Deliverance

Friday, February 8, 2008

By John Bruce

Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Those who want to read previous installments will find them on this newspaper’s web site. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.

All of a sudden we were in the world of heavy-breathing conspiracy. There was just a whiff of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima. And I was cast as Hyacinth Robinson, or maybe Stevie. Al Salzman, I noticed, was nowhere to be seen. He was smarter than Larry and Bob.

“Right,” I said. “What do you think the consequences might be for me if I did that?”
“Oh, I don’t think anything would happen,” said Bob. “They’d throw you out of the ROTC, of course. But isn’t that something you’d want?”

I shook my head. “I think the whole thing would be a lot less predictable than that.” I had a feeling that this bright idea had been discussed back and forth in the SDS, maybe chewed over at a level higher than just Dartmouth. They’d be sure that if it happened, media would be there to cover the whole thing. “We’ve got a guy who’s going to put his rifle down and quit the ROTC, right in the middle of the Armed Forces Day parade, as his personal protest against the war. . . !” And I was elected. I was, in fact, the useful idiot. Larry and Bob were looking at me, and what they saw was a big useful idiot. I didn’t use those words. I don’t think they were in general use then. But I knew what they thought they were looking at.

“I’ll think about it,” I said to get them off my back and so I could finish my lunch in peace. But I had absolutely no intention even of considering it. The ROTC wasn’t worth it, and I had visions of the whole thing spinning out of control. It would be too easy for me to be on television news broadcasts, with nothing to show for it but a national reputation as a flake. If things went the wrong way, “to pull a John Bruce” could enter the vocabulary.

This exchange took place, let’s remember, in 1967. The Parkhurst takeover, which centered on the same issue, the ROTC, didn’t take place until 1969. It’s an indication, it seems to me, of how completely the SDS was focused on the single issue of the ROTC as it related to the Viet Nam War, well before the more public manifestations. And we’ve already seen how militarily insignificant the ROTC was as a target. Larry’s and Bob’s idea of radical action was to get someone else to make an empty gesture. That little meeting over lunch at Thayer Hall was the start of my serious disillusionment with Larry.

I marched in the ROTC Armed Forces Day review, and it was uneventful, since I had no intention of starting what would be an unpredictable chain of events over a matter that I didn’t think was important. But a few days afterward, Major Frigment called me into a meeting at the ROTC headquarters on campus. All of the Army guys were there, not only Frigment, but Colonel Ditherspoon, Major Tickworth, and Sergeant Major Fludge.

The purpose of the meeting was clear, but as I remember it now, I’m not sure why they wasted as much time on it as they did. It was a long meeting. Time, I suppose, was a commodity they had in excess. Colonel Ditherspoon did most of the talking, at least at the start. I assume Sergeant Major Fludge was there to type. As best I can reconstruct the meeting, with many years intervening and diminishing my memory of this trivial event, here is what Colonel Ditherspoon had to say:

“Cadet Bruce, the Central Office of Defense Bureaucratic Personnel Planning, or CENDEFBURPP, has made a careful study of the Army’s officer needs over the coming six years. As a result of their planning, they have determined that, currently, there are two cadets too many enrolled in the ROTC nationwide. One of those cadets, Mr. Bruce, is you. The other one, I believe, is somewhere in South Dakota. As a result, we are forced to terminate your participation in the Dartmouth ROTC program.”

This couldn’t have been better news, of course. Thrown out of ROTC, without having to throw down my rifle and walk away from the formation! However, Dartmouth’s crack Army ROTC faculty wound up having much more to say:

“It appears,” Colonel Ditherspoon went on, “that our disaffection with each other is, shall we say, mutual.” That was the sign for Frigment and Tickworth to jump in. This must have been more excitement than they’d had since the field trip to Massena, New York.

“We’ve noticed,” said Frigment, “that polishing your shoes and uniform buttons hasn’t been a priority.”

“You don’t get your hair cut very often, do you?” added Tickworth. “Don’t you care about your appearance?”

