipline (1980)

The Lords of Discipline is a 1980 novel by Pat Conroy that was later adapted in a 1983 film of the same name.

The story centers on Will McLean, who is in his fourth year at the fictional Carolina Military Institute in Charleston, South Carolina. Will's experiences are heavily based on Pat Conroy's own experiences at The Citadel, a real military college in Charleston.

The story is narrated in first person by Will, who attends the Institute between 1963 and 1967. Will recounts his years at the institute, especially focusing on the school's brutal culture of hazing and abuse.

After discovering a secret society that drives cadets deemed unworthy of graduating from the institute to drop out by any means necessary, Will learns that graduation and lives are on the line.

Background

Although Conroy drew on his experiences as a cadet at The Citadel, and also references traditions and locations of both Norwich University and Virginia Military Institute (VMI), he has said that the story is fiction and not based on his life or that of any other graduate of a military academy. Citadel alumni were critical of the novel, considering it a thinly veiled and unflattering account of the school, and Conroy was ostracized by his alma mater and effectively banned from campus for over 20 years after its publication. In 2000, The Citadel invited Conroy back to campus to receive an honorary doctorate, and again the next year as commencement speaker.

Plot

An aged Will McLean, returning to the Carolina Military Institute in Charleston, South Carolina, an unknown number of years after his graduation, tells the story of his life at the institute.

In 1966, Will was an English major on a basketball scholarship, in his fourth and final year at the institute. Will was not interested in a military career. He only attended the school on account of his father, also an alumnus. Will is fulfilling a deathbed promise he made to his father that he would graduate from CMI and wear the honored CMI ring. Will is a sarcastic young man who seldom agrees with the rigidity of CMI, but is generally well-liked and his professors and peers recognize him for his integrity and fairness. Will struggles to fit into the strict military environment, but finds solace in his three roommates, who have become his closest friends: Tradd St. Croix, the son of an upper-class Charlestonian family, and two brawny Italian-American boys from the North: Dante "Pig" Pignetti and Mark Santoro. They all look forward to graduation, although Will's friends will head off to fight in the Vietnam War, which Will is personally against. However, Will does have some pride in the institute, representing it in basketball. Though anti-war, he also despises the discrimination the Institute faces from civilian students of other colleges due to its military association, which he sees at away games. For example, when Will plays a game against the Virginia Military Institute, which is considered their biggest rival game, he notes that VMI was the only team all season that did not harass him and his teammates.

Retired US Army Colonel Thomas "The Bear" Berrineau, the Commandant of Cadets, asks Will to look out for the institute's first black cadet, Tom Pearce. The Bear knows that Will is the only cadet unopposed to racial integration. Will also begins a secret relationship with Annie Kate Gervais, a girl from an upper-class Charlestonian family who has become pregnant from a boy who refused to marry her. Will knows their relationship has no future either, because Will is Irish-American, Catholic, and not wealthy. Will attempts to aid a struggling freshman, Poteete, who has been targeted by numerous upperclassmen. Shamed by his inability to cope with the harshness of the institute's freshman system, Poteete hangs himself, leaving behind his ominous claim of a "house where they take freshmen" to be tormented outside the oversight of the Commandant's office.

In an extended flashback, Will describes his own plebe year three years earlier. He learned that the only way to survive is to bond closely with the other members of his class against the cadre. Having entered the college on a basketball scholarship, Will is also protected by other members of the basketball team who don't want to see Will physically harmed and, at one point, rescue him from a particularly brutal hazing incident. Many of Will's classmates are not so lucky, and they resign from the school due to the unrelenting hazing.

One recruit swiftly rises to prominence: Bobby Bentley, who has a problem with urinating on himself due to the stress of hazing but is otherwise in excellent shape. Bentley refuses to quit on himself or his classmates, and he endures all the upperclassmen's torment. Conventional hazing methods fail to break Bentley, and his classmates gradually rally around him, making Will's cadre the subject of ridicule of the entire corps of cadets. One evening, Bentley is taken off campus by unknown individuals. The next day, he withdraws from the Institute for unknown reasons. A first classman claims that it was the doing of The Ten, a secret society of cadets. Its members are handpicked for embodying the greatest virtues of the institute. The Ten ensures certain cadets, deemed unacceptable to "wear the ring" (that is, to be a graduate of the institute, denoted by wearing of a class ring), are run out by any means necessary. Once it became clear the R Company cadre had failed to run Bentley out of the school, The Ten had decided to act. Near the end of the year, Will's freshman class is recognized as cadets, and the hazing ends. Will vows to himself that he will never participate in tormenting future generations of plebes, seeing no value in organized cruelty.