The Boo

by Pat Conroy

  Joe Sanfort had to walk tours up to Friday of graduation week. The Boo was patrolling outside Padgett-Thomas Barracks when a pretty little girl shyly approached him and asked if she might speak with Joe Sanfort. “Honey, Cadet Sanfort is walking tours right now.” “I know, Colonel, but we’re getting married Saturday and I just wanted to make final arrangements.” “O. K. Honey, I’ll get him for you.”

  Raffles flourish in the barracks throughout the year: rifles, liquor, tape recorders, and tickets to rock festivals have been given away as prizes time after time. Raffles make money and most upperclassmen (especially those in Business Administration) know that, psychologically, it is almost impossible for a freshman to refuse to buy anything from an upperclassman. One senior paid for his flight ticket home simply by going to every freshman’s room in the battalion and asking for a contribution. A freshman will do almost anything for a friend.

  In the history of raffles at The Citadel, and it’s a distinguished history, filled with the stories of cadets who made a fortune through the use of their wits, Chuck Haffly rates some type of special mention for creativity and imagination. Every cadet and his mother knows that if you get into your car at The Citadel, drive across the Cooper River Bridge, and head north up Route 17, before you hit the North Carolina line, you will pass the most famous or infamous house of prostitution in this part of the country. The sun does not set on this venerable institution without a stream of soberly dressed businessmen, double-jowled policemen, or lusty-eyed college youths stopping to sample some of the fleshly pleasures offered here. The portly matron who greets you at the door claims that her girls are free from germ or bug, and are inspected weekly by a doctor whose main concern is the prevention of disease and the propagation of cleanliness. At the risk of offending any Citadel mother who reads this book, it is not entirely unheard of for a cadet or a group of cadets to venture northward in search of these forbidden fruits. Cadet Haffly, whose understanding of the cadet psyche must have been considerable, decided to raffle off a night of pleasure to some cadet smiled upon by the spirits. Nor was his a small time venture. Each ticket cost ten dollars, making his raffle the most expensive and ambitious in Citadel history. He found willing contributors to his cause: lonely freshmen who just received “Dear John” letters from their high school sweethearts, sad-faced physics majors whose thoughts turned from formulas to the hard complexions of women of the night, and depressed boys who needed some glimmer of excitement to lift them from advanced cases of The Citadel willies. Old Chuck made a fortune. Unfortunately, the winner was a Catholic freshman whose moralistic background and refined sense of guilt took him over the brink and caused him to report the whole affair to the Commandant’s Department. Enter The Boo.

  Allen Carlson took no crap from any living man, but dished it out in mountainous heaps to anyone who came under his jurisdiction. Tough and hard-nosed, he worked his way up to become company commander of Foxtrot his senior year. He was hell on knobs. They lined the walls outside his room at night and he would walk before them, a muscled symbol of leadership formed by the rigors of the plebe system. Carlson not only liked to rack knobs, but also had one other idiosyncrasy not usually found in God-fearing, law-abiding college seniors: he enjoyed poaching alligators. On dark, moonless nights in a small motor boat, he would venture out among the marshes, amidst the deafening chorus of insects, and sweep a flashlight across the black waters, until he spotted the two red eyes of a bull ’gator flashing like burning embers in the swamp. A blast of a .410 shotgun and Carlson had spending money to court the bashful maidens of Charleston the following week. The Boo found out about Carlson and the alligators fairly early in Carlson’s career, but found nothing in college regulations against it. In fact, everyone knew Carlson poached ’gators.

  When Carlson appeared at Boo’s office one afternoon, his face an ashen pallor and his hand trembling perceptibly when he saluted, The Boo knew something of more than general concern was eating Cadet Carlson.

