From 1963 to 1967, I attended the no longer operational Staunton Military Academy. My going there was a decision of my parents. I was being bullied in Junior High School. So they send me to a military academy where “rats” (first year cadets) were subjected to various degrees of physical and mental abuse done under the term “hazing.” Well, isn’t that just special!

Oddly enough, despite the hazing, I took to the academy like a duck takes to water.  I’m not sure why this was. I tolerated upper classmen hitting “home runs” on my backside with a broom as I was bent over the steel frame of a bunk bed. I listened for a year to being told that a “rat” was the lowest scum on the planet, even lower than whale shit on the bottom of the ocean. Somehow, despite this abusive first year, I went back. There was something there that I liked about the place.  For years I couldn’t put my finger on it and it made no real sense to me why I liked that life. I was a small human being in a world of large human beings who were distant and not so friendly. My last year, struggling with the severe emotional issues which would eventually drive me into drug abuse and crazy living after I graduated, I crashed and burned. I lost the rank of sergeant I had obtained, was assigned to another company in the ranks, went AWOL, and eventually barely graduated.  Yet despite all this, for the longest time, I found myself filled with a certain nostalgia for the place, which makes no sense to me in retrospect. What was it about the place that I still to this day find compelling when I look at the old pictures of the campus?

I think it was belonging.

I finally found something greater than myself to which I could belong. All through my young life I had never had a sense of belonging to anything, even my family.  When I was around ten years old, I asked my mother one day if I was adopted. Think of that. What does that tell you about my sense of belonging to my family? Very sad. Yet here, in this distant place far from home, I found something I could be part of.

I was pretty much a loner when I was at SMA.  I didn’t need friends to be part of it. I was a cadet, and to be a cadet was to be part of something bigger and greater than myself. I accepted the academy, found the disciplined life to be to my liking, and wore the uniform with pride, especially when I began to achieve rank in the academy.   Yes, from time to time others made my life miserable, but that was a very small component of a greater good.  Staunton was a very highly respected academic academy, and to this day I am thankful for a quality education. I excelled in my studies, won numerous academic awards, got promoted in rank, and looked forward to perhaps being an officer in the Cadet Corps.

That never happened.

I’m writing this today because I am now regularly receiving the Kablegram, the SMA newsletter that is sent out quarterly to all who have signed up for it.  I went back to the school two years ago, being close to Staunton on a business trip.  It was strange to see the old campus and the many changes that have taken place. The school closed on June 4th, 1976. Attempts by graduates to revive it failed and it was eventually sold to Mary Baldwin College and is part of their campus now. There is an SMA museum on the grounds, located in the building which used to be the quartermaster’s supply.  I parked my car, stood on the asphalt of the parking lot and stared out at the beautiful expanse of the Shenandoah Valley. From the third floor of North Barracks, which was torn down when the campus changed hands,  I used to watch distant approaching storms, enchanted by the onrushing gray sheet of rain as it marched up the valley until it drenched the parking lot and barracks, catching the unprepared cadets by surprise.  At night, distant lights twinkled on the hillsides.

Inside the museum I introduced myself to Brocky Nicely, a graduate who, with his wife, runs the museum.  He happily put my name on the list of graduates receiving the Kablegram and showed me around the museum. I looked in my old yearbook and examined the various artifacts in the museum, feeling deeply the flood of memories that came to me as I looked at pictures of a time in my life long past. And the odd part is that, given a chance, I would go back to my youth and relive that time in a heartbeat. Except, knowing what I know now, I would do so many things differently. I had opportunities, but I squandered them all, and it is not the fault of anyone but me.

After saying goodbye, I stood again on the parking lot and stared at the now vacant lot which used to be North Barracks. I remember many nights I stood in front of North Barracks at ten in the evening and, as a member of the Bugle Corps, played Taps to indicate to the student body, “Lights Out! Time to go to bed.” After the last note died off from my bugle, I would stand on the portico, eyes closed, feeling the passing of the ages and the many young men who had gone before me. I felt connected to them, to the ancientness of it all. I was part of something great. With eyes closed I could feel the decades of time that had marched by and the connection I felt to them. Thinking about that experience, a line of poetry came to me and from it, a poem:

The sound of Taps my bugle sings,                            
through ancient halls its echo rings.                      
I hear the commander’s cadence call.
The long grey line from Kable Hall.
The laughter from times gone by,
the friendships that will never die.
Where have all these young men gone,
who graduated and moved on?
I close my eyes and once again,
I am there forever with old friends.
And closing my eyes I hear at last,
the sound of marching from the past.
And into that eternal night,
they march along till out of sight.
A distant place and time gone by,
Yet in my heart, will never die.

The shame of it all is that I could have been a really good cadet with just a bit of attention from the teachers or administrators. I was a lost child, a kid in a man’s world, trying to grow up. Honestly, I really didn’t belong there. I have never been a warrior. I was too small to play football or baseball. In short, other than my academics, not a good fit in a military academy. A number of the graduates went on to military careers. For some reason, probably the Vietnam War and the reality of getting your ass shot off, a career in the military didn’t appeal to me. Neither did the stories I heard from graduates who came back embittered by the way politicians were running the war. I liked the discipline of the life, but I didn’t want to kill anyone and I still don’t.

Perhaps the administration realized this about me and spent time grooming other young men who had no reservations about going to Vietnam and killing Commies. Or maybe they just realized I was another in a long line of screw-ups who were passing through the hallowed halls of SMA, and their time would be wasted on me. Whatever it was, no one really paid much attention to me. I had some student acquaintances with whom I was friendly in a passing way, but I really made no deep friendships of the kind which I read about in the Kablegram.  This is why I have never gone to any of the reunions. I feel a connection to the place, but made no real connections to any of my fellow students. Yes, that is kind of sad.

In my junior and senior years, I received no career counseling. As I said, I crashed and burned my senior year.  It all came unraveled for me.  The sad part was that none of the teachers or administration took notice. I guess that in a student body of six hundred fifty young men, the woes of one small human being could easily get lost in the crush.  The only notice I did get was when I was failing my senior year Calculus class and got called into Major Dodge’s office and told that either I shape up or I would get a paddling.  My response was to tell him I didn’t understand the class, I didn’t need it to graduate, and would you please put me in another class?  He put in in Colonel Lander’s typing class, in which we never knew if we would get half an hour of typing or half an hour of goofing off to his bawdy jokes as we plucked away on our bulky Underwood typewriters.

Life is filled with oddities. I scan the pages of the Kablegram and note so many of my classmates who have passed on to the next life – yet I am, for some reason known only to God, still here. I find that even in typing this piece, I have a certain nostalgia I do not understand.  This was not a good time in my life, yet like all people, as I look back in time, my focus is away from the hazing and the lonliness of my life, but to those moments such as standing on the parade grounds for the Sunday Parade, waiting to pass in review. I don’t know how to explain what I felt as I stood there, listening to the popping of the guide on flags in the breeze cutting across the field,  It was a good feeling, a sense of being in a good place where I belonged. I think of it and even now it is a good memory.

Perhaps other SMA Old Boys will understand.