Faith of My Fathers (15 page)

Demerits were handed out for every infraction, large and small, of school regulations, and I piled them up. I was chronically late for class. I kept my room in a near permanent state of disorder and filth. I mocked the dress code by wearing a ratty old jacket and tie with a pair of infrequently laundered Levi's. And I despised and resisted the caste system that first-year students were obliged to endure with good humor.

EHS was not a military academy, but it borrowed a few traditions from Southern service academies. Like the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel, Episcopal imposed on first-year students the designation “rats.” Rats were expected to submit to a comparatively mild form of hazing. Mild or not, I resented the hell out of it. And my resentment, along with my affected disregard for rules and school authorities, soon earned me the distinction of “worst rat.”

My hazing increased to correspond to the disrespect with which I treated school customs, and my ever-lengthening catalog of demerits was addressed with ever-longer punishments. But neither my offenses nor their consequences were so serious that they caused a permanent estrangement to develop between me and the staid society that I imposed upon.

My initial entry into EHS society was rough. I was one of the smaller boys in my class, a fact that upperclassmen, annoyed by my obdurate refusal to show a rat's humility, took to be further evidence of arrogance on my part, or arrogance that was all the more insufferable to them because neither social connections nor physical stature justified it. Despite my Confederate ancestors and my family's Southern origins, my heritage was perceived as rootless and not particularly distinguished—a perception confirmed by my conspicuous lack of a Southern accent.

These circumstances might have made for a lonely three years, but I managed to make friends and find a place for myself without pretending to share in the culture from which EHS students were drawn. I was good at sports, and athletics were my passage through my difficult first weeks at the school. I played football in the fall. I wrestled in the winter. I played tennis in the spring. I wasn't an exceptional athlete, but I was good enough to earn the respect of my teammates and coaches.

Eventually, I would use my reputation both as a credible athlete and as a troublemaker to earn a modest distinction as a leader of sorts at Episcopal—a leader of a few troublemakers, but a leader nonetheless. I was part of a small cadre of students who satisfied our juvenile sense of adventure by frequently sneaking off-campus at night to catch a bus for downtown Washington, and the bars and burlesque houses on 9th Street.

Our exploits there were tame compared to my more reckless conduct at the Naval Academy. But because we exaggerated them for the benefit of our rule-abiding classmates we were granted some prestige for our daring, and for the welcome fallacy that our excursions were somehow leading us to romantic opportunities that were only imagined in our all-male society.

The school hosted two dances a year, and for most students these were the only opportunities during the school year to enjoy the company of girls. To give the impression that you were regularly pursuing liaisons outside the school's walls with women you were unlikely to meet at a school dance was a sure route to notoriety on campus. That the impression was, for the most part, contrived did not overly concern us. We deluded ourselves into believing the most salacious rumors about our behavior.

I had good friends at Episcopal. Memory often accords our high school years the distinction of being among the happiest, most relaxed of our lives. I remember Episcopal in that light, and the friendships I formed there make up the better parts of my remembrance. But there was one unexpected friendship that enriched my life at EHS beyond measure.

Were William B. Ravenel the only person I remember from high school, I would credit those days as among the best of my life. His influence over my life, while perhaps not apparent to most who have observed its progress, was more important and more benevolent than that of any other person save members of my family.

Mr. Ravenel headed the English department at EHS, and he coached the junior varsity football team, on which I played. He had been a star running back at Davidson College and had a master's degree in English from Duke University. Stocky and compact, he still had the appearance and manner of an athlete but without the callowness that often marks men who live in the shadow of their long-ago successes on the playing field.

Like most men of his generation, Mr. Ravenel had known far greater danger than that posed by a tough defensive line. He had served in Patton's tank corps during the Third Army's aggressive advance across Europe and had survived its hard encounters with Hitler's panzer divisions. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, the only master at the school who still served in the military.

With his craggy face and athlete's build, he was a rugged-looking man. He seemed to his students to be as wise and capable as any man could expect to be. He loved English literature, and he taught us to love it as well. He had a way of communicating with his students that was uniquely effective and personal. He made us appreciate how profound were the emotions that animated the characters of Shakespeare's tragedies.
Macbeth
and
Hamlet,
in his care, were as compelling and revealing to boys as they are to the most learned and insightful scholar. He wasn't Mr. Chips, but he was as close to that ideal teacher as anyone is ever likely to find. No other master had half as much of our respect and affection. My class dedicated our senior yearbook to him. He was, simply, the best man at the school; one of the best men I have ever known.

Demerits required the offender to march ceaselessly around the long circle drive in the front of the school or to tend the yard of a master's house. It was my good fortune to have received for my many transgressions assignment to work in Mr. Ravenel's yard. Perhaps the school authorities knew they were doing me a favor—knew that Mr. Ravenel was best able to repair the all too evident flaws in my character.

