Violating the Honor Code at Annapolis​

Issue 15

      At eighteen, I’m too young to understand being accepted to Annapolis could become the curse that might break me. I’m leaving a traumatic childhood behind, moving to an unseen world in which hazing is a ritual meant to indoctrinate neophytes into an institution in which the uniform itself is a symbol of power and grandeur. I’ve heard enough from reliable sources to fear hazing by the upperclassmen but am oblivious to the possibility new trauma may regenerate old trauma. I am oblivious to the loss of identity.
      During plebe indoctrination summer at Annapolis, we neophytes run everywhere and practice marching with an M1 rifle in the hot July sun. I wonder why a Navy guy needs to learn to carry a rifle. We shower off the sweat, change uniforms, and sprint to the next formation — a perpetual race against an immovable clock.
      At our table in the mess hall, the midshipman in charge of plebe summer supervision says we’ll have to brace up during meals when the brigade returns in September, saying that’s when the shit will hit the fan. He advises us to memorize Reef Points, which is a small black bible of naval history, obscure facts, and stupid speeches you have to recite if prompted. I see that Reef Points defines a “sandblower” as “he who walks at a low altitude.” That there is no special definition for a big guy implies that sand blowers are a scrutinized minority. I am only 5’ 4”.
      The upperclassmen return to Annapolis from their summer cruises and begin the bullshit. I am at the mercy of foul-mouthed overseers who think I need to “straighten up and fly right.” I know what a maniac is all about. I’ve heard the maniac voice a thousand times. I’ve seen the maniac blood vessels bulging in my father’s neck. It’s scary.
      In the mess hall the overseers shout at me as though I am unwelcome in my new home. If they dislike my answers to their questions or my recitations from Reef Points, they make me “shove out,” which means pushing my chair away while maintaining the sitting position. When my legs begin aching, I start sinking. It’s difficult to eat when my legs ache and my chin is almost level with the edge of the table. They don’t say “come aboard” until my legs are almost gone. Most overseers say “come around” to their room ten minutes past reveille, which means getting up at O-five-forty-five to shower and shave and brush up on answers to questions. This is what I fear most, because I’m unsure what will happen in a room with some deranged Second Classman who has been waiting an entire year for his first opportunity to haze plebes.
      I see craziness in some of their eyes. When an upperclassman sticks his face up close to mine, I see a few with the normal eyes and the normal smile. I see others with the evil eyes and grim mouth — my father all over again.
      The one who worries me most is a sand blower with a scary grin. Mister Beam. He rooms with Mister Bengston, whose face is a death mask, which is nerve-wracking too. Mister Beem’s beady eyes drill right through me. He has an evil-looking grin, as if he is plotting something diabolical. He makes me come around with my M1 parade rifle and hold it vertically at arm’s length above an overturned trash can until the heavy length of steel drops down with a clunk. Then he says I’m not going to make it at the Academy.
      My two “wives” and I inhabit a small room with a bunk bed and a single, a double desk and a single, and three metal lockers. That our roommates are called “wives” gives the secret language a nuance that I could do without, especially since my father had an extra “wife” before my mother divorced him.
      Joe does the most praying to God. After lights out each night, Joe fiddles with his rosary beads and mumbles Hail Marys and Our Fathers until Fred says he can say a couple for us and then knock it off so we can sleep. Joe should have saved his prayers for the tower.
      The fifty-foot tower stands in the middle of the Natatorium’s indoor swimming pool. As part of our Phys Ed swimming class, each plebe has to climb the tower and jump off into the pool. The instructor says, “When you get to the top, stand on the edge. Fold your arms across your chest like this. Put one hand over your mouth and hold your nose with your thumb and forefinger. Look straight ahead. Then step off and cross your legs like this. If you don’t, you’ll be a soprano when we fish you out.”
      Most of the class laughs, but not Joe. He can’t swim.
      Fred and I are among the first to climb the tower, wanting to get it over with quickly. You don’t want to let the power of fear hang around until you’re paralyzed. At the top, the scary thing is looking down. I look straight ahead, step off, and cross my legs. Can a tenor become a soprano? I knife into the water, immersed in a sea of bubbles. I swim up to the surface. At the edge of the pool I sit with Fred and watch other jumpers. When Joe’s turn comes, he doesn’t step off. His brown skin and black, brush-cut hair give him the appearance of a Comanche standing at the edge of a cliff looking for smoke signals that will provide guidance, although he is actually an ex-football jock who is not sure God will save him from the jump. He steps back from the edge and makes the sign of the cross. He folds his arms across his chest and pinches off his nose. He steps up to the edge. He looks straight ahead. He doesn’t budge. Everybody shouts encouragement. Joe doesn’t budge. Everybody starts betting whether he’ll go or not. He finally steps off, and someone shouts, “Cross your legs!” Joe’s collision with the water sends up a huge spray. Everyone says, “Oooooooo.” Fred and I move to the spot where bubbles are rising. Joe surfaces with eyes that have seen Hell. He claws his way to the edge of the pool. Fred and I each grab one of his arms and ask if he is okay. Joe nods and gasps for air and says, “Hail-Mary-Mother-of-God.”
      I’m glad Joe survived the jump, because his girlfriend at a nursing school in Pennsylvania has lined me up with a date for the Army-Navy football game. And according to Joe, my date is “a sure thing.” I take this to mean she has experience, and a nurse with sexual expertise is more than a virgin could ask for.
      ​During the autumn chaos, I receive a letter from Mom saying she’s married again. She describes a kind but uneducated man who runs an auto-body repair shop, has plans to fix up our house, and is eager to meet me when I come home for Christmas. I’m not particularly interested in meeting a stepfather but am more than ready for a reprieve from the verbal assaults that feel similar to those with which my father abused Mom for so many years.

