The Boo Read Online Free PDF

meaning and variety to existence, by their actions, by the bright effervescence of their smile, or in some cases, by the shadow which darkens and dominates their being. Much of The Boo’s time in the Commandant’s Department was spent tediously studying demerit lists or checking All-in reports, labor which required time and patience. Yet many events happened which stand out and illuminate the ten years he reigned as Assistant Commandant. Most of the stories he recalls are of the villains and blackguards, the bums and cutthroats who covered the body of the Corps like warts, who mastered the subtle art of Blue-Book evasion, and who engaged in dubious battle with the cigar-totin’, silver-leafed Colonel who kept them in the strangling confines of his pasture. These are the stories of cadets remembered being cadets and being people.
    The Boo, as Tac Officer for Band Company, welcomed his boys back from Christmas furlough in January 1965. He bantered with several cadets about their sexual exploits over the holiday. Walking up to Ted Malcolm, the Company Commander, he said, jokingly, but with mock gravity, “Bubba, I heard you got married over the holidays.” “Sir,” Malcolm answered strangely. “Did you get married or not?” “Sir.” It suddenly dawned upon The Boo that he had better shut his mouth as quickly as possible and get the hell away from poor, trembling Malcolm. Malcolm introduced him to Mrs. Malcolm and little Kelly at graduation.
    Cadets sometimes thought The Boo was under the same regimen and bound to the same rules they were. One zealous cadet accosted him at a basketball game and gave him a minor bawling out for attending a Citadel function in civilian clothes.
    This announcement caught Boo’s ear as he walked through the mess hall one night: “All friends of Freddie Hack will have a meeting in the telephone booth outside the mess hall at 1900 hours.”
    A. F. Calhoun was a crack rifle shot for The Citadel. During his last year at the college it came out in the Charleston newspaper that he was married. Details about the ceremony were included. He ranted and raved because he had paid a desk clerk at the paper extra money to insure it would not be put in the paper.
    Suggs Britton, in the school of the big-time operators— a card player who flirted with punishment orders during his entire career, a genuine bum, a cadet who earned a Boo-inspired sobriquet of fourteen carat reprobate—wrote The Boo to tell him about the first job he got upon graduation. He was commandant at a military high school in Florida.
    During one of the last parades of the year, when the adjutant was reading a list of tactical officers who would not be returning to The Citadel the following year, The Boo walked through second battalion checking for cadets who skipped parade. As he walked up the third division, he heard the adjutant’s voice booming through the loudspeakers across the length and breadth of the campus. “Colonel Smith is leaving. Major Samuel is leaving. Captain Adams is leaving,” when a loud and vigorous “Bull—” rang out from a room not thirty feet away from him. Poor Cadet Cludd smiled weakly and accepted the timing of the fates when The Boo peeked in the door and asked gently, “Pardon me, Bubba, but what’s your I.D. number?”
    Young George Durk played the military game well and kept his name free from the debris of excess demerits. He walked no tours and served few confinements, so it was no surprise he died many times when he was driving back to The Citadel wearing civilian clothes and noticed Colonel Courvoisie’s green Comet in his rear view mirror. He slumped as low into his seat as humanly possible, peering through the steering wheel, and suffering unspeakable agony as the Comet continued to follow him. The Boo did not see him, but Durk later told him that the moment was the nearest thing to coronary failure he experienced while at The Citadel. Durk became a doctor and practiced in Charleston.