The Lords of Discipline
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The Lords of Discipline (published 1980) is a novel by Pat Conroy. The narrator, Will McLean, attends the South Carolina Military Institute (The Citadel) in Charleston, from 1963 to 1967. As an Irish-American Roman Catholic from Savannah, Georgia, Will is an outsider and finds life as a "knob" or "plebe" (a first-year cadet in training) at the Institute to be physically and emotionally brutal. But he finds solace in three boys who become his great friends: Tradd St. Croix, an "old Charlestonian" (from a very rich and respected family); and Dante "Pig" Pignetti and Mark Santoro, two brawny, Northern boys of Italian descent. He also respects the tough-talking, cigar-chomping Colonel "Bear" Berrineau (based on Thomas Nugent "The Boo" Courvoisie, a former Commandant at The Citadel) who asks the senior cadet McLean to look out for the Institute's first black cadet, Tom Pearce. But McLean's journey to manhood is full of twists and turns, as he meets a girl whose life he can never be a part of and hears rumors of The Ten, a mysterious Institute secret society that ensures certain cadets, deemed unacceptable to "wear the ring" (that is, be a graduate of the Institute, who wear an exquisite ring denoting their alma mater), are run out by any means necessary.
Although Conroy drew on his experiences as a cadet at The Citadel, as well as stories from similar military schools such as Benedictine College (a military high school in Savannah, Georgia) and the Virginia Military Institute, during the 1960s to create the setting for the story, he has explicitly stated that the novel's plot and principal characters are a product of his imagination.
The novel was adapted for the screenplay of a 1983 film of the same name, starring David Keith as Will McLean and Robert Prosky as Colonel "Bear" Berrineau.
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