Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508210112
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Newsday
DATELINE: POWDERSVILLE, S.C. LENGTH: Long
At 20, as the first woman cadet to break into the male bastion called The Citadel, Faulkner had won, lost and found she had been naive, because even before her decision to leave the school Friday became official, someone had already packed her bags.
``They wanted me to walk out the back door'' to avoid the media, Faulkner said in an interview that was teary at times. ``I told them I was going to walk out the front door. I told them I was going to go with my head held high like when I walked in.''
Faulkner described how she had bottled up stress during her 21/2-year court battle to become the first female cadet at The Citadel.
She was pained over the high school teacher for whom she had baby-sat and who now couldn't stand to be in the same room with her.
She remembered the reaction of strangers, such as the person at her hometown gym who wore a T-shirt that read ``Over my dead body.''
``Maybe I should ask them where I should send the flowers,'' Faulkner said she told her mother. ``It's part of the Southern way to laugh, to use humor to cover pain.''
At 8:15 Friday morning, Faulkner phoned her mother, who was teaching at the local high school, and in one simple sentence threw Sandy Faulkner into a panic: ``Mom, I want to come home.''
With that, Faulkner's father, Ed, her soldier-brother, Todd, and her attorney sped down to the military college in Charleston.
Faulkner denied reports she had collapsed from the heat Monday with five other cadets. She said she had jogged in the heat like the rest of the cadets, having prepared for the rigorous training by running with her father every day during the summer.
``I did not collapse,'' she said. ``I never passed out. I walked into the infirmary on my own two feet.''
The problem, she said, was her stomach. And the cause was stress.
``It wasn't the stress from The Citadel or the cadets,'' she said. ``It was the stress from everywhere else and me.''
``The fact that I could not keep anything in my stomach was something I had to deal with,'' she said. ``It was no good for me to go through training and end up in the infirmary. I was doing everything. I was staying up with the guys. I wasn't complaining. It was just my stomach couldn't take it.
``I've never dealt with stress. I just kept it bottled up. I never talked about it, what people were doing to me, what people were making me go through.''
After informing the school that Shannon would be leaving, father and daughter jogged back to her barracks to pack her things. But they found someone had already done it.
``Her room was packed up,'' Ed Faulkner said.
Classmates had encouraged Faulkner to stay, once they found out she was a human being, nervous like themselves, she said. But later she saw pictures of cadets cheering because she was gone. They were cadets from her class.
Perhaps it was her father who best summed up her battle, Shannon Faulkner said. When asked what his children did, he replied, ``My son's in Haiti; my daughter's in hell.''
The hell began soon after Faulkner decided to make the point that it wasn't fair to use taxpayers' money for a school that allowed only men as cadets.
The hell came from within Faulkner, too. ``I'm my biggest critic,'' she said, but declined to give details. She once kept a diary as a means of catharsis, Faulkner said, but stopped writing about herself when The Citadel demanded that she turn over the book in connection with her lawsuit.
By day and night the Faulkners, sitting inside their home, would hear, ``Pop, pop, pop.'' It was the sound of eggs thrown at their house. Slurs such as ``lesbo'' and ``you b****'' were painted in red on the white siding and pillars. Death threats came on the phone.
Faulkner said even some of those she trusted turned their backs on her. ``The one that hurts me is one of my teachers when I was in high school,'' she said. ``He went to my church, and I baby-sat his children. He said he didn't even want to be in the same room with me. Of course, he didn't tell me. He wouldn't even talk to me. He told my parents.''
The girl who once had the American dream in her mind has now cast it aside as a fairy tale. ``I found out the world isn't what I thought it was,'' she said. ``I'm glad I found out. It's hardened me emotionally.''
Faulkner said she felt maligned but at the same time triumphant for breaking the Citadel's 153-year male tradition. Her parents backed her completely.
``Every day there would have been a challenge for her,'' Ed Faulkner said. ``But we're not going to look back. There's nothing but straight ahead now.''
``From the bottom of my heart, I'm as proud of her today as any day of my life,'' Sandy Faulkner said. ``It takes more guts to walk away than to stay when the whole world is watching.'' The mother said she gave that message to her daughter, who replied, ``Oh, Mom.''
Shannon Faulkner said she's not sure what she'll do.
``I never thought anything like this would happen,'' she said. ``I was expecting to get my degree in Citadel. I will find another college to go to. I don't know whether it will be this semester. I've got a lot of searching to do.''
But she said she was convinced The Citadel's walls would fall to other women. ``I believe women are going to be in the corps of cadets,'' Faulkner said she wanted the nation to know. ``I just hope it won't be one woman going in by herself.''
by CNB