I don't know if it was their benevolence or providence that brought me to his attention. Neither do I understand why it was that Mr. Ravenel took such an interest in me, seeing in me something that few others did. But that he did take an interest in me was apparent to all. And as he personified the ideal of every student, Mr. Ravenel's regard for me signaled my classmates that I had some merit despite the fact that they and I had to strain to see it.

I discussed all manner of subjects with him, from sports to the stories of Somerset Maugham, from his combat experiences to my future. He was one of the few people at school to whom I confided that I was bound for the Academy and a Navy career, and to whom I confessed my reservations about my destiny.

In the fall of my senior year, a member of the junior varsity football team had broken training and been found out. I cannot recall the exact nature of the offense, but it was serious enough to merit his expulsion from the team. Mr. Ravenel called a team meeting, and most of the players argued that the accused be dropped from the team. I stood and offered the only argument for a less severe punishment.

The student in question had, in fact, broken training. But unlike the rest of us, he had chosen at the start of the year not to sign a pledge promising to abide by the training rules faithfully. Had he signed the pledge, he would have been expelled from school, because violating the pledge constituted an honor offense. Had he signed it, I wouldn't have defended him. But he had not. Moreover, he had not been caught breaking training, but had confessed the offense and expressed his remorse freely, without fear of discovery. I thought his behavior was no less honorable than that of a student who signed the pledge and adhered to its provisions.

So did Mr. Ravenel. But he kept his own counsel for most of our discussion, preferring, as was his way, to let his boys reason the thing out for ourselves.

At the start, most of my teammates wanted to hang the guy. But I argued that he had made a mistake that he sincerely regretted, and, uncoerced, had admitted the infraction. His behavior warranted no further disciplinary action. As I talked, I noticed Mr. Ravenel nodding his head. When some of the other guys started to come around to my point of view, Mr. Ravenel closed the discussion by voicing support for my judgment. The team then voted to drop the matter.

After the meeting broke up, Mr. Ravenel approached me and shook my hand. With relief evident in his voice, he told me we had done the right thing, and thanked me for my efforts. He allowed that before the meeting he had been anxious about its outcome. He had hoped the matter would be resolved as it had been, but was uncertain it would. Still, he had not wanted to be the one who argued for exoneration; he wanted the decision to be ours and not his. He said he was proud of me.

I have never forgotten the confidence his praise gave me. Nor have I ever forgotten the man who praised me. Many years later, when I came home from Vietnam, Mr. Ravenel was the only person outside of my family whom I wanted to see. I felt he was someone to whom I could explain what had happened to me, and who would understand. That is a high tribute to Mr. Ravenel. For I have never met a prisoner of war who felt he could explain the experience to anyone who had not shared it.

I regret that I was never able to pay him that tribute. Mr. Ravenel had died of a heart attack two years before my release. He lived for only fifty-three years. His early death was a great loss to his family, friends, and students, and to everyone who had been blessed with his company; a loss I found difficult to accept.

I was often accused of being an indifferent student, and given some of my grades, I can appreciate the charity in that remark. But I was not so much indifferent as selective. I liked English and history, and I usually did well in those classes. I was less interested and less successful in math and science. My grades at Episcopal were divided along those lines. Overall, my academic record there could be fairly described as undistinguished, but acceptable. I graduated a member in adequate if not good standing of the Class of 1954. One of my closest friends at the school, Rives Richey, said later, “If they'd rated everybody in the class for likely to succeed, I guarantee you he'd have been in the bottom ten, without any question.”

A few months prior to graduation, I had taken the Naval Academy entrance exams. I had applied myself, after having been enrolled by my father in a course at an Academy preparatory school, and did surprisingly well, even on the math exam. At graduation there was no longer even the slightest doubt that I would follow my father and grandfather to Annapolis. And on June 28, after a short vacation with some friends at Virginia Beach, my father drove me to the Academy to begin my plebe summer.

In those days an officer escorting his son to the Naval Academy was thought to be an event charged with symbolic importance, a solemn rite of passage. Yet I don't remember it so. I had so long expected the day, so often envisioned the drive, that the actual event seemed more familiar than remarkable. I remember being nervous, and my father offering me typical words of encouragement. But nothing occurred in that one-hour trip that affected my long-held paradoxical image of the Academy, a place I belonged at but dreaded.

         
CHAPTER
10
         

Plebe

To my surprise, I liked it at first. I liked almost every minute of it until that time when my education at the Naval Academy began in earnest. I liked it until plebe summer concluded with the return of the upperclassmen from their vacations, eager to commence their campaign to humiliate, degrade, and make miserable me and every other plebe they encountered.