  “Colonel, I need your help bad.” “What’s the problem, Bubba?” “They’re gonna get me,” Carlson answered, visibly perturbed. “Settle down, Mr. Carlson, and tell me about it.” Instead of answering, Carlson handed The Boo a letter from the State Wildlife Commission. The letter stated that agents of the commission had caught an alligator poacher in Georgetown, and several stubs in his checkbook had Carlson’s name on them. The commission was sending a man to The Citadel to question Carlson about his possible involvement with animal poaching in the state. “What in the hell am I going to do, Colonel?” “Pray, Bubba, just pray real hard.” As The Boo looked at the letter, he stared at the name of the wildlife commissioner whose name appeared on the masthead of the letter. He took a book from his shelf which listed all the government officials in South Carolina. The commissioner’s name that appeared on the letter had been out of office for two years. “Anybody hate you, Carlson?” the Colonel asked. “What do you mean, Sir?” “Someone has pulled one over on you. You can’t tell me the wildlife commission uses stationery two years old to write official letters to crooks like you. I know they have more money than that.” “It’s that goddamn knob.” “Pardon me, lamb.” “I know who did it, Colonel. This damn little knob in my company knows some people in the state department. I bet he got that stationery and wrote the letter.” They say that Carlson, an extraordinary racker of freshmen on ordinary occasions, conducted a sweat party of inhuman dimensions that night for a plebe more creative than most.

  One of the first bits of propaganda fed to the cadet, pablum-style, his first year, is the relationship between the soldier and his rifle. The soldier treats his rifle as gingerly as a mother treats her crippled child and shows it the same respect a parish priest gives a visiting bishop. In The Citadel’s entire history, only one cadet, B. M. Schein, has ever walked into the Commandant’s Office and said, “I will not be turning in my rifle. I can’t find it.” Poor B. M. had lost the weapon, simple as that. He could not find the damn thing and he had searched the entire campus. Since the loss of an Ml and matricide are roughly comparable at The Citadel, B. M. looked at Citadel walls for six long months and his feet burned second battalion for 120 tours.

  Larry Orb was a cadet of questionable nobility. A cadet accused Orb of an honor violation. He was tried and found innocent because of some technicality involved in the case. Orb beat up the cadet who made the accusation the day after the trial and then received 10/120 tours.

  The Boo calls Carl Mazzarelli the nearest thing to a full-fledged gangster The Citadel ever welcomed to her gates. He once went to the company bulletin board, saw his name mentioned prominently on the demerit list, flew into an uncontrollable rage, ripped the whole bulletin board off the wall and hurled it to the quadrangle twenty feet below him. On another occasion, The Boo saw a figure dart from a line of cars, after taps, near third battalion. Boo did not give chase. One lesson he learned early was that old hearts do not function as well as young hearts during foot races. He merely went down the line of cars until he came to one whose engine was warm. He took the number off the car’s sticker, checked the records in his office, and made an extremely cordial phone call to Cadet Mazzarelli the next day.

  A gargantuan jock who stood like an anvil at left tackle during the football season went up to the head of a department and practically begged to take seven subjects his senior year. The department head persisted in knowing exactly why he had to take seven subjects. The jock, A. W. Reynolds, answered, “Because I’m married, Sir.” The teacher turned him in.

  Once upon a time there was a basketball player who rose to the rank of Captain in the Corps of Cadets, a rare blend of athlete and soldier. He also performed brilliantly in the classroom. Many people turned to him whenever any discussion of model cadet arose and pointed out that he excelled in every phase of cadet activity. The night before graduation, this admirable, triple-threat cadet partook of the bottle and the vine a little too vigorously. On the way to receive his diploma, he vomited into a little bush beside Bo
nd Hall. He was carried unceremoniously back to barracks. He received his diploma later. This vomiting trooper is now an eminent professor in the Business Department of The Citadel.

