Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/07/16/shanghaied.php
Monday, July 16, 2007
Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.
We’ve already sat in on a late-night dorm room chinfest where the consensus was that I needed to adjust my relationship with my father in some vaguely Freudian way. I promised then that we’d meet my father in due course, and that time has arrived.
At some point after I’d left for Hanover, my father got it into his head that I should have joined the ROTC. We’d never discussed it, and it certainly wasn’t among the activities I signed up for in the fall. But by Freshman Father’s Weekend (now First Year Family Weekend), late in the Winter Term, the idea had apparently become fully formed in his mind, though he still hadn’t mentioned it to me. On his visit to Hanover that weekend, he found a vacant hour or so where I wouldn’t miss him, went to see Colonel Ditherspoon, who was in charge of the Dartmouth Army ROTC unit, and signed me up. When he saw me again, it was a fait accompli—I was in the ROTC. My father explained that I was to see the colonel and pick up my uniform the following Monday. He and the colonel had worked things out so that, even though I’d missed two terms, I could double up on my Military Science courses to catch up with the rest of the class.
He almost certainly arranged his appointment with the colonel before he came to Hanover. It took me some years after I reached adulthood to recognize and accept that my father was secretive and devious, indeed pathologically so. This was actually my first real exposure to how he worked in the big world. Among other things, I came to realize that the stated reasons he gave for doing anything were never his actual ones. The military draft, of course, was very much in effect in 1966. He explained his action to me that weekend in a singsong voice, repeating his exoteric reasons over and over, pronouncing certain words strangely each time: “Since you have your military obligAAY-tion to perform, you may as well serve as an AHHH-fficer.” (He himself served only briefly in the Army in World War II and hated the officers as a class.)
I simply don’t know what else was behind his idea of putting me in the ROTC, except that I’m sure that whatever it was, my own interests came in at best a distant second. He had an aversion to applying for financial aid—he said he didn’t want to disclose the family’s financial information on the application form—but he also lost two jobs while I was at Dartmouth, and he was likely struggling to pay my bills, as well as my sister’s tuition at a private school, as well as payments on cars, the house, and a boat.
He may have been looking for a way to put me on financial aid without directly telling me he was doing it (and certainly without taking a systematic look at the family finances), but this is pure speculation. The ROTC stipend might have helped, but I wouldn’t receive it until my junior and senior years. Nothing fits exactly, and it may be expecting too much to try to find a motive that seems consistent or reasonable. Perhaps he simply thought the Army ROTC would make sure I got regular haircuts. Maybe he just wanted to interfere. A year or so later, I flat out told my father he was crazy and meant it. It didn’t do any good, of course.
In hindsight, it puzzles me that Colonel Ditherspoon went along with this, since common sense should have told him that things weren’t going to work out with someone whose motivation was so indifferent that he didn’t even know he was being signed up. What likely happened was that my father cooked up some sort of story about how I was eager to be in the ROTC but somehow hadn’t followed through, and he was acting as an intermediary to plead my case. The colonel was likely wrapping up an undistinguished career with the Army at that point and simply took the easy route to get my father out of his office.
Of course, with no idea that my father had this in mind, I’d chosen my classes, such as ancient Greek, and innocently made up the rest of my schedule without factoring in the time demands that the ROTC made. Clearly the decline in my grades that later took place could be laid in part on that move.
What, given several decades’ perspective, could I, or should I, have done when my father and the colonel got together and signed me up for ROTC? Clearly the thing to do would have been to go to the Dean of Freshmen, or any available Assistant Dean, the following Monday and explain the whole situation. I hadn’t been consulted, it had been done behind my back. Since I’d already chosen a full roster of courses and activities; adding ROTC to my schedule was likely to threaten my performance. The meeting I had in late spring with Dean Dickerson, which I’ve already recounted, took place a couple of months after these events, but it never occurred to me to discuss the problem with him—after all, we weren’t talking about my grades or schedule.
The facts on the ground were that my father’s move had caught me completely unaware, and on top of that, as the Dean of Admissions seems to have divined about my character, I was basically a good kid, and part of being a good kid was to be filial. So I went along with the deal, giving my father the benefit of the doubt that he had my best interests in mind. Five years later, I would have cussed him out of the room, but I was only 18.
At the time, I didn’t have a strong opinion on whether the ROTC should be on campus. Looking back, I think there was a dissonance between the Military Science courses we had to take and at least the intent of the intellectual life on campus. We did many pointless, repetitious things like disassemble and reassemble World War II-era M1 rifles. I still remember a question I missed on a Military Science quiz: “Communist revolutions have not succeeded in Western Europe because ___________.” There was room for just a few words to complete the sentence.
It occurred to me that many books could be written to complete that thought, but apparently I’d missed the single right answer, as far as the Army was concerned, in the class I’d cut. We spent a fair amount of spare time polishing our shoes, belt buckles, and brass buttons. All this was nothing but busy work, something you presumably buy into if you’re in the military, but we weren’t really there, and assuming a Dartmouth education was a worthwhile endeavor, we all should have had better things to do with that time.
As far as I could see once I’d started the program, my fellow ROTC students were a cut below the average that you found at Dartmouth—and that’s saying something, since I described my pre-ROTC peers to Dean Dickerson as vapid and conventional. So the guys I knew in the ROTC were a dull bunch, the sort who couldn’t have imagined anything better to do with their spare time than polish their shoes. Actually, I remember the names of only two: Ed Sloper, a big, docile guy, maybe six-four, 210 pounds, who had the permanent duty of carrying the M30 machine gun in drill. Then there was Ellsworth Bostrom, or Elbo. Every once in a while we had a beer party in the Hinman common room. Elbo would start chugging cans of beer, and at a certain point, he’d get up on a table and announce, “I’M NOT DRUNK.”
Originally, I thought this was part of some charming Animal House-like routine—ironic, self-deprecating, maybe mixing wacky, entertaining antics that showed he was drunk with hilarious insistence that he wasn’t. I chuckled a little in anticipation of what I thought was to come. Elbo heard me and glared down from the table. “I’M NOT DRUNK!!” he insisted again, his voice full of contempt for me, who hadn’t understood (and who, not sharing Elbo’s code of conduct, was likely getting drunk).
After a while, Elbo got down from the table, chugged a few more beers, and got back up again. “I’M NOT DRUNK,” he announced. That, I realized, was the whole point. That was all that was going to happen. Elbo was determined to show he wasn’t drunk even though he’d chugged a whole lot of beer. The point wasn’t to have fun. The point was to show he would never lose control. Elbo was a pretty grim guy. The whole Dartmouth Army ROTC in those years was full of guys like Elbo.
I have a recurring nightmare that’s never gotten less frequent: in it, I’m back in college, and finals are just days away. I suddenly realize that I’ve completely forgotten about one course. Not only have I never been to class, but I haven’t even bought the books. In the dream, I’m trying to figure out how to BS my way through the final and somehow get the prof to ignore the fact that I missed the midterm and quizzes. From what I hear, many people have dreams like this.
I had situations a little like my dream during my sophomore and junior years at Dartmouth. The one class, or set of classes, that I consistently neglected was, of course, ROTC and Military Science. I did, though, go on an ROTC field trip to Massena, New York. I didn’t question it at the time. If they wanted to take us to see Massena, New York, that was fine. I was all for expanding my horizons. But now, as I try to figure out what was really going on then, I’m confused. Why in the world did Dartmouth Army ROTC load up a couple of charter buses and take the cadets to Massena, New York? Let’s try to find out.