I bet they still hate his guts over this one, an eternal echo that will never fade:
Hey neat, they've even archived their old Letters. Here's one pertinent posting in the next week's issue:Citadel cadets have no more connection to the military than do Harvard undergraduates. Only those students who have signed ROTC contracts will be obliged to be sworn into a branch of the service, and an ROTC contract can be signed on most any campus in the country. Even former Citadel president James Stockdale, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, likened attending The Citadel to playing soldier. Get up close and you can see it. Those splendid cadet uniforms—and the faculty's, too—are of the sort you might get at a good Army surplus store, vague grays and indefinite stripes and tags. The Citadel uniform is the equivalent of a World War II bomber jacket ordered through a catalog.
Pat Conroy wrote:Congratulations on your article about my alma mater. Though it broke my heart, the article was brilliantly written and witheringly accurate. Reilly described the terror of the plebe system as well as it has ever been described. Reilly also corroborated almost every line I wrote in The Lords of Discipline. His article could serve as the Cliffs Notes for that novel.
Though I received a wonderful education at The Citadel, I have never been able to understand fully the pathological fear of women there, the eerie cult of brutality against freshmen, and the consistent lying about what goes on in the barracks. I was also stupefied by the statement of Lieut. Gen. Claudius Watts, who says that "race relations are not a problem at The Citadel."
I welcome SI to a new sport, one you did not know existed. I'm an Olympic-class athlete in this obscure and bruising sport: the fielding of hate mail from Citadel graduates. Because of Reilly's fierce and uncompromising exposé of a college I deeply love, I will have to be content to be this year's silver medalist. I predict that SI will run away with the gold.
Not ready for the MVC.
