[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 16]
[Senate]
[Pages 23886-23887]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



    AN EXCERPT FROM PAT CONROY'S UPCOMING BOOK, ``MY LOSING SEASON''

  Mr. THURMOND. Mr. President, I was recently given a copy of an 
excerpt from a yet unpublished book written by South Carolina native 
and former Citadel graduate, Mr. Pat Conroy. This essay is an 
insightful tribute to the men and women who served their country in 
times of conflict, and I would like to take this opportunity to bring 
this exceptional essay to the attention of my colleagues.
  Mr. Conroy's composition recounts the experiences of a courageous man 
who answered his nation's call to serve in the armed forces during a 
time of conflict, and the intense pride he had in his country even 
during the most dire of circumstances as a POW. It also recounts how, 
through the author's interaction with this patriotic individual, Mr. 
Conroy arrived at the realization that duty to one's country is an 
obligation that comes with the privilege of being a citizen.
  This dramatic composition honors those who accepted their duty with 
courage and dignity, and I ask unanimous consent that this poignant 
essay be inserted into the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                           My Heart's Content

                            (By Pat Conroy)

       The true things always ambush me on the road and take me by 
     surprise when I am drifting down the light of placid days, 
     careless about flanks and rearguard actions. I was not 
     looking for a true thing to come upon me in the state of New 
     Jersey. Nothing has ever happened to me in New Jersey. But 
     came it did, and it came to stay.
       In the past four years I have been interviewing my 
     teammates on the 1966-67 basketball team at the Citadel for a 
     book I'm writing. For the most part, this has been like 
     buying back a part of my past that I had mislaid or shut out 
     of my life. At first I thought I was writing about being 
     young and frisky and able to run up and down a court all day 
     long, but lately I realized I came to this book because I 
     needed to come to grips with being middle-aged and having 
     ripened into a gray-haired man you could not trust to handle 
     the ball on a fast break.
       When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth's house in New 
     Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his 
     memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches 
     that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al 
     had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 
     5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with 
     indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior 
     year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA 
     center Lew Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a 
     brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a 
     Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated. After we 
     talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up 
     with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still.
       ``Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar 
     demonstrator.''
       ``That's what I heard, Conroy,'' Al said. ``I have nothing 
     against what you did, but I did what I thought was right.''
       ``Tell me about Vietnam, big Al. Tell me what happened to 
     you,'' I said.
       On his seventh mission as a navigator in an A-6 for Major 
     Leonard Robertson, Al was getting ready to deliver their 
     payload when the fighter-bomber was hit by enemy fire. Though 
     Al has no memory of it, he punched out somewhere in the 
     middle of the ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. He 
     doesn't know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days, 
     nor does he know what happened to Major Robertson (whose name 
     is engraved on the Wall in Washington and on the MIA bracelet 
     Al wears).
       When Al awoke, he couldn't move. A Viet Cong soldier held 
     an AK-47 to his head. His back and his neck were broken, and 
     he had shattered his left scapula in the fall. When he was 
     well enough to get to his feet (he still can't recall how 
     much time had passed), two armed Viet Cong led Al from the 
     jungles of South Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi. The journey 
     took three months. Al Kroboth walked barefooted through the 
     most impassable terrain in Vietnam, and he did it sometimes 
     in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained, and he slept 
     in bomb craters with his two Viet Cong captors. As they moved 
     farther north, infections began to erupt on his body, and his 
     legs were covered with leeches picked up while crossing the 
     rice paddies.
       At the very time of Al's walk, I had a small role in 
     organizing the only antiwar demonstration ever held in 
     Beaufort, South Carolina, the home of Parris Island and the 
     Marine Corps Air Station. In a Marine Corps town at that 
     time, it was difficult to come up with a quorum of people who 
     had even minor disagreements about the Vietnam War. But my 
     small group managed to attract a crowd of about 150 to 
     Beaufort's waterfront. With my mother and my wife on either 
     side of me, we listened to the featured speaker, Dr. Howard 
     Levy, suggest to the very few young enlisted marines present 
     that if they get sent to Vietnam, here's how they can help 
     end this war: Roll a grenade under your officer's bunk when 
     he's asleep in his tent. It's called fragging and is becoming 
     more and more popular with the ground troops who know this 
     war is bullshit. I was enraged by the suggestion. At that 
     very moment my father, a marine officer, was asleep in 
     Vietnam. But in 1972, at the age of 27, I thought I was 
     serving America's interests by pointing out what massive 
     flaws and miscalculations and corruptions had led her to 
     conduct a ground war in Southeast Asia.
       In the meantime, Al and his captors had finally arrived in 
     the North, and the Viet Cong traded him to North Vietnamese 
     soldiers for the final leg of the trip to Hanoi. Many times 
     when they stopped to rest for the night, the local villagers 
     tried to kill him. His captors wired his hands behind his 
     back at night, so he trained himself to sleep in the center 
     of huts when the villagers began sticking knives and bayonets 
     into the thin walls. Following the U.S. air raids, old women 
     would come into the huts to excrete on him and yank out hunks 
     of his hair. After the nightmare journey of his walk north, 
     Al was relieved when his guards finally delivered him to the 
     POW camp in Hanoi and the cell door locked behind him.
       It was at the camp that Al began to die. He threw up every 
     meal he ate and before long was misidentified as the oldest 
     American soldier in the prison because his appearance was so 
     gaunt and skeletal. But the extraordinary camaraderie among 
     fellow prisoners that sprang up in all the POW camps caught 
     fire in Al, and did so in time to save his life.
       When I was demonstrating in America against Nixon and the 
     Christmas bombings in Hanoi, Al and his fellow prisoners were 
     holding hands under the full fury of those bombings, singing 
     ``God Bless America.'' It was those bombs that convinced 
     Hanoi they would do well to release the American POWs, 
     including my college teammate. When he told me about the C-
     141 landing in Hanoi to pick up the prisoners, Al said he 
     felt no emotion, none at all, until he saw the giant American 
     flag painted on the plane's tail. I stopped writing as Al 
     wept over the memory of that flag on that plane, on that 
     morning, during that time in the life of America.
       It was that same long night, after listening to Al's story, 
     that I began to make judgments about how I had conducted 
     myself during the Vietnam War. In the darkness of the 
     sleeping Kroboth household, lying in the third-floor guest 
     bedroom, I began to assess my role as a citizen in the '60s, 
     when my country called my name and I shot her the bird. 
     Unlike the stupid boys who wrapped themselves in Viet Cong 
     flags and burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate 
     against the war without flirting with treason or 
     astonishingly bad taste. I had come directly from the warrior 
     culture of this country and I knew how to act. But in the 25 
     years that have passed since South Vietnam fell, I have 
     immersed myself in the study of totalitarianism during the 
     unspeakable century we just left behind. I have questioned 
     survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, talked to Italians 
     who told me tales of the Nazi occupation, French partisans 
     who had counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and 
     officers who survived the Bataan Death March. I quiz 
     journalists returning from wars in Bosnia, the Sudan, the 
     Congo, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, San Salvador, Chile, 
     Northern Ireland, Algeria. As I lay sleepless, I realized I'd 
     done all this research to better understand my country. I now 
     revere words like democracy, freedom, the right to vote, and 
     the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding 
     fathers. Do I see America's flaws? Of course. But I now can 
     honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me 
     walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no 
     idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. My country let me 
     scream to my heart's content--the same country that produced 
     both Al Kroboth and me.
       Now, at this moment in New Jersey, I come to a conclusion 
     about my actions as a young man when Vietnam was a dirty word 
     to me. I wish I'd led a platoon of marines in Vietnam. I 
     would like to think I would have trained my troops well and 
     that the Viet Cong would have had their hands full if they

