Road Map to a Suicide

I was in a fraternity in college, and we had all these deep, dark secrets that you're never supposed to tell anyone about. You are supposed to take them to the grave. Enhanced interrogation techniques should never pry these stories out of your tortured breast.

Wanna hear one?

We had a ceremony that we enacted in December that was supposed to kick off the end of pledge training in the fall semester. This was back in the days that pledge training meant hazing, pure and simple. We heard about how much harder it was in the old days, and how much easier we had it than our fathers. Nowadays, there is no pledge training. Nothing much is required to get in, so I guess I sound like those people that used to tell me what a wimp I was for the pledge training I endured.

We called the week before Finals Week Dead Week. It was called Dead Week because you didn't do anything but study, and if you did attend class, they were just review sessions, no assignments. So, in the spirit of Dead Week, we had to dial back the intensity of pledge training for finals. So the Friday before Dead Week, we did an interesting thing. We kidnapped each of the pledges separately. We did it during study hours, so no one would be able to see the others being taken. Two actives would go up to the pledge and tell them to close their books and come with them. We took them down to the sleeping dorm and had them get a pillow case off their bed. Then we took them out to our car, handed them a bent dime, and had them put their pillowcase over their head and get in the back seat. We then took them out to some remote place, sometimes after driving for a long time, and assembled them together in a group, yanked off their hoods, and shouted "Surprise!" We gave them a bunch of beer and told them to have a party and have fun and when they came back, pledge training would be over. So you spend this tense hour or so thinking you're going to be dumped somewhere out in the countryside and you'll have to bash the dime out flat and walk a couple of miles to the nearest pay phone. Instead, you get released from PT (Pledge Training) torture and you get a party.

We all had it happen to us, and so we all enjoyed turning around and doing it to others. It was a fun story and a fun little trip. The year I was a junior, my cousin Jerry and I were asked to find the party location for the affair. We went up to Tuttle Creek Reservoir north of Manhattan (Kansas - we were at KSU) for a location. We found this place where a road ran into the lake from before the lake filled up. It was a parking lot, and there was the remnant of an old rock quarry right next to it, making the perfect party protection area. We drew a map up, made copies and distributed it to the Actives. Obviously, you were supposed to keep it away from the Pledges so as not to ruin the surprise, but someone left theirs out and it got stolen. The pledge that found it took a friend and followed the map one night right before the ceremony.

You have to put yourself in the Pledge's state of mind. They were being messed with and harassed constantly and this strange map had an unspoken promise of something unpleasant to come. So the night they followed the line on the map to the big X that it ended at, they did not know what to expect.

What they found was a dead body.

By some very strange coincidence, some guy decided to end it all right where the X marked the spot on the map, right before the Pledges went out to follow the map.

The freaked out, drove away, and anonymously phoned it in to the police. Then they spent the next few days quietly asking themselves "What the f***!?"

I found out about it the night of the ceremony when two of the Freshmen found out who drew the map and selected the spot and dragged Jerry and I out to the gravel parking lot to show us the spot. There was a dark stain on the ground where the guy landed and bled out.

That's the secret story and as wild as it sounds, it is 100% true.

Military Ethics

I went into the Army because I had an ROTC scholarship that paid for college. My father encouraged this, and I liked the idea when I was 18. I was offered Army, Air Force, Navy, & Marine scholarships, because in 1981 the memory of Viet Nam was fresh enough that recruiting was not easy. The scholarships were generous and easy to get. I was determined to go to Kansas State University because of family tradition, and because it was a good engineering school with plenty of women and a drinking age of 18. I wanted to be a jet pilot, but was told (erroneously, as it turns out) that I could not be a pilot and a scholarship recipient because that was too much money spend on one person. So that left Army ROTC.

I signed up after my application was accepted. Men's hair was still pretty long, a leftover from the 70's and mine was no exception, completely covering my ears, but not to my shoulders. I knew the Army would eventually make me get it cut short, but surprisingly, the standards were not strictly enforced and I was able to adopt a style that did not mark me or make me stand out.

LTC McCann was the Professor of Military Science (PMS - everything in the Army has acronyms, you soon learn). The Kansas State University (KSU - some things in the civilian world have acronyms, too) ROTC program had a outdoor adventure fun time image it was trying to project, so things were fun and lax for the first two years. We repelled off the side of the Old Stadium and learned map reading skills complete with weekend jaunts out to nearby Fort Riley to tromp around on the range doing the military equivalent of an Easter Egg hunt. It was in my Junior year that I finally had a Military Science core class, Leadership and Leaders, and finally saw LTC McCann as someone other than the "old man" that sat in his office smoking a pipe (or was it a cigar? MAJ Piper smoked the pipe).

Embedded in the leadership course was an ethics class. I can't remember whether LTC McCann taught the class or was a guest lecturer. As you can see, some of my memories are sketchy about this era. My memory of LTC McCann's story in this class is still crystal clear after all these years.

Young 2LT McCann served in Viet Nam when he entered the Army. He was in an Armor unit on the front line, in heavy combat. They occasionally lost equipment, either through normal wear and tear maintenance issues or in combat. His unit's inventory of tanks and APCs (Armored Personnel Carriers) had dwindled to the point that they were having difficulty completing missions, soldiers were fighting unprotected, they did not have the heavy support they wanted, and people were dying. They needed new vehicles, which finally arrived in country at some depot and had to be picked up. Their requisitions and paperwork in hand, young LT McCann went to the depot and presented his paperwork to them to pick up his new tanks and APCs. Unfortunately, the paperwork listed vehicles specifically by their serial numbers, and they were not in the depot. Feeling despondent, he left the offices and wandered out to the new equipment lined up in the yard. He saw all the tanks and APC styles they were due represented in the yard, and it occurred to him that it wasn't right or fair.

He went around and took down some serial numbers of vehicles that were parked in the yard, awaiting distribution or pick-up. He took his requisition paperwork and erased the serial numbers on them and put the numbers he found in the blanks. He must have waited for the personnel to change out before going back and submitting his new paperwork. He picked up all the equipment and moved the vehicles out of the depot and back to his unit.

He knew that taking those vehicles meant that other units that those tanks and APCs were meant to go to would probably struggle like they had been struggling. He even knew that his actions probably resulted in the deaths of people in those other units. He knew that by the book, by the letter of the rules, he had done something not permitted and wrong. He could probably have been reprimanded at the least, possibly court martialed at the worst. He knew he was wrong, but he told us that he never lost a night's sleep over his actions.

Whichever unit came up short of equipment would probably suffer additional casualties because of those shortages. In his mind, he said it wasn't a dilemma because if someone had to die, it was better that it was people in the other units rather than his. Was he playing God? Did he think his people were worth more than the others? That wasn't it. The difference between his soldiers and the soldiers in another unit is that he didn't have to watch them die.