...

      After  listening to classmates’ discussions about their conquests, it is clear I am the only entering Fourth Classman who is still a virgin and doesn’t know the location of a woman’s clitoris. No one in my home ever discussed this part of a woman’s anatomy.
      I am ashamed to think I don’t know what the clitoris is. From what Fred says about rubbing the crotch and starting the fire, I am guessing it is possibly inside the vagina. The female power button. If I don’t know this, how can I love a woman properly? My date is experienced and will expect me to know what every good lover knows.
      There is so much chaos the week before the big game I don’t have time to worry about whether I can satisfy an experienced woman. I can barely satisfy the evil ones who have me running this way and that, screaming “Beat Army” at every turn in the corridor. The evil ones seem more agitated than usual, as if Armageddon is near, as if we are about to embark upon the war of all wars. The pep rallies are a frenzy of screaming animals that will devour the Army team once we arrive in the combat zone called Philadelphia. If we beat Army, there will be no plebe hazing for the three weeks leading up to Christmas leave. If we lose, the evil ones will take out the frustration of defeat on their slave plebes.
      We ride to Philly in big buses. Navy hits the Army wall. We lose. I am frozen as much by the prospect of returning to Annapolis as I am by the biting wind in Memorial Stadium. At the final gun, we sing a dispirited “Navy Blue and Gold,” and then everyone moves down to the field to meet their women.
      Like most women on the field, our dates appear eventually in fancy overcoats and spike-heeled shoes that make little holes in the grass. I’m happy my date is attractive and small, because I’m prepared to accept almost any woman who is a sure thing. Lorraine’s short hair is ash blonde, her eyes and smile are mischievous. Her only flaws are a thick nose and acne, which are actually a good sign if you believe those guys who say a poor complexion means a woman was oversexed. She asks questions about Annapolis and seems to like me.
      We take a taxi to a restaurant. When I remove Lorraine’s coat, I see a silk blouse that reveals a good figure. It is difficult to concentrate on the meal and small talk when I know the women have booze in their hotel room and we have a midnight curfew.
      Later in the hotel room Lorraine says she is going to pour herself a bourbon and ginger ale and asks if she can make me one too. I say yes, and the taste is good. My jacket and tie and shoes are off, and I’m sitting on a woman’s bed. Fred and his date are on another bed, Joe and his date are on the sofa. As Lorraine and I are sipping our drinks and getting to know one another, Joe goes around and turns off all the lights. So now Lorraine and I are drinking in the dark while Joe and his date go at one another on the sofa. It’s difficult to concentrate on conversation with a date when you can hear the sounds of passion.
      Lorraine giggles, puts her free hand on the back of my neck, and pulls us into a passionate first kiss. When our lips finally part, we place our drinks on the nightstand and go at one another with both hands. There can be no better heaven than being tangled up with Lorraine on this bed. When the legs are tangled together, there is incidental rubbing going on. Maybe I don’t have to put my hand down there.
      Soon we are naked in bed. I decide to touch the place that Fred says starts the furnace. It seems I’ve found the clitoris, because suddenly I am no longer a virgin.
      As Lorraine and I are resting, I think about an encore. But an alarm goes off. Joe says, “We’ve got twenty minutes to get to the buses.”
      The three of us dress in the dark, and I’m having trouble finding all the uniform pieces. I’ve practiced getting into a uniform at jet speed, but never in the dark. I kiss Lorraine goodbye and promise to write and lurch out the door with Joe and Fred. On the elevator down, we keep adjusting pieces of our uniform. We sprint through the hotel lobby and the streets of Philadelphia until we see the buses lined up on the street that is the preordained pickup spot. We settle into seats on our bus. As the buses leave the city, I think how lovely a woman’s body is and how wonderful it would have been to be in bed with Lorraine for more time than the Cinderella allowance.​

...

