The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son Read Online Free PDF

tried to tell her how much she meant to me and how I adored everything about her. I told her I wanted to do things in the world that would make her proud to be my mother.
    My mother took my hand and said that I’d made her proud already. I had survived Santini and provided a great example to my younger brothers and sisters. Then she told me a secret she had kept from the rest of the family. She had just discovered that she had cancer and hadto have a massive hysterectomy sometime in the near future. There was a real possibility that she would die on the operating table. She wanted me to promise her something. I told her I would promise her anything, and would fulfill that promise.
    My mother said, “If I die because of the operation, Pat, I want you to promise me you’ll quit The Citadel and come home to raise your brothers and sisters. I’m afraid your father would end up killing them all.”
    “He may start off with me,” I said.
    “He thinks you’re a match for him,” she said.
    “Not yet. But I’m getting there, Mom.”
    “Then promise me.”
    “If you die,” I said, starting to cry just mentioning the words, “I’ll quit The Citadel and come home to raise my brothers and sisters.”
    “Get Tim and Tom in high school,” she said, “and then you can start your life all over again.”
    “I promise,” I said, through tears.
    On September 2, 1963, I left the city of Omaha by train to walk into the fearful mouth of The Citadel’s plebe system. Even my father had not prepared me to encounter such ferocious abuse. I hated it from the moment I walked into the barracks until the time the upperclassmen recognized me the following spring. It was a nightmare from beginning to end, and I found nothing ennobling about it. I’d been brought up in the United States Marine Corps and my military education was complete the day I entered the barracks. In the Marines, you fed your men first, and then the officer in charge ate only after his men were fed. At The Citadel, the cadets hounded and brutalized and starved the plebes. The Romeo company cadre was especially savage and feral. I’ve not quite found it in my heart to forgive them almost fifty years later.
    As a novelist, however, I thought I was blessed with my Citadel education. It gave me wider knowledge of the nature of atrocity and mankind’s capacity for infinite cruelty. I believe The Citadel plebe system prepared me quite well for the setbacks and disappointments of life—it even prepared me for the savagery and jealousies of my brother and sister writers. It gave me a narrative of darkness that I could move through my life’s work. It gave me a story line that was action-packedand adrenaline-fueled, since my plebe system was not like your day in the eating clubs of Princeton. I’ve ended up writing about my college as much as any writer in American history. It became my crucible of origin, whose anthems were all warlike and barbarous and wild. I’d been tested by American males as few writers had ever been, and I was the handiwork of the school’s grim codes. They sensed my weakness, my disabling emotional frailty, and they hardened me into the likeness of themselves, made me pretend to be one of them. It took me many years to understand I
was
actually one of them. It took The Citadel much longer to accept me into its own staunch brotherhood.
    Soon after I entered college, my mother was operated on for her hysterectomy, and the doctors made a mess of it. As she predicted, she almost died on the operating table. For a long, agonizing month, she was in the hospital with her life in danger the whole time. I would have been frantic but the plebe system was giving me more than I could handle and I was fighting for my survival every day. When I went home to Omaha on the Christmas break, Mom was there, but I was anxious about her and asked Dad so many questions about her health that I annoyed him.
    “Hey, you her doctor, sports fan? She’s fine. She’s