During plebe summer, Academy life had been sort of a highly organized camp: sports, pleasant company, and, compared to what awaited us after Labor Day, rather benign leadership from the few upperclassmen and junior officers who supervised us. I made friends easily. I boxed, wrestled, ran the obstacle course, and marched in formation. I did well enough in all of these activities that I briefly showed an enthusiasm for the place that my superiors mistook for an indication that I was an emerging class leader. They made me a company commander that summer. It was one of the very few occasions when I distinguished myself in a positive way at the Academy.

Coming out of plebe summer, I had, in Academy parlance, good grease, which meant I showed a natural aptitude for the service and possessed embryonic leadership qualities. The grease would last about a week past summer's end. For a short time in my last year at the Academy, I would again possess good grease. But that was to be an anomaly in a long history of transgressions and improprieties.

The Academy that welcomed the Class of '58 was essentially unchanged from the days of my father's and grandfather's classes. The Academy prided itself on the continuity of its traditions, linking tomorrow's officers with the heroes of an honored past. It wasn't until the 1970s that the Academy, at the prodding of the influential Admiral Rickover, agreed to substantive changes in its core curriculum and even some of its more venerable customs.

When I arrived there, the
Reina Mercedes,
where my father had been obliged to reside his last year, was still visible in the Yard. The curriculum was the same. There were no electives. Everyone took the same courses, which included a good number of rather outdated offerings such as a stupefyingly dull class in Navy boilers, the purpose of which was lost on midshipmen living in the nuclear age.

Every plebe was issued a copy of
Reef Points,
a book of Navy legends and maxims that plebes were expected to quickly memorize. The first passage I was expected to commit to memory, as it had been expected of my father and grandfather, was John Paul Jones's “Qualifications of the Naval Officer”:

It is by no means enough that an officer of the Navy should be a capable mariner. He must be that, of course, but also a great deal more. He should be as well a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor.

He should be the soul of tact, patience, justice, firmness and charity. No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape his attention or be left to pass without its reward, even if the reward is only a word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate, though at the same time, he should be quick and unfailing to distinguish error from malice, thoughtlessness from incompetency, and well meant shortcoming from heedless or stupid blunder.

In one word, every commander should keep constantly before him the great truth, that to be well obeyed, he must be perfectly esteemed.

In this well-ordered, timeless world, with its lofty aspirations and grim determination to make leaders and gentlemen of schoolboys, plebes who possessed minor eccentricities might be tolerated somewhat, but arrogant nonconformists encountered open hostility. Recognized as belonging in the latter category, I soon found myself in conflict with the Academy's authorities and traditions. Instead of beginning a crash course in self-improvement so that I could find a respectable place in the ranks, I reverted to form and embarked on a four-year course of insubordination and rebellion.

Once the second and first classes returned, the unexpected happiness I had experienced in my first weeks at Annapolis rapidly disappeared in the strain of surviving the organized torment that is plebe year. From that moment on, I hated the place, and, in fairness, the place wasn't all that fond of me, either.

Now, more than forty years after my graduation from the Naval Academy, I understand the premise that supported the harsh treatment of plebes. I may have even grasped it at the time I experienced it, but was simply reluctant to accept its consequences personally. Service academies are not just colleges with a uniform dress code. Their purpose is to prepare you for one profession alone, and that profession's ultimate aspiration is a combat command. The Academy experience is intended to determine whether you are fit for such work, and if you are, to mold your natural ability into the attributes of a capable officer. If you aren't, the Academy wants to discover your inaptitude as quickly as possible. The period of discovery is your plebe year, when you are subjected to as much stress as the law and a civilized society will allow. The agents of the Academy's will are the upperclassmen, most of whom relish the assignment.

One-quarter of the plebes who entered the Academy with me had decided or were told to find another line of work by the time our class graduated. Most of them left during our plebe year, unable to cope with the pressures, having failed to lose their individuality in the corporate identity. Upperclassmen had driven them out.

Of course, nothing in peacetime can replicate the dire experiences of war. But the Academy gives it a hell of a try. The workload imposed on you by instructors is daunting but by itself is probably not enough to break all but the least determined plebe. It is the physical and mental hazing by upperclassmen that makes the strain of plebe year so excruciating. It seems mindless and unrelenting.

We were expected to brace up, sit or stand at rigid attention with our chins tucked into our neck, whenever upperclassmen came into view. Our physical appearance was expected to conform to a code with rules so numerous, esoteric, and pointless that I thought them absurd. We were commanded to perform dozens of menial tasks a day, each one intended to be more demeaning than the last, and made all the more so by the heap of verbal abuse that would accompany it. We were ordered to supply encyclopedias of obscure information to any silly son of a bitch who asked a question. When we did not know an answer, which, of course, our interrogators hoped would be the case, we were made to suffer some further humiliation as punishment for our ignorance.

