Faith of My Fathers (16 page)

There was in Witt's edgy hostility resentment not evident in the affected disdain upperclassmen typically held for plebes. He had a bitterness about him that apparently stemmed from an imagined injustice. Perhaps he admired his father very much, and resented the officers whom his father was obliged to obey, thinking them lesser men, and perceiving in the exercise of their authority a self-importance that demeaned his father's dignity. Maybe he had felt ill at ease his plebe year among so many officers' sons, and his insecurity had embittered him. Or he might have just been a jerk who enjoyed humiliating people.

I never learned what experience lay at the heart of Witt's contempt for me, but whatever it was, I hated its expression like hell, because I believed it implied an assumption that my grandfather and father were the kind of shallow officers who let rank determine their regard for sailors. They were not that kind of officer. They took great care with their men. They often put more faith in the judgment of their chiefs than in that of their fellow officers. They were fair judges of character, good commanders who measured their respect for a man according to his merit and not his station. And had they ever seen me locate my self-regard in class distinctions, they would have quickly expressed their disappointment in me.

Witt did not know my father or grandfather, and he should not have assumed anything about their character. Nor, for that matter, should he have assumed anything about mine. Also implicit in his scorn was an assumption that he had merited his appointment to the Academy, while I was merely the Navy's version of a fraternity legacy. Had my father and grandfather been accountants, it is unlikely I would have sought appointment to the Academy. But it was their example, and my father's expectation, that led me there, not their influence in the Navy. I had passed the same exams as Witt had.

I disliked him intensely, as did my friends. “Shitty Witty the Middy,” we called him, and behind his back we ridiculed his pretensions, which was, he probably assumed, exactly how we would have reacted had he treated us decently.

The following year, Witt's last at the Academy, my friends and I, still resentful of his mistreatment of us during plebe year, seized opportunities to avenge our injured pride. The reprisals amounted to nothing serious, small inconveniences really. But we felt they balanced the book with Witt, and recovered whatever degree of our self-respect had been a casualty in the previous year's encounters with him.

After graduation, the second most anticipated event of a midshipman's last year at the Academy was the first class's training cruise. In June, eager midshipmen would embark, sometimes in barely seaworthy ships, for a six-week cruise to exotic ports. During the cruise, it was presumed, they would learn the essentials of life at sea, though often they only acquired a taste for the excesses of leave in foreign ports.

Every midshipman was assigned a cruise box to stow his gear in during the summer cruise. At graduation, the box was sent to his first duty station. My friends and I got hold of Witt's cruise box and changed the address to a fraternity at an Ivy League school, where it arrived some days later, never to be recovered by its puzzled owner.

It's hard to credit our trivial revenge on Witt as anything more than the sort of puerile mischief that kids often aggrandize as acts of justice. We took the pranks more seriously than their effects warranted, just as I accorded far more gravity to Witt's assaults on my dignity than they warranted. Had I really possessed the sturdy sense of honor I prided myself on, I would have suffered his harassment with equanimity.

I made this observation only a few years after my first encounter with Witt, when I learned he had been killed. He was serving as a flight instructor at a naval air station in the South and had flown his T-28 to the town where his father had retired from the Navy. As he flew in front of his parents' house and unwisely attempted a dangerous maneuver, he lost control of his plane and crashed while his parents watched.

Considering all the adversity that a human being confronts in a lifetime, what had passed between Witt and me was nothing. I was embarrassed that I had taken his abuse so seriously. My animosity dissolved into regret after I learned of his death. I assumed his death had been caused by an impulse to impress his father. It was an impulse a great many other midshipmen and I understood.

         
CHAPTER
11
         

Low Grease

Although my friends and I seethed at the treatment we received from upperclassmen, our main nemesis was our company officer, Captain Ben Hart (false name), a red-faced, muscular, bullnecked Marine who had played on the Academy football team some years earlier. His father was a Marine colonel, and Captain Hart had been raised to revere the protocols of command.

He was probably in his late twenties when we knew him, although he seemed much older to us. He was tightly wound, the kind of guy who never appeared relaxed. I don't think he possessed even an anemic sense of humor. It was hard to imagine him out of uniform. He was a stickler for rules and regulations and exhibited the overeagerness of a junior officer trying too hard to allay his own insecurities. Every day when his wife dropped him off at work, he bade her goodbye with a crisp salute while standing at attention.

Hart wasn't highly regarded by the other officers at the Academy, but he was fiercely determined to command respect from his subordinates. He intended to bring any miscreant in his company quickly to heel. I was one of the miscreants he had in mind.

A group of midshipmen who shared a common conceit that we were rebels against the established order had formed a small club and anointed ourselves the Bad Bunch. My roommates Frank Gamboa, Jack Dittrick, and I were the chief instigators of the group's mischief, but membership often included a few conspicuously squared-away midshipmen. Chuck Larson, one of my best friends at the Academy, was a member who joined in many of our misadventures. In the fall semester of our last year, he was selected brigade commander, the top leadership post for midshipmen, and president of our class. He went on to a spectacularly successful career in the Navy, wearing four stars as Commander in Chief, Pacific (my father's last command), and as Superintendent of the Naval Academy.

Our exploits were well known to most midshipmen, as well as to Academy authorities. We were hardly as daring as we regarded ourselves, but we managed to defy most of the rules without committing any breach of the honor code. We were in search of a good time, which led us over the Academy walls on many an evening.

Nothing serious ever occurred in our nightly revels outside the Yard. Mainly we drank a lot of beer, occasionally we got in fights, and once in a while we found girls willing to give us the time of day. However, most of our activities were proscribed by the Academy, and the fact that we were never caught in the act only intensified the anger of our superiors. It drove Captain Hart crazy.

