• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 498 0

was to educate and mold us into proper citizens, instilling in us the kind of acquiescence to authority that generals have sought to impose on their troops from the beginning of time. The military mind has one aim, and that is to make soldiers react as mechanically as possible. They want the same predictability in a man as they do in a telephone or a machine gun, and they train their soldiers to act as a unit, not as individuals. That’s the only way you can run an army. It is only through order, submission to discipline and the exorcising of individuality that you make a good soldier. Many people really enjoy it. I witnessed it at Shattuck, and I’ve seen it in a hundred different ways since then. But I hated it. To regiment people—to make them march in step, all in uniform, marching in a unit—was nauseating to me.

I missed my parents, who rarely visited or wrote, but I had a lot of fun at Shattuck along with much anguish and sometimes loneliness. I did my best to tear the school apart and not get caught at it. I wanted to destroy the place. I hated authority and did everything I could to defeat it by resisting it, subverting it, tricking it and outmaneuvering it. I would do anything to avoid being treated like a cipher, which is what they aim for when they put you in a military uniform and demand conformity and discipline.

Not long ago, I ran across a pile of letters that I’d sent home from Shattuck and that my sister Frannie saved. In my first letter a few weeks after I got there, I told my parents: “The school work is terribly hard to start with, plus my not knowing how to concentrate and my rotten foundation in English, French and Algebra makes things awfully tough. I’m learning, though, not fast maybe, but learning about everything. I hope I will be able to carry all my subjects. I’m working hard and I think I can … I’m rooming with an awful nice kid from Portland named John Adams (good guy)….” The food served by the Shattuck mess, I observed, was “grand and you can have all you can hold. I have gained ten pounds and now weigh 157 with clothes on and about 150 without. I feel swell except for my back, which I messed up in football. It’s coming along, though, and I’ve found I can get plenty tough if I want to in football. People think you have to be a big bruiser to play football. That’s bunk. All it takes is a little callousing of the constitution.… You don’t have time to blow your nose here. On the run all the time. The seniors are plenty tough on you. Some are swell fellows just having a bit of fun. Others get nasty sometimes. I don’t like that, but I’ve found that it’s best to just let things slide.…” I went to a dance at a local girls’ school, but apparently it was disappointing: “The girls are grand, but all but bored to tears, and all they can offer you is a roaring game of Chinese checkers or sitting in the middle of the front lawn.… Sometimes I get very lonely and wish I could be home, of course. Mother, please write me. I’ve gone away to school, you know. Address to Shattuck School, Faribault, Minn.”

In other letters saved by my sister, I reported on the ups and downs of my first year:

September, 1941

Dear Folks:

Well, the routine has been unleashed in all its fury. I’m going like hell every second. I would have written sooner but honest to my dear God, I just haven’t had time.

So you don’t think I can play football? I am now first-team first-string right half. Am I sore! My lord above couldn’t know how sore I am. It’s all I can do to lace my shoes.… We have had two tests and in both I think I have done quite well. I like John very much and think—as a matter of fact I know—we will get along fine.… This work has sapped all my strength. I can’t write another line.

Your loving son, Bud

September, 1941

Dear Folks:

I am settled materially but not spiritually. The staff is tough and the reward is usually a good, sweet, but firm kick in the ass. I’m playing first-string football but the studies are pretty rigid so I think I’ll have to drop it. All I went out for was to see whether or not