Reading this week:

• Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden (a perfectly normal adult book, besides the name)
• Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton (I worry this is a feel-good book for white people)

One of the more exciting times came when we did Midshipmen ops. During 2/C (Second Class aka Junior) Summer, Naval Academy Midshipmen go on PROTRAMID (PROfessional TRAining MIDshipmen), which involves a lot of stuff, but includes 24 hours on a submarine. The submarine pulls into port, a whole bunch of Midshipmen board, the submarine goes underway, dives, does some typical submarine-y type operations, serves everyone pizza, and then pulls in and discharges its Midshipmen cargo with them hopefully buoyed by wonder at the submarine life. Midshipmen ops on the Montpelier started about three days after the rest of us had come aboard, so by this time I was practically an expert in all things submarine-related. The Midshipmen that came aboard where actually ROTC Midshipmen, so I didn’t know any, but we had the same rank insignia and therefore I was a friendly face. I guided them in the essentials of Midshipmen life on a submarine, such as “how to ask to go up to the bridge to look at the ocean” and “where are the bathrooms.” That was fun showing off, but I was equally glad to be rid of all the other Midshipmen, and hear the crew complain about how annoying Midshipmen ops are. “Ah but you’re different,” they told me, a Midshipman, mostly because I was sitting within earshot (to be fair to me, Midshipman ops are annoying because doing all those different activities in 24 hours is taxing on the crew, and the Mids take up a lot of space and force people out of their bunks so the Mids have a place to sleep, whereas the longer-term ride-alongs like us don’t really impose any additional requirements on the submarine except that we occasionally bother people by pushing the “test lamp” button on the Tomahawk firing panel to make all the lights light up).

I remember being most impressed by the captain of the ship, who’s name I entirely forget. One time I came up to the bridge to find the captain already there. He had both the legs and sleeves of his coveralls rolled up, and his hat on backwards, enjoying the weather and driving around his nuclear-powered warship. I remember thinking that was just so cool, him relaxed as can be in total command of his domain. This trip was also my first real glimpse of the terror a Navy captain can instill. One of our limited duties as Midshipmen onboard the submarine was to get the movie ready every night in the wardroom. This involved loading up the DVD and getting the popcorn ready. One night we finished watching the movie, and the captain said “Tomorrow we’re gonna watch Talladega Nights.” So the next night we go to set up the movie, and flip through the wardroom’s large binder of movies, but we don’t find the ballad of Ricky Bobby. We ask around, and no one’s got it. So, being the enterprising young Midshipmen we are, wanting to forge ahead and not bother Garcia (I hate that book), we simply chose another movie. Shortly before the movie was about to begin, we casually mentioned this to the XO. “Oh no,” he said, fright evident in his eyes, “that’s not good.” This initiated a flurry of activity. People were woken up. Audio-visual systems were to be rerouted. Additional potential sources of movies were hunted down. Panic commenced when none of these options were bearing fruit. Suddenly, the captain walked in! We told him that we didn’t have the movie. The captain then simply walked out. We figured we were doomed. We couldn’t find the movie! How much of an abject failure could each of us be? But then shortly thereafter the captain simply returned to the wardroom, tossed a copy of the movie on the table, and stated flatly “Man to do a man’s job,” and we watched the movie.

Other exciting things happened during our time on board. We had two swim calls, to take advantage of the Caribbean weather. These are what it sounds like, where the submarine surfaces, stops, and people can go topside and go swimming. Also during this event we had a gun shoot (on the opposite side of the ship as the swim call). The ship came up with some excuse that they needed to shoot the 50-cal they had onboard for force protection, and we got to fire it and some boxes they had wrapped in plastic bags (submarine cruises are very very much recruiting trips). In the battle of AUTEC, the boxes lost, let me tell ya. Smoking was banned on submarines in 2010, but on this trip I also made sure to smoke a cigarette or two just for the novelty of smoking underwater. I had been given the advice to bring a pack of cigs or two onboard even if you didn’t smoke, because hanging out in the smoke pit and giving a away a few cigarettes was an effective way to make friends. I also fondly remember the ship’s gas-station-style cappuccino machine; the galley was small enough that in the right spot you could sip your cappuccino and then reach over and refill your cup without getting up from you seat. Heaven, truly.

Like I said at the beginning, this trip is what convinced me to go submarines. What I liked is how small and tight-nit the ship and the crew seemed. No one seemed aloof or distant, and there were few enough people it seemed you could get to know everyone. People were friendly, or at least willing to give you their time. The crew was irreverent that seemed especially appealing to 19-year-old me. I remember one Chief yelling to another that was disembarking “DON’T FORGET MY GOAT PORN” for when he was to return to the ship. It was a short ride, and after nine days we were off, loaded onto a tugboat that came to meet us and bring us back to shore. Quite the good time.

