Wrinkle in the Long Gray Line (eBook)

Chapter 1

Why Did I Go to West Point in the First Place?

West Point has had some notable failures. Edgar Allan Poe suffered there for a short time in 1830–1831, before he stopped going to class, parades and mandatory chapel. Not surprisingly, Mr. Poe was dismissed, probably for the good of all of us.

George Custer, who at least one writer3 has described as the worst West Point cadet ever, graduated last in his class of 1861 and was court-martialed shortly after graduating for neglect of duty. Of course, he went on to notoriety at Little Big Horn.

The painter James Whistler, son of a West Point graduate, also comes to mind. Apparently, Mr. Whistler was smart enough to pass most subjects without much work, and his roommate said that he was “one of the most indolent of mortals. But his was a most charming laziness, always doing that which was most agreeable to others and himself.”4 As you might guess, indolence is not highly regarded at West Point, and after Whistler referred in a chemistry class to silicon, a primary component of sand, as a gas, his military career was doomed. He eventually was expelled by Superintendent General Robert E. Lee (yes, that Robert E. Lee, the future Confederate general).

I mention these notable failures not because I have been as successful as Poe as an author or Whistler as a painter, or as big a disaster as Custer as a General. However, I managed to generate a good deal of notoriety when I left West Point due to my request for conscientious objector status.

You wouldn’t be the first person to ask me, “If you were a conscientious objector, why did you go to West Point?” In fact, my wife read about me in a newspaper article when she was in high school, before ever meeting me, and later told me she’d asked herself, “What kind of idiot would go to West Point if he is a conscientious objector?” It is a reasonable question. It is well known that West Point has always been intended to create elite military leaders from raw, cocky high school boys (and now girls). It has produced some of our country’s most prominent military leaders: Generals Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, “Stonewall” Jackson, John J. Pershing, Douglas McArthur, George Patton and President Dwight D. Eisenhower (not to mention Duke basketball coach Mike Kzyzewski, who I saw play under then-West Point basketball coach Bobby Knight). At the same time, our country had been sending “military advisors” to Vietnam since at least 1960 and increased its troop level there from 1966 to 1967 by over 100,000 to 485,600 military personnel.5 The war was on TV news every night in 1967. So, if I was a conscientious objector, what was I thinking?

The answer is long and complicated, but it is directly related to the fact that we and every country send our young and often naïve men and women to the battlefront, not the decision makers who decide to go to war. In addition, the sad fact remains that our country and most countries spend far more research, analysis, and money on how to make war rather than on how to resolve differences in more constructive ways. Sadly, the fifty-plus years since 1970 have not changed this.

A Military Family

The oldest of four, I was born toward the beginning of the baby boom, on November 11, 1949—Armistice Day. My father grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois. His father had died when he was seventeen, and his mother, Myrtle Pearl Donham, got a government loan to buy a small confectionary, leading her to becoming a lifelong Democrat. She was a founding member of the East St. Louis Women’s Democrats and once rode in a car with Eleanor Roosevelt. She also was a dedicated churchgoer, usually Methodist, which at the time was fervently anti-Catholic. Her political views won out and held true when John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, ran for president. I guess she ultimately decided that a Catholic Democrat was better than the Republican, Nixon.

My father joined the Army Air Corps in World War II, even though he could have received a deferment since his father had died and his older brother had suffered a serious chemical burn injury working at a Monsanto plant and was incapacitated at the time. After training in Texas, he became a pilot in the Pacific theater, in places like New Guinea, the Philippines and Australia. He flew a C-47, known as the “biscuit bomber” because it transported supplies to troops stationed on the front lines. He had 200 hours of combat flying, was a squadron commander and was awarded the Air Medal, given for “heroic or meritorious achievement while participating in aerial flight.” He never talked much about the war.