  The name “Stindle” means very little unless you come from Union, South Carolina, or thereabouts. Then you’d know the Stindle’s had money flowing from the glove compartment of their blue Cadillac which sat in front of a house built for the landed gentry. Them Stindle’s owned Union. Landon Stindle came to The Citadel and became an outstanding cadet. In the early sixties, he was regimental commander. He went with a beautiful girl for four years and planned to marry her when he completed his three-year stint in the Marine Corps. He left his girl friend under the benevolent care of his best friend, Jim Rheinhart. Jim took excellent care of Stindle’s girl. He married her.

  One night while making his appointed rounds of the barracks, The Boo had paused in a freshman room to give them merits for outstanding room during study period. While he was there, a knock sounded on the wall in the next room, the universal signal for young knobs to go scurrying to the service of indolent seniors. Boo left the room and cracked the door of the next room and said meekly, “Yes, Sir.” Tod Dood sat comfortably propped with his feet on his desk looking over some papers he had written. “Bring the cream in, Dumbhead, the coffee’s ready,” Dood said without looking up. “Thank you, Bubba. That’s all I need.” Dood buried his head in his hands and still without looking up or turning around, pleaded, “Colonel, you can do anything you want to me, but please don’t tell anyone how you caught me.”

  Daryl Butker, in a futile attempt to popularize the troubador’s art on The Citadel campus, would waltz into Colonel Courvoisie’s living room, strap on his guitar and sing his ERW’s to the Colonel.

  Another music lover, Caleb Winston, went AWOL his freshman year and took nothing with him but his two guitars. He left toothbrush, underwear, and picture of his girl at The Citadel, but his two damn guitars went over the wall with him.

  During June Week of his freshman year, Denny Copester was creeping back on campus at two in the morning when a campus night watchman ordered him to halt. Since the general run of watchmen at The Citadel are selected at random from the dregs of mankind, Copester decided to make a run for it. The guard who took his job rather seriously, fired a warning shot over Denny’s head. Denny prudently fell to the earth. The Boo gave him a punishment order of 3/60 and fined him 53 cents for the round of ammunition the guard wasted firing the gun.

  Boo often checked the zoo area, otherwise known as “A” Company where the towering jocks grazed in relative tranquility. One night in early spring he saw a room with the lights out, opened the door, flipped the lights on, saw two figures in bed, turned the lights off, and closed the door. As he was taking the two cadets’ names off the door, he could not shake the persistent feeling that something was just not right. He opened the door again, cut on the lights once more, walked over to the beds, and threw back the covers. Dummies, complete with wigs, occupied the beds. Cadets Whitner and Reyt, imbibing freely at The Ark, returned to The Citadel late that night to discover 120 tours awaited them to walk in their leisure time.

  A senior mess-carver learned that a freshman at his table was allergic to tomato juice. He made the freshman drink nine glasses that same morning. The freshman required emergency treatment at the hospital. The Boo and the Commandant’s Department recommended the senior be shipped, but he was given 2/40 instead. This was one of the cruelest violations of the Fourth Class System The Boo heard about during his reign as Assistant Commandant.

  Boo’s association with the band and its members would constitute a book in itself. But one of his habits which eventually became tradition was his solemn march behind the line of bagpipers dressed for parade. On this march, he lifted the skirts of the pipers to make sure they were wearing drawers. J. W. Howt used to exchange wisecracks with The Boo every Friday when this ritual resumed. “Do you like what you see back there, Colonel?” “Howt, everything I see back here looks better than your face.” Each Friday, The Boo and Cadet Howt fired verbal fusillades at each other. What The Boo didn’t see was his photograph pasted onto Howt’s drums, and as the parade began, and the cutting session ended, Howt marched onto the field beating the hell out of his major antagonist.

  Alvin Reet and W. J. Milder, two of the first cadets who made the discovery that The Boo could be a leaping son of a bitch on occasion, burned a cross on his front lawn.

  Bill Winters lingered too long in the barracks after graduation, possibly reflecting on his long and distinguished career as a senior private and bum in residence, when The Boo, tired of waiting, locked the gate and gave Bill the distinction of being the only cadet ever locked in the barracks on the last day of school.