Swim call cigars.

Reading this week:

• The Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot
• A Problem From Hell by Samantha Power

If you’ll allow me to briefly skip over the entirety of Plebe Year in my Navy Life Story, I’ll talk about my submarine cruise during Youngster Summer. Every summer at the Naval Academy, you have professional training. This was split up into several different blocks, and on one of those blocks you went on a Fleet Cruise, wherein you did something with the fleet, aka the Navy outside of the Naval Academy. Each summer is named after the following school year, so Plebe Summer becomes before your Plebe (Freshman) year, and Youngster Summer comes before your Youngster (Sophomore) Year. My Youngster Summer I went on a submarine cruise.

During your Youngster Summer, your options for your fleet cruise are limited to either a surface cruise, where you go on a surface ship, or a submarine cruise, where you go on a submarine. The point of this cruise is to give you a taste of what life is like for an enlisted summer. Back in the day, like 1900, you would actually do like, work, but I think these days mostly Midshipmen just sorta wander around the ship looking lost. I can’t remember if submarine cruises or surface cruises were the more popular choice (you did whatever the Academy told you, but you got to put in preferences). Anything submarines-related was generally unpopular at the Naval Academy, but the submarine cruises had the advantage of tending to be shorter. The surface cruises were all for a month, but I wound up on a submarine for a whopping 9 days. I had put in my preference to go on a submarine because I was genuinely interested in submarines, I promise.

This cruise really cemented my desire to go submarines. Usually when I tell the story, I pithily say that “I found my people; they took me in, fed me coffee, and I was quite happy.” The first step was reporting to the Naval Academy, where we stayed overnight for some processing. I was to go on the USS Montpelier, which was stationed in Norfolk. Since it was pretty close, they just drove me down there, along with some other Mids. There was to be three of us on this particular submarine. We were driven by a newly-minted Ensign, who was at the Naval Academy on temporary duty, and had no real idea what was going on. He drove us to Norfolk Naval Base, and then drove along the pier until he found a submarine, and tried to just drop us off. We objected to being dumped on the pier next to some random submarine, so he next drove us to the squadron headquarters. This went better and we checked in with squadron and eventually checked into the on-base hotel for the night. Our submarine was leaving the next morning, and we’d come on board then before departure.

Now that I am writing this I am struggling to remember anything about the first day or so of being underway on the submarine. It must have been fairly overwhelming. Honestly I’m not even sure about the hotel thing, but it seems right. I do remember two officers from the ship picking us up and taking us out to dinner, which was fairly exciting because like, here we were meeting real life officers out in the fleet doing fleet stuff. Also they bought us dinner, after one guilted the other into it, citing the fact they got paid way more than we did. The next morning we must have gone to the submarine with our stuff. We probably sat in the wardroom for a bit while doc got us our TLDs (thermo-luminescent dosimeters, aka radiation detectors) and someone briefed us on the ship and had us sign whatever paperwork we had to sign. We were assigned bunks. I do remember getting the “Iron Cross,” as that particular bunk in 9-man berthing is known. Unlike most bunks, it is half hidden behind some other bunks, leaving a relatively small hole where you can enter it. And it’s the top bunk, all of which means you have to do some particular gymnastics to get up into it. I tried to minimize the number of times I had to crawl into that thing, unusual for a Midshipman.

There frankly wasn’t a whole lot for us to do on the submarine. We were assigned crew buddies, who we were nominally supposed to shadow. I don’t remember his name, but my buddy was a firecontrolman, who stood his watches in the control room. That was convenient because it gave me a pretty good excuse to hang out in control and sit at the fire control stacks. The major advantage there is that was the easiest way to figure out where we were in the world, by looking at the chart on those stacks. This was my first time underway on a ship, and since a submarine doesn’t have windows, it’s a little disorienting figuring out where you are in the world. Over the nine days we were on the submarine, it was slated to first drive down to Cape Canaveral for some Midshipman ops (I’ll explain later), and then to AUTEC in the Caribbean to do, uh, something I guess. I tried to spend a reasonably large amount of time with my crew buddy there to learn the ins and outs of submarine stuff. I eventually figured out someone friendly on each shift I could hang out with and so that’s mostly what I did, hanging out with people on watch. Quite the life.

Please come back next week for Part II, so I can stretch this into two weeks of content. Thanks!

This is hopefully my last “Plebe Summer” post, though depending on how long this pandemic lasts I reserve the right to circle back around.

