Being an Officer at Linton Hall Military School

Just like everyone else, I started out not as a private, but as a "recruit." I remember that after they had cut off your hair and taught you things like right face and about face, you actually got a piece of paper "promoting" you to Private. Kinda ironic to get called "Private" when you had zero privacy!

I remember what it was like being the low man (boy) on the totem pole, not only did I not know all the rules of Linton Hall Military School yet, but I had to follow orders from "officers." I'm putting all these words in quotation marks because it seems bizarre that we were "playing soldier" (as one of the commentators to my blog put it) just like kids play cops and robbers.

It was bad enough to have adults ordering me around and controlling every aspect of my life 24 hours a day, but even worse having some kid -- yes, not an "officer" but another child, maybe a year older, maybe my age, maybe even a year younger, telling me what to do.

Some of the officers were fair most of the time. I don't think there was anyone who was fair all of the time. By fair I mean that they expected you to follow legitimate orders such as "about face" when drilling, make your bed the prescribed way in the prescribed amount of time, they were understanding if you made an innocent mistake (hard to avoid, since everything had to be done a certain way, from how you made your bed to where you placed your toilet kit and slippers on the metal chair next to your bed.) And a "fair" officer punished you fairly, you know, maybe standing at attention for fifteen minutes, that type of thing.

I wasn't impressed by most officers, mind you, I felt that most of them were, how do I put it, a bit slow mentally since they seemed to accept and enforce rules without question, and focused on minor details instead of what was really important. I've had professors and bosses who were like that too, people who seemed to focus on whether a word was spelled wrong and not on the substance of a report.

But then there were also the officers who abused their power, the ones who used their rank to bully and intimidate, who punished and scared younger, smaller, and lower ranking children just because they had the power to do so. I know that they were acting just like some of the adults in charge, but at the same time all the officers at Linton Hall Military School were eighth graders, at least 13 years old, some as old as 15, and they could have exercised better judgement.

I never ran away simply because I realized that I had nowhere to go. When you're a kid you can't just get a job and an apartment. And if I followed orders it wasn't out of any respect for the school, the majority of the nuns (there were some decent ones, not too many) or for the rules. I just saw how other cadets (I mean children) were punished. I did just what I would do if an armed robber pointed a gun at me; I would hand over my money not out of "respect" but out of fear.

I was careful about saying anything negative about Linton Hall Military School to the wrong people, and was lucky enough not to get caught that time I brought about ten apples from home, so I didn't get disciplined much.

I guess the Commandant and Sister Mary David misinterpreted my compliance for "respect" or perhaps "leadership" because when I became an eighth grader, I was promoted to officer.

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I was proud of being an officer. You know, really feeling good about myself because I got to wear some metal on the collar of my khaki shirt, a leather officer's strap, a dull-bladed sword during drill, and I got to tell a whole bunch of lower ranking cadets what to do, and if they didn't do it I got to punish them.

I hope you can understand this, I mean, I was almost (but not quite yet) 13 years old at the beginning of eighth grade.

I tried to model my behavior after those officers who had treated me fairly. In other words, I told people what to do, but wasn't on a power trip. I succeeded doing that with most of the cadets I was in charge of, but some had real discipline problems, were real brats, and sometimes I would say insulting things to them, knowing I could get away with it, sometimes punish them more than perhaps they deserved. Not that officers were allowed to do any of the abusive things that the adults got away with, but I could make cadets stand at attention a really long time, do deep knee bends, that type of thing. I'm not proud of this, but I admit it.

Even though I tried to be fair, and was fair most of the time, and felt "proud" of my rank (whatever "proud" means) I also felt bad about being an officer, I had the feeling that I wasn't doing the right thing.

One time this realization really struck me was when I was supervising study hour for the third grade. We officers got to supervise different grades during study hour, which basically meant sitting at the teacher's desk and trying to do your own homework (without much success) since at the same time you had to make sure everyone was quiet, and you kept getting interrupted by cadets who really really had to go to the bathroom, little kids who had questions about their homework, and so on.

Surprisingly, the third grade was the hardest to supervise because they didn't have enough homework to keep them occupied for an hour and, well, these were rambunctious eight year olds, and it was hard to keep them quiet.

I remember thinking hey, these are little kids (of course I was a kid too, just five years older than they were) you would give an order like "right face" and some of them don't even know their right from their left -- and there they were having to follow this discipline. They should be home watching cartoons. They shouldn't be here having to act like they're in the military.

And then I remember several times when the whole battalion was assembled on the blacktop, and we had to watch some unfortunate soul get punished by the Commandant, having to stand at attention holding out two rifles, and whenever his arms got tired and they dropped down from being perfectly horizontal, he would get hit in the elbow with another rifle.

I don't know what held me back, but I just wanted to take the bars off my collar and the helmet off my head and walk up to the Commandant and tell him I was resigning and wanted no part of this.

I never did it. It's the type of thing that looks great in the movies, but I can't imagine him just accepting my resignation. This is just speculation on my part, but I think it's highly likely that I would have gotten the same punishment, and then would have been sent back, maybe without my rank, but I still would have been doing the work as an officer. That's what happened to a lot of officers who got bumped; they lost the rank and privileges, but still did the same work.

I could have tried giving my resignation at a calmer moment, and explained my reasons, but I cannot by any stretch of the imagination picture it going well.

With everything I've learned as an adult, I still can't think of how I could have gotten out of being an officer, not without doing something really major in order to get a really huge punishment.

I don't know if any other officers thought the way I did, if several of us could have tried resigning at the same time, if I could have found even one other officer to lend me moral support and accompany me when going to the Commandant and Sister Mary David and telling them that hitting kids with rifles was wrong, that making bedwetters wear their urine-soaked pajamas around their neck all day was wrong, that so much about that school was wrong.

Can you imagine if some of us officers had actually rebelled? Yup, folks, I'm taking mutiny here. It would have been so worthwhile.

But I didn't do it, and nobody else did either.

As usual, comments are welcome.

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