  Before a West Point football game, the Colonel got a phone call from a man named Goldman who said he used to be a private in “G” Company. When The Boo couldn’t place him at first, Goldman said, “Hell, Colonel, you remember me. I was the only Jew in your company.” “Sure, Bubba.” He got the tickets.

  R. V. Gordon studied like hell and had the grades to prove it. He ranked one in the political science department and fully expected to represent The Citadel at a political science convention at Annapolis. He came to talk to The Boo one afternoon, very frustrated and bitter, and told him his department had chosen to send a man with rank, instead of a senior private. Something like the image of The Citadel was involved.

  Mickey Rollins and Ed Zurowski rated the titles of first class bums, but both of them were pretty good students. Both of them liked to have a good time and play the la dolce vita bit. They were playing leap frog one day on the beach, when Mickey leaped too far and landed on his head. The broken neck sustained in the fall nearly killed him. It was damn close for a while, but he made it.

  Theoretically, Carey Tuttle would graduate in January if the gods continued smiling warm smiles upon him. Some god quit smiling and The Boo caught him selling hot popcorn on a chilly night in early January. The month restriction would prevent him from graduating, so he begged The Boo to give him some chance of escape. The Boo slapped him with a fine of $50.00 that would sweeten The Citadel’s treasury. He paid off forty-two dollars. Hereby, let it be known that Carey Tuttle still owes eight dollars.

  Jimmy Spur’s father was a classmate of The Boo’s at The Citadel. Jimmy stayed in trouble with the law during his entire career at The Citadel. He and The Boo had several disagreements and The Boo nailed him with a punishment order. Later, some merchants downtown complained that Jimmy owed them a lot of money. Boo co-signed a note of a few hundred dollars so he could pay his bills.

  One thing which irritated upperclassmen of the 1960’s was the sight of perspiration stains ringing the armpits of obese freshmen awaiting inspection at noon formation. Whether this was because of television’s influence with its ubiquitous commercials extolling the virtues of desert-dry underarms or simply some hang-up which became generalized throughout the Corps, no one really knew. The mother of David Wellman stormed into The Boo’s office one day. She was a large and effusive woman with her exaggerated features heavily made up. She begged and exhorted The Boo to keep the hungry pack of upperclassmen from, devouring her fat, sweating little boy, David. She had sent him deodorants, both stick and spray, special odor-killing soaps, powders, and even deodorant pads. Nothing worked. Big, ugly perspiration stains still plagued him at noon formation. She wept copiously and as she told the tragic story of her son, she did not notice The Boo on the edge of hysteria, trying to keep from laughing as he watched the purple rivers of mascara drip down her face with every tear.

  When Larry Wolf walked up the flight of stairs in Jenkins Hall and walked into Courvoisie’s office, it was easy to tell that something was eating the kid. “Colonel, I have something to tell you.” “What is it, ‘Wolf’?” “Colonel, I just have to get married. I have to. I love her and she loves me and we just have to get married.” “That’s fine, Wolf. But The Citadel’s no place to be married. Your wife can
’t be with you. There’s no sense of companionship. You’d miss the hell out of her during the week, break barracks every time you got the chance, and get yourself into a lot of trouble.” “I know, Colonel, but we’re in love and there’s nothing else we can do.” “O. K. Good luck, Bubba, whatever you do.”

  Several weeks later Larry returned to his office with tears in his eyes and said, “Colonel, something terrible has happened. I have to go home right now. I can’t wait for the weekend.” “O. K., Bubba, you have twenty-four hours.” The Boo later learned that Larry’s girl had married another guy from their home town.

  Pete Reston and Jerry Bester engaged in a kind of psychological warfare against each other their entire senior year. Jerry, being a cadet major, held a distinct advantage on the disciplinary battlefield. Pete, fighting with limited resources, helped stimulate Jerry’s intellectual life by ordering over sixty magazines and signing Jerry’s name to the purchase order.