The story I should have actually told by now in my Plebe Summer series is that I was dating another Plebe at the time. This has gotta be fairly unique. Sure, you meet a lot of people over Plebe Summer, but it’s not exactly a great time to meet someone.

Let’s call her K. I was in love. I was in love with that teenage love that made her seem like she was the only part of the world really in focus. We had started dating in High School. We were in the same program, and it was a small program, so we knew each other. Senior year I finally asked her out and she accepted. We didn’t start dating because of our mutual desire to go to the Naval Academy, but I guess having mutual interests doesn’t hurt. Like the majority of women in my life, she was much more dedicated and organized and tenacious than me, and she had been much more successful far earlier in the application process than I was, and was accepted way before I was. We talked briefly at one point about my backup plan if I didn’t get in, which consisted entirely of hitchhiking to Florida, stealing a sailboat, and going to the Caribbean.

Thankfully, I did eventually of course get in. The first thing I did was drive to K’s place to show her my acceptance packet. That was a good day. So we knew we had the rest of the semester together, and our short summer, and then it was off to the Academy. We didn’t plan on seeing each other much over the summer. You don’t want to draw a lot of attention to yourself as a Plebe, and having another Plebe as a girlfriend would have been a pretty big way to go about doing that. We also didn’t think it would work, or maybe it would just be suspicious, to send letters directly to each other, so we planned on sending them to our respective parents, who would then forward them to us. I think we only did that once. She also managed to get a note passed to me via some mutual contacts, and we wound up being able to see each other about once a week.

You know I was about to write “in a lot of ways it was nice to have a girlfriend going through Plebe Summer with you.” On reflection I don’t know if that was true. I was going to say that it was nice to have someone who knew what you were going through. But then again everyone I knew at that point knew what I was going through. I guess one advantage is that she, specifically, knew what I was going through, so I didn’t get the breakup letter some other people got. But I think I was probably a burden on her, and the relationship, or rather the existence of the relationship, probably mostly worked to feed my ego. We (I) managed to keep our relationship a secret for about half of Plebe Summer, I think. We wound up being able to see each other on most Sundays, because the Chaplains hosted a thing on Sunday mornings where they served donuts and Cadre weren’t allowed in. So we met up there, though sometimes I worried about shining my shoes and cut our time short. We’d also occasionally run into each other during PT or events like that. Later in the summer, when I was getting dangerously brave, I even wandered up to her room.

I was the one that let our secret out of the bag. I was stupid man. All Plebes are stupid, the act of becoming a Plebe makes you stupid, but I was stupider than most in a lot of ways, as I have mentioned. It was breakfast one morning and our Squad Leader decided to ask us all where our girlfriends were. So we were going around the table shouting (Plebes are always required to shout) various towns. I could have just said “Annapolis,” which was technically true and also very reasonable because I was local. Instead I got the bright idea to shout “SIR FOXTROT COMPANY SIR.” I still regret doing that. I mean at the time it fed my ego but the poor woman was just trying to fit in as a Plebe and not make waves and there I went blowing our secret out of the water. Man I was dumb. In some ways letting the secret out was nice. I remember during the Plebe Boxing Smoker I was allowed slash forced to go over and hang out with her and her squad. It was nice to see her, though again all I was really doing was attracting attention.

I don’t know if Plebe Summer was good or bad for the relationship. It probably wasn’t great? I thought about her a lot. At some point I thought it would be romantic to write her a letter that mostly consisted of the lyrics to a particular marching cadence, but thankfully I came to my senses before I wrote that out. That note she got passed to me was actually a note saying that we should talk, because she intended to break up with me. For better or for worse, by the time the note got to me and we could steal away for a tête-à-tête, she had changed her mind. Plebe Summer just changes you so much that we were really two new people figuring out who we were and who we were in relation to each other. Since in a lot of ways you change in the same direction it can kind of cover that up. The first time we got to spend any real amount of time together was Plebe Parent’s weekend, when we finally got some liberty. We of course went home and hung out with each other there. But we both refused to wear anything other than the proscribed PT gear, and kept our shirts tucked in, in accordance with the uniform regulations.

We survived Plebe Summer as a couple, and the rest of Plebe Year. We technically lived in the same building, though in different wings, and were busy enough that we would go days without seeing each other. She would eventually dump me early on in Youngster Year, and rightfully so. She hasn’t talked to me since.

My Plebe Summer saga continues. I remember being sweaty, terrified, and confused most of the time. Most days, except for Sunday and Wednesday I think, started early with PT. We got up and got dressed and ran on down to the field to do whatever exercises they told us to do. I hated this. I was not exactly the most athletic Plebe on the field. Over the summer I got a whole lot skinnier, and although I got better at strength exercises my run time on the Physical Readiness Test actually went down.