      Despite having no experience in wrestling, I decide to try out for the plebe team, which, during meals, has a training table where no hazing occurs. Where you don’t have to sit braced up straight and looking straight ahead. I hate being at meals where a sadistic upperclassman waits until a morsel of food is almost to my lips before firing a question at me, requiring that I drop my fork immediately.
      The bodies in the wrestling loft of MacDonough Hall are muscular and sweaty and smelling like ripe cheese. For my tryout I’m matched against an opponent who appears heavier and has experience written on his face. For awhile, I use my speed to skip away when he lunges for my legs, but suddenly I’m on my stomach with one leg bent up toward my back. The more I struggle to escape, the more he presses down on the doubled-up leg. The whistle blows finally. The match is over, and now there is some strange clicking in my knee. I limp to Misery Hall, where a corpsman applies an ice pack and tells me to hold it there for an hour. The next morning the knee is swollen, and after limping to a doctor consult in Sick Bay, I ride a Navy bus to the Academy hospital, where another doctor draws fluid from the knee with a gigantic hypodermic needle while I grip the examining table until my knuckles are white.
      One week before the brigade’s departure for Christmas leave, the rumor at breakfast is that today is when the doctors decide who can leave the hospital and go home for the holidays. I test my leg, and the knee is a fucking barrel of pain. But when the doctor arrives, I lie. “No pain, sir. And the swelling’s almost gone.”
      “Okay,” he says, “Let’s see you get up and take a little walk on it.”
      I hop off the bed and limp across the open ward as fast as I can, hoping that speed makes up for the limp.
      “How’s it feel?”
      “Good, sir. Real good.”
      ​“Okay. Pack up your things and get out of here.”

...

      Mom and Ed and my sisters meet my train in Brattleboro, Vermont, late on a frigid December night. We pile into Ed’s pale green Cadillac, which is eight years old but shined bright as new.
      Ed is a big Finn with a short crew cut, thick middle, and little facial expression. His soft deep voice speaks with authority when he reminds my sisters about their chores. When Ed and I drink a beer together, I see that he takes a shot of whiskey with his beer, the dreaded boilermaker that Joe and Fred warned me about. Ed seems like a kind and gentle giant, but he is divorced too, so I wonder if there are secrets hidden beneath the gentle façade. When Mom asks him when he’ll talk to Henry about his broken sink drain that is allowing Henry’s gray water to exit the back of his rundown farmhouse and flow down over our wall as it freezes, Ed says, “Gosh, Liz, not during the holidays. I’ll speak to Henry after the holidays.”
      I can tell neither one of them wants to speak with Henry about his sink drain, both wanting to avoid a power struggle with Henry, who has a bad temper and once used a pitchfork to chase a health inspector off his property.
      While I’m home, I don’t tell anyone I’m afraid of upperclassmen who seem mentally unbalanced. When Ed asks about the plebe hazing, I say, “I can handle anything they can dish out.” In truth, I feel as though the power structure has me in some sort of chokehold in which the fear of suffocating is worse than actual events.

...