[[Page 23887]]

     entered a firefight with us. From the day of my birth, I was 
     programmed to enter the Marine Corps. I was the son of a 
     marine fighter pilot, and I had grown up on marine bases 
     where I had watched the men of the corps perform simulated 
     war games in the forests of my childhood. That a novelist and 
     poet bloomed darkly in the house of Santini strikes me as a 
     remarkable irony. My mother and father had raised me to be an 
     Al Kroboth, and during the Vietnam era they watched in horror 
     as I metamorphosed into another breed of fanatic entirely. I 
     understand now that I should have protested the war after my 
     return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty for my country. 
     I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then 
     in my bones but lacked the courage to act on: America is good 
     enough to die for even when she is wrong.
       I looked for some conclusion, a summation of this trip to 
     my teammate's house. I wanted to come to the single right 
     thing, a true thing that I may not like but that I could live 
     with. After hearing Al Kroboth's story of his walk across 
     Vietnam and his brutal imprisonment in the North, I found 
     myself passing harrowing, remorseless judgment on myself. I 
     had not turned out to be the man I had once envisioned myself 
     to be. I thought I would be the kind of man that America 
     could point to and say, ``There. That's the guy. That's the 
     one who got it right. The whole package. The one I can depend 
     on.'' It had never once occurred to me that I would find 
     myself in the position I did on that night in Al Kroboth's 
     house in Roselle, New Jersey: an American coward spending the 
     night with an American hero.

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