After PT is was time for breakfast. Meal times over Plebe Summer were a mixed blessing. On one hand: there was food, and you got to sit down for a while. You ate as a squad, and we had the same squad for all of Plebe Summer, so that was kinda nice. On the other hand, your squad leader, who was the Firstie Cadre training you, was there, and their job was to grill you on all the pro-know (professional knowledge) that you were supposed to know. I tried to avoid getting any attention directed towards me, which is a good strategy for all of Plebe Summer, and one I failed at spectacularly. One of the most useful things about the Naval Academy is that they work really hard to beat the ego out of you, and while they were very successful when it came to me, my ego was large enough that whatever portions were and are left still manage to shine through. One of the bad habits I still hold onto from Plebe Summer is eating really fast. I gulp down food even when I’m trying to slowly. This winds up with some awkward situations on dates.

During the rest of the day there were a great many different activities. Plebe Summer has a whole program to train you up on the absolute minimum knowledge required to be a functioning little member of the Brigade of Midshipmen. Sometimes there were classroom sessions where we would learn about Navy history or the different ranks or something. Sometimes there were hands-on lessons about damage control or something. We had sailing lessons over Plebe Summer, which were always a great deal of fun. We never knew we’d be going sailing that day until we were ordered to change into our sailing gear, which was fairly identical to PT gear, but included wearing our standard-issue boat shoes, our standard-issue ballcaps, and putting on the standard-issue sunscreen. We even had a fine dining etiquette lesson one day. That’s a little surreal in the midst of Plebe Summer. You are running around getting yelled at and then one day the Cadre drop you off in this room you’ve never been to before and you’re told to sit down at these tables set with nice dinnerware and you learn to tear your roll to butter it instead of cutting it, to scoop up your soup by moving the spoon away from you, and to put your napkin on your chair to signal you’re coming back and to put it on the table to signal you’ve left for good.

We also got to go shooting for a day. That was a lot of fun. The shooting range is across the Severn River, and I always enjoyed going across the river because you went across it in the troop transport boat things. Then the whole day was spent shooting, with the morning on rifle and the afternoon on pistol, or vice versa. They teach you how to shoot the things, and then you do some target shooting, and depending on how well you shoot you qualify and get to wear ribbons for “Qualified,” “Sharpshooter” (I think), and “Expert.” I managed to qualify Sharpshooter on the M-16, and Expert for Pistol. Qualifying Expert lets you wear a medal instead of just a ribbon, so that’s cool. This was the peak of my pistol performance, and as I requalified every year on the ship I just got worse and worse. This experience makes me forget though that some people out there have never shot a gun. I had shot rifles before in the Boy Scouts, but I am always vaguely surprised when other people haven’t shot a gun before just in the normal course of their college orientation.

One final part of Plebe Summer were the academic placement tests. Here’s a fun fact about me and Plebe Summer: I didn’t know that I was going to college until about halfway through Plebe Summer, when we were choosing our classes. I had thought that the Naval Academy as like, happy fun time boat school instead of, you know, a fairly normal academic setting that is tacked onto a military training command. It didn’t even click when I was doing the placement tests, which I managed to do pretty darn good on by the way. I managed to validate chemistry and got placed pretty high up in math, despite forgetting a calculator for my final placement tests. Doing well on the placement tests was nice from an academic perspective, but even better from a Plebe Summer perspective because not everyone qualified for the later placement tests, and doing a placement test meant that you had a few extra hours by yourself in air conditioning, away from the cadre. I was disappointed that I only validated one semester of the two required semesters of English, but the second test was mostly poetry analysis and while I think I am actually pretty okay at that I apparently wasn’t good enough. I still got to go around mentioning that I was a “Plebe High Validator” when I was getting myself into the French classes that Plebes normally aren’t allowed to take.

