Scott Rhee's Reviews > The Lords of Discipline

I never attended a military academy, and I never wanted to. Indeed, military schools are, in my mind, the punishment desperate parents dole to their unruly male children. Or they are the punishment given to rich kids when their wealthy parents want absolutely nothing to do with parenting. In either case, it’s punishment.

Pat Conroy has a love-hate relationship with military academies. Well, one military academy in specific.

The Citadel, located in Charleston, South Carolina, is a gorgeous sprawling campus that has, over the years, consistently garnered high academic rankings. It has also provided the military with many young soldiers, and, in fact, during the second world war, it had the distinction of having the highest percentage of its student population go into military service. It officially became racially-integrated in 1966, and it ended its male-only admissions policy in 1996.

Conroy attended the Citadel from 1963 to 1967, graduating from the school. All graduates are given a ring that is as highly cherished as a wedding band. Indeed, the famous first sentence of Conroy’s now-classic 1980 novel “The Lords of Discipline” is “I wear the ring.”

There is an almost contradictory sense of loyalty and loathing that Conroy writes about regarding his feelings toward the Citadel. He has nothing but compassion and love for his fellow brethren of the Class of ’67, but he also clearly has distinctly negative feelings toward what was called “the plebe system”, the strict and, in many ways, abusive, honor code system lorded over by upperclassmen as a way to, ostensibly, build young boys into men. In reality, it was more of an excuse for upperclassmen to torture and abuse underclassmen.

The novel follows Will McLean, a young man from a lower-class Southern family, through his four years of attending the academy. A poet at heart who wants nothing to do with the military, McLean learns to navigate his way through a system that he finds abhorrent. Along the way, he learns a lot about himself, what it means to be honorable, and what it truly means to be a man.

There is much to love about this novel. Besides Conroy’s gorgeous prose stylings, the novel touches on a plethora of themes—-friendship, loyalty, class distinctions, racism, male-female relationships. There is also a mystery, of sorts, at the heart of the story, as McLean and his roommates stumble upon a secret society within the Citadel; a discovery that will have major repercussions on McLean’s tenure at the school, as well as his life and the lives of his friends and loved ones.

As always, Conroy transports the reader to another world through his gorgeous, almost ethereal, writing. In this case, it is Charleston, South Carolina of the late-1960s, a somewhat alien world to 21st-century readers but one that—-if looked at closely—-isn’t all that different from our own.