      Back in Annapolis after Christmas leave, the overseers make me shove out in the mess hall when my bad leg is still too painful for sitting on air. When I request permission to explain about the leg, they tell me to stop being a malingerer. When I try to put most of my weight on the good leg, I sink until my chin is level with my plate.               Then usually one of the overseers says, “Come aboard.”
Then one evening when my wives and I are studying, our door bangs open. An upperclassman in full dress says I need to get dressed and come with him. Something feels wrong. He doesn’t say anything, just walks me through the corridors to an office where the duty officer, a lieutenant, sits behind a desk. He says, “There’s been a death in your family. I don’t know what relation he is to you, but Ed has died.”
      I feel immediate relief that it isn’t Mom and then immediate guilt about my relief. “He’s my stepfather.”
      He says, “I’m sorry. You can call your family from the inner office and arrange for emergency leave if you need to attend the funeral.”
      I call Mom, and she says Ed walked up to Henry’s in the evening to talk about the sink drain. Henry swore at him and told him to get out of his yard, and when Ed started to walk back, he went down. Mom says she’d been watching and listening from the side door. She says, “I knew he was gone as soon as he collapsed. The doctor told Ed he had heart problems and should give up drinking. But Ed was stubborn about having his drink each day.”
      “Do you want me to come home?”
      “No, I just needed you to know. There’s nothing you can do here. You need to stay there and concentrate on your studies.”
      “They told me I can come home for the funeral.”
      “I’d feel better if you stayed there.”
      “Ma, I’m real sorry about Ed.”
      “Me too, honey. Me too.”
      It is the persistent winter dampness blowing in from the Chesapeake Bay that makes the dark chill feel colder than my snowy old home. Mom doesn’t say in her letters whether the cold and the aftermath of Ed’s death depressed her in any way. She says only that Ed’s dog, Davy Crockett, killed two of Henry’s chickens, which seems like some measure of retribution. Mom doesn’t say if she thinks Henry felt any remorse about taunting Ed as he lay dying, only that he fixed the sink drain quietly and has avoided her.
      I suspect she feels that my becoming a success compensates for any bad luck she might be experiencing. But I have no idea what I’m becoming. I am aware that, even if I doubt my warrior destiny, I have to prove I don’t quit when the going gets tough. It is best to avoid thinking beyond each day.
      What’s worse than the cold winds are the silent moods and unpredictability of the upperclassmen. I worry constantly about when one of those with my father’s Jekyll-and-Hyde personality will strike next. And though the strikes become less frequent, rotating to a table in the dining hall where a sniper resides stimulates a fear that churns my stomach.
      As spring approaches, the upperclassmen stop hazing, and I dream about the traditional Youngster Cruise to the Mediterranean and the French Riviera. But then the Academy announces that our cruise will be to the Great Lakes. Even so, I see our impending time on destroyers as emancipation from the chaos of Bancroft Hall.

...

      In the middle of my third year a strange feeling seeps into me as silently as a virus. Life seems empty, as if someone turned the “off” switch in my head. It’s another cold, damp winter in Annapolis. The blue skies that once lifted me seem dark.
      I try to fulfill my duty to “indoctrinate” plebes, but chastising them for even small infractions makes me feel horrible. I hate using that power. So I stop.
      I don’t feel like studying anymore either. So I stop. It isn’t really a conscious decision, just something that happens one night and continues to the next, as if something inside me has become disconnected. It seems as though my mind is becoming a dangerous place, a cesspool of illogical thoughts. That choking sensation I felt as a plebe has returned. I play Solitaire at my desk every night, one card on another card.
      While apathy numbs me, I copy answers from a classmate’s Leadership quiz in perhaps a subconscious rejection of the military leader’s role and all the power that it entails. Someone notices and reports that I have violated the honor code. Academy officials decide I’m not fulfilling my obligation as an honorable warrior in this privileged world and force me to resign. I suspect my mental shutdown and subsequent bad behavior was a provocation to have others make a decision that I couldn’t make. I had stayed here too long, just as Mom had stayed too long with my father.

...

      At the time of my dismissal, I found some small sense of vindication from Admiral Rickover’s Congressional testimony that the Academy should be shut down or drastically improved. According to a news report then in the Washington Post, Rickover had said the Academy regimented its young men under English boarding school rules, fostering adolescence and encouraging a preoccupation with football, escort duty for beauty contestants, policing the quarters, and similar trivia. Rickover didn’t mention the honor code or the stupidity of hazing, but I thought he implied it when he said they treat students like children and stifle interest in learning.
      During the next ten years, I graduated from Michigan State University with a BSME, vagabonded around Europe for a year, took a writing course, and wrote a novel about plebe year at the Academy. Crown Publishers thought it would make a decent young adult novel, except for a few obscenities. The book earned good reviews from organizations like Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and the American Library Association. Two local newspapers interviewed me, took photographs of me on my front steps (one with my hound dog), and produced in-depth write-ups of my road to publication. I felt overjoyed at accomplishing this goal but disappointed with the lousy compensation that my writing instructor had predicted. I knew I had to find a better way to earn a living as a writer. By the time I was married and had a son, I’d established a well-paid career as a technical writer with two hi-tech companies.
      But there was never anything as exciting in that career as seeing my name on the cover of a hard-bound novel. Or telling my version of the Annapolis adventure.
      ​Last week they threw me out of Annapolis. Made me resign. The whole thing made me sick, because the Naval Academy had been an opportunity to make something out of myself, a chance to see the world—places like Barcelona. Now that it’s all over, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do.

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Kurt Schmidt is the author of one novel, "Annapolis Misfit," (Crown Publishers, 1974) and the chapbook memoir, "Birth of a Risk-Taker," (Bottlecap Press, 2025). Anxiously, he flew in a plane piloted by his newly-licensed son. That story appeared in The Boston Globe and can be viewed among others at www.kurtgschmidt.com.

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