Postwar, my father finished college, earning two bachelor’s degrees—one from Indiana State and the other from Washington University in St. Louis—as well as a master’s from Auburn, all on the GI Bill. My father loved all sports, but baseball was his first love. He was a southpaw who played first base for semi-pro teams in East St. Louis when he worked for the Swift packing plant, and in college at Indiana State and McKendree College, a small Methodist college in Lebanon, Illinois. He suffered a severe knee injury, torn ligaments, I believe, playing baseball at Indiana State. Today, these are repaired with minimally invasive arthroscopic surgery, but his procedure gave him a long, ugly scar on his knee, limited his ability to run and ended his career as an athlete.

My mother grew up in a poor family with nine kids in rural southern Indiana close to the Wabash River. I didn’t realize just how poor her family was until my wife, Becky, and I visited the graves of my mother’s parents, my grandparents, Emmett and Florence Clough. They are buried in the cemetery at Darwin, Illinois, which is barely big enough to be called a hamlet along the Wabash River south of Terre Haute, Indiana. We found the graveyard but didn’t know where the graves were. Someone pointed us to a tiny, weather-beaten house down the road. We knocked on the door and a young man, maybe twenty years old, came to the door in a woman’s slip. He may have had Down syndrome. He invited us into a living room with a threadbare carpet that reeked of urine. As the wait for his mother approached several minutes, Becky and I started to get nervous, with the “Deliverance” banjos ringing in our heads. Finally, an elderly woman appeared and we explained we were looking for the Clough graves. She said, “The Cloughs? They were dirt poor!” Becky and I looked at each other—if this woman described my mother’s family as dirt poor, what would that have been like?

After high school, my mother moved to Terre Haute to attend a “business school” to learn to be a secretary. She enlisted in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service—the women’s branch of the US Naval Reserve) during World War II, and perhaps her greatest disappointment was when she was disqualified from serving due to a “heart murmur.”

However, the heart murmur did not keep her from reaching ninety-four before she passed away. My mother was brought up as a strict Baptist. She believed in God—that Jesus died for our sins, that hell was waiting for those who didn’t believe and that the Bible was a rule book. She also believed in “spare the rod, spoil the child.” Believe me, I was not spoiled. She felt it was her duty to teach her children the gospel and did her best to impart her beliefs to her family, with varying success.

My parents met after World War II in Terre Haute, at a USO where my mother was volunteering, while my father was attending Indiana State. My parents did not talk about their courtship with me, except that my mother would occasionally mention my father’s green eyes with a rare smile. They were married in 1948. My dad became a teacher and turned his love of sports into a coaching career. When I was born a little more than a year later, he was teaching and coaching in Bunker, a little town in the Ozarks in southwestern Missouri. From there, my father moved to a teaching and coaching position in Chambersburg, in the “belly” part of Illinois, west of the Illinois River. Then we moved again, when I was about three or four, to a slightly bigger town, Meredosia, right on the Illinois River. Our house was close to a railroad track. Across the track was a vacant field that bordered the river. I played with wooden blocks and pretended they were the barges passing by. At Meredosia, my father received press attention in the small-town newspapers after he punched out a referee who made a bad call that cost his high school team a win. While we lived there, when I was three, my brother Mark was born in Jacksonville, the nearest town with a hospital. We have been close our entire lives. When I was four, we moved again to a slightly bigger town, Glasford, about twenty miles from Peoria. In Glasford, we lived in two different houses and my cocker spaniel puppy Susie got run over by a motorcycle. I started first grade in Glasford in September 1955 when I was five, although I missed at least two weeks of school when I got the measles. Then, right after school ended, I had my tonsils removed.

Peoria was a big city to those of us who lived in nearby small towns. Among other things, it had an airport. Once or twice, we drove there to watch the planes. One time, while we were looking at planes taking off and landing, there was a young boy with his parents nearby who happened to be African–American. I asked my parents, “Is he black or brown?” My mom quickly shushed me. It was my first experience with race. To drive twenty miles from...