The final note I guess to make about Plebe Summer is communication home. Back in my day it was kinda limited. I hear the kids these days get like hour long phone calls every week or something. We got three phone calls total over the course of Plebe Summer. Those were an event. We all got to retrieve our cell phones from the big room where they kept all of our civilian stuff. We were lead out to the courtyard where there were these big paving tiles, and told to pick one and keep at least one between all of us, so we were each probably about six feet apart. We were told to dial, and wait to hit “send” until the appropriate moment. When the clock started, we hit “send,” and the call began. Our parents were given a heads up for when our call times were, so they could be prepared (we were kept in the dark). We were warned sternly to call our parents instead of our girlfriends or boyfriends (still Don’t Ask Don’t Tell then, so this is a gendered statement). This was mostly because our parents would inevitably miss us, and no matter how much we thought we were in love our significant others were likely to dump us. This was true for me, and is famously true for 98% of everyone else. So I called my parents every time (my girlfriend was actually also in Plebe Summer with me, which maybe I can detail next week) but I didn’t quite know what to talk about? Things were fine at home, I was doing fine (relatively), and so I would run out of things to talk about before the five minutes were up. At five minutes, the Cadre told us to hang up and we were yelled at if we didn’t. Other than that I wrote a good number of letters; this was encouraged and you got a talking to if you weren’t writing home (out of concern for your mental health). My parents sent a large number of letters and packages, which generally included cookies and drink mixes. This is what you want to receive over Plebe Summer, believe me.

I suppose I should stop there for this week. Maybe next week I can talk about the saga of dating over Plebe Summer. It went… fine.

In case you’re not a longtime fan, the previous entry is here.

As I sit down again to write this, after only like a three year hiatus from the last entry and a span of 13 years since the events happened, I’m trying to think of a narrative to weave. I wander around thinking about it and I’m really surprised by all the little events and things I remember. It was so long ago. I was confused much of the time, though “confused” isn’t really the word for it. I am pretty good and simply shedding my perception of those things that aren’t really necessary for day-to-day existence and only focusing on the task at again, a skill that is useful for an event like Plebe Summer. There was so much that I simply didn’t realize was going on, through the sheer force of my own ignorance. I feel like a lot of the other Plebes simply knew more about the Academy than I did, having done much more research on the institution prior to applying, or maybe just because they paid attention at more of the right times. I didn’t know that Company Senior Enlisted was even a position for a long time, and so never quite figured out why that one Chief was always hanging around us. This is something I very much should have known – I think I probably cited her name multiple times a day when reciting the chain of command but it never clicked that this Chief walking around was the name I was yelling when ordered.

I covered up a lot of my ignorance with knowing a lot of other stuff. I grew up around the Naval Academy and used to live there when I was a small kid. I could suddenly put a lot of my dad’s stories into context so I had these weird little nuggets of information that allowed me to convey a broader understanding that I didn’t have. Plus I actually read Reef Points like you were supposed to whenever you had a second of downtime to just stand there. And I didn’t just focus on the stuff you were supposed to memorize, because that was boring, but read all the history and gouge in the back. So I think that must have made me seem like I knew what I was doing. Plus then again it’s Plebe Summer – it doesn’t require a whole lot of smarts, just enough sense to do what you’re told. I wasn’t great at that, but apparently just good enough.

Then again maybe it shouldn’t be remarkable to remember so much about Plebe Summer. It is an incredible time of forgetting and learning all in once. The point of Plebe Summer is to prepare you to enter the Brigade of Midshipmen, to become a fully functioning member of the society that is the Naval Academy. The Naval Academy made me in almost every way the person I am today, and Plebe Summer was the staging point for that growth and transformation. There is a weird phenomenon that happens over Plebe Summer that you shed so much of what you were before. We were warned at the beginning by one of the Cadre that we would simply forget much of what had occurred over High School and before. Not forget, I still remember High School, but the events that occurred before Plebe Summer fell from such significance to the person I became that they are relegated deeper into the subconsciousness just out of sheer irrelevance.

The first few days of Plebe Summer were about establishing the routine and habits that would carry us through the rest of the experience. Many of these were very weird, looking back. Many of these efforts were about saving time. I dry shaved over Plebe Summer for reasons that are still somewhat unfathomable to me – but it seemed to work. And I suppose it saved time in the morning. It was weeks or months into the Academic Year (so after Plebe Summer had ended) when I realized I could use shaving cream – and shaving became worlds nicer. We also didn’t use soap over Plebe Summer? Olsen suggested, and the rest of us simply took as gospel, the advice that we just use shampoo. There were four of us in the room, and when it was time to shower we simply left the shower running the entire time. The first person would get in and turn the water on. We each had been issued shampoo as part of our standard-issue supply, and one of these bottles was stationed in the shower. We used the shampoo as shampoo and as body wash. When one person was done showering, and they showered as quick as possible, they left the water on and the next person rotated in. I guess this saved time?

I’ll end with that for this entry, since it’s late and I’m already at like 800 something words. I’ll fill the rest of my Plebe Summer posts with memories about stuff. Someday it’d be a project to go back and put them in chronological order. I wrote letters home like you’re supposed to, and I’m sure mom has those saved somewhere. They probably smell like the rest of Plebe Summer did, which was a mix of sweat and Febreze. I still can’t smell Febreze without shuddering.