“What about your support for the war?” It was Frigment’s turn again. His voice took on a sneer. “I wonder if it’s wholehearted.”

“If I receive orders, I’ll follow them,” I said. I’m not sure what other answer would have been appropriate. Frigment’s own support for the war didn’t seem to extend as far as trying to get himself shipped over there.

Apparently the protocol didn’t allow Sergeant Major Fludge to express an opinion. He was there in case any typing needed to be done. But his look said enough. There were too many Wednesday afternoons with my shoes insufficiently shined for it to be otherwise.

They finally let me out of the place. I went to my room and got my uniform and whatever else I had to return, brought it back, got some kind of receipt from Sergeant Major Fludge, who was busy typing, and I was free.

I never really believed the explanation Colonel Ditherspoon gave me for why I was being thrown out, but the bureaucratic sound of it, that the Army somehow had some number of excess cadets, in consequence of which I was supernumerary, was very useful to me in explaining the situation to my father. There would be no way in which he could go back to Colonel Ditherspoon and try to have me reinstated: the decision was bigger than any single person.

But recognizing that the explanation they gave likely glossed over the real reasons for throwing me out, it was still hard for me to think the actual cause through. If the Army had any true inkling of what the SDS had in mind for the Armed Forces Day review -- that I’d at least been pressured to throw down my ceremonial M1 and break ranks as a Viet Nam protest -- I would think that the prudent thing would have been to throw me out before the day, not afterward.

So I seriously doubt that they had any information on what the SDS had asked me to do. On the other hand, when the ROTC officers grilled me over my opinions on the war, they must have had some basis for thinking I opposed it. Actually, while many of my peers were in fact against it, I was still undecided.

I suspect that what was really going on was that one or more ROTC cadets – perhaps my acquaintance Ellbo -- decided to tell those in authority that I was hanging with the wrong crowd. It was probably a way to gain favor, and with that group, it likely worked very well. In fact, it worked well all around. I was out, with an explanation I could conveniently give my father. I would no longer be required to polish my shoes, cut my hair, and march around the football field on Wednesday afternoons. Whatever would happen to me in the draft when I graduated in a couple of years was where it belonged: in the future.

I went home that summer and worked for a short time selling ice cream from a truck. One night a co-worker gave me a ride home. He ran a red light, and we were in an accident, in which I was slightly injured. The insurance company gave me a generous settlement. I wasn’t rich, but it was a nice piece of cash. I’m still puzzled at what my mother did when I got it. The bits and pieces that I’ve related here about my parents – signing me up for the ROTC without telling me, making an apparent drunken phone call to Dean Seymour and then claiming it hadn’t happened – should be enough to indicate that they didn’t always have what a disinterested observer might call my best interests in mind.

My mother’s position on the insurance payout was that it was my money; it was something special; it should not be used for routine college expenses. It was, in her view, enough to support me for six months of foreign travel. I simply don’t know, at this remove, what got into my mother, nor how she was able to prevail with my father, who must certainly have had his own designs on it, since the family, in its effort to maintain appearances, was always in one or another crisis.

Neither of my parents ever had a simple set of motives for doing anything. It’s possible that my mother thought having a son on a Wanderjahr would enhance her efforts to break into Washington society, her preoccupation at the time. In any case, a Wanderjahr, or at least a Halbwanderjahr, was what I got. When I returned to Hanover that fall, I began planning to take a term off in 1968, which, in conjunction with summer vacation, would give me the six months I wanted. I went back in to see Dean Seymour to get his permission to double up on courses so I could graduate on time. I was still, it seemed, quite familiar to him from my earlier visit. On the other hand, though deeply skeptical of what I had in mind, he must have figured any arrangement that got me off campus couldn’t be all bad, and I got his blessing. Unwitting, I was about to act out a cockeyed version of Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, the same novel I mentioned above. It is, I would add, greatly underrated. n

Deliverance

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