As bad as my plebe year seemed, it was a considerably more civilized experience than it had been for my grandfather and father. My father, who was two years younger and much smaller than I when he entered the Academy, had been hazed cruelly and suffered much worse treatment than that which awaited me twenty-seven years later. But he accepted his trial with better humor and more courage than would I. Even as a boy, my father exhibited a fierce resolve to prove himself the equal of any man.

Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley, who was an upperclassman at the Academy when my father was a plebe, described the merciless treatment accorded my father by Tolley's roommate. He explained the “preferred method” used by “sadistically inclined” midshipmen to punish plebes—a broom with its bristles cut to just below its stitching. “A man pulled that thing back as hard as he could, like a baseball bat, and whacked you with it when you were bent over. The first time it hit you, you just couldn't believe that a broom could do that. It jolted your backside right through the top of your head.”

Kemp had a roommate, “one of these sadists,” who delighted in using the broom on my father whenever my father was unable to recite one or another of the “utterly useless things” a plebe was supposed to have memorized, things like the day's lunch menu or the names of various British battleships. As pictured in Kemp's account, my father was a pathetic physical specimen, a “little runt” who “looked like a wretched little animal that had just got out of the water with its fur still wet.” But he compensated for his lack of stature with extraordinary courage. “In order to protect himself,” Kemp said, “he was tougher than hell.

“[O]ld Jack would bend over, and my roommate would hit him—three or four or five times. Then he would say, ‘Do you want another one? Are you going to learn it the next time?'

“And Jack would say, ‘Hit me again, sir. I can take it.' And he would tell him that until my roommate would give up, even though tears were coming out of his eyes. That was the kind of guy he was. Jack McCain was not, in my personal opinion, one of the brightest naval officers that ever lived, but he certainly was one of the guttiest.”

The practices of plebe year described in Admiral Tolley's account of my father's ordeal exceed the severity of my experience, but I despised my upperclass tormentors nonetheless. And although I lacked my father's courage, I tried in my own way not to yield my dignity to their abuse.

It was a trying time. That was the point, of course. Though I may now understand the purpose of that punishing year, even grant the necessity of learning to tolerate the barely tolerable, I nevertheless hated every minute of it. And I resented everyone who inflicted it on me. I dislike even the memory of it. But, like most graduates of the Academy, my hate for the experience does not constitute regret. It rests in memory, paradoxically, with my appreciation, gratitude really, for the privilege of surviving it, and for the honor of that accomplishment.

At moments of great stress, your senses are at their most acute; your mind works at a greatly accelerated pace. That's the purpose, I take it, of plebe year—not simply to test your endurance, but to show that you can function exceptionally well, as a leader must function, in concentrated misery. I began to glimpse this truth about midway through my plebe year when added to contempt for imperious upperclassmen was my burgeoning pride in not succumbing to their design to see me bilge out.

I resisted not by refusing the hazing but by letting my resentment show, and by failing to conform fully to the convention of a squared-away midshipman. I tried to balance my insolence on just the other side of intolerable, but I worked hard to expose a trace of my resistance. I wanted the lords of the first and second class to know my compliance was grudging and in no way implied my respect for them. I did not accept that they were entitled to my deference, as Academy custom held, for the minor accomplishment of having lived for a year or two longer than I had. Nor did I accept that the abuse they had suffered in their plebe year now gave them the moral authority to abuse me. The Academy granted them that authority, and I wanted to remain at the Academy. I did not want to break. So I suffered their tyranny to the extent necessary to avoid bilging out. But no more than that.

A civilian observer might have judged my appearance to be as neat as that of any other midshipman, but by the exacting standards of the Academy I was a slob. My roommates and I kept our personal quarters in less than acceptable order. My ritual obedience to an upperclassman's commands was perfunctory, or, at least, I hoped there was something in my manner that gave the impression that I lacked proper enthusiasm for the task. These are small rebellions, to be sure. But they were noted, and I was pleased that they were.

One second classman in particular tested my self-control, and I had a hard time suppressing the urge to respond to his assaults on my dignity in a way that would have hastened my departure from the Academy.

Henry Witt (false name) was the son of a chief petty officer. I was a captain's son. Witt never tired of reminding me that our respective stations at the Academy reversed the order of our fathers' relationship in the Navy. “My father is a chief, and yours is a captain. Isn't that strange, McCain,” he observed as I discharged the commission he had given me at the start of the year. He had instructed me to enter his room every morning at five-thirty, close the window he left open at night, turn up his radiator, and perform various other small tasks to make comfortable the advent of his day.