Failing to apprehend us in the commission of a serious offense, but aware of the notoriety we enjoyed in our class, Captain Hart scrupulously called us to account for smaller infractions of Academy regulations and punished us more severely than required. By so doing, he hoped to prove to the rest of our company that we had not escaped justice for our more egregious threats to the brigade's good order and discipline. I spent the bulk of my free time being made an example of, marching many miles of extra duty for poor grades, tardiness, messy quarters, slovenly appearance, sarcasm, and multiple other violations of Academy standards.

My reputation as a rowdy and impetuous young man was not, I am embarrassed to confess, confined to Academy circles. Many upstanding residents of lovely Annapolis, witnesses to some of our more extravagant acts of insubordination, disapproved of me as thoroughly as did many Academy officials. Neither did I often find more appreciative audiences on the road.

During my second year at the Academy, I met and began dating a girl from a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia. The following summer, she called me at my parents' house on Capitol Hill, where I was spending my leave, and invited me to visit her family for a few days. I instantly accepted the invitation, grateful for a little relief from what had been a pretty monotonous leave.

On the agreed-upon day, I bade good-bye to my parents for the weekend and departed Washington's Union Station on the train to Philadelphia. Some hours later, I arrived at Philadelphia's 30th Street Station, where I was supposed to catch the next commuter train for her town. I had a few minutes to kill before my train left, so I decided to have a quick beer in the station's bar.

As I settled on a bar stool, dressed in my white midshipman's uniform, I drew the attention of several friendly, inebriated commuters, who graciously offered to buy me a beer. I welcomed the offer and their company. We chatted amiably as I, eager to be on my way, quickly drained my glass. Not wishing to appear discourteous, however, I cheerfully consented when they pressed me to accept another drink, and several others after that.

I missed the first train, and then two others, before I politely refused my new friends' entreaties to continue drinking and made my way unsteadily through the station to catch the last train of the evening that would carry me to my girlfriend's hometown. After arriving there, I hailed a cab, and finally I arrived, several hours behind schedule, at my destination.

As I ascended the long staircase that led to the front door of her house I was aware that I was probably not in ideal condition to be introduced for the first time to her family. Nevertheless, I believed I could manage the task without betraying the extent of my insobriety.

At the top of the stairs, I noticed that the front door was open. Knocking on the screen door, I was beckoned inside as my girlfriend and her mother and father rose from their chairs to greet me. When I reached for the door handle, I lost my balance and fell through the screen and into a heap on the floor of the entry hall. My startled hosts helped me to my feet, and after I spent a few moments dusting myself off and clumsily straightening my uniform, they led me into the living room.

My unorthodox entry must have aroused her father's suspicions that I was perhaps not the suitable escort for their daughter they had expected the United States Naval Academy to provide. I cannot recall much of the conversation that ensued in their warm and brightly lighted living room. Whatever I said, and the manner in which I said it, apparently confirmed my host's suspicions. After little more than a quarter hour of their hospitality, he abruptly thanked me for paying them a visit and wished me a safe journey home.

I took this gesture as an indication that my weekend visit was to be substantially abbreviated. Politely, I asked if someone would be kind enough to call me a cab, and a few minutes later I was on my way back to Philadelphia to catch a late train for Washington.

When I arrived in the early morning of the next day, my surprised mother greeted me with: “What happened? I thought you were going away for the weekend.”

“Mother, I don't want to talk about it,” I replied sullenly, and headed for my room, and a few hours' sleep.

I never saw the girl or her family again.

A combination of academic performance and grease grade determined a midshipman's class standing. The company officer assigned your grease grade. Hart considered my aptitude for the service to be the poorest in the company. In fact, by Hart's reckoning I possessed no aptitude at all. He never failed to give me the low grease, which, combined with my spotty academic record, always kept me somewhere near the very bottom of the class standings.

I must take most of the responsibility for my poor relationship with my company officer. We were a poor match from the start: Hart was a meticulous, by-the-book junior officer who was unfailingly deferential to his superiors, and I was an arrogant, undisciplined, insolent midshipman who felt it necessary to prove my mettle by challenging his authority. In short, I acted like a jerk, and gave Hart good cause to despise me.

The encounter that set the stage for our four years of discord occurred early in my plebe year. My roommates and I had returned to our room late one morning to find my bed (or “rack,” in Academy jargon) unmade, the sheets and cover balled up in the center of the mattress. That was not the condition I had left it in when earlier that morning I had gone to my first class. I might not have been scrupulous about obeying many Academy regulations, but I usually managed to make my bed in the morning. Apparently, Captain Hart considered the manner in which I performed this morning ritual to be below Academy standards, and had stripped my bed to show his dissatisfaction.

I don't recall which disturbed me more, the fact that he had stripped my bed or simply the idea of Hart prowling around in my room when I was not there. Whatever the cause, I instantly lost my temper and what little self-restraint I possessed in those days. Disregarding my roommates' pleas to forget the insult, I marched immediately to Hart's office to confront him. I knocked on his door, and entered before he gave me leave to do so. Without any prefatory remark, and with only the sloppiest of salutes, I declared my indignation:

“Captain, please don't do that again. I am too busy to make my bed twice a day.”

My honor avenged, I turned on my heel and left his office before I had been dismissed or reprimanded by my shocked company officer. My behavior was inexcusable. Such impertinence was not tolerated at the Academy, least of all when the offender was nothing more than a troublemaking plebe. I should have paid a terrible price for my outburst. But Hart took no action and never said a word to me about it. I am sure it intensified his contempt for me and steeled his determination to purge me from his company. Today, when I remember this incident, I am ashamed of myself, but at the time, Hart's failure to respond immediately and forcefully to my insubordination caused me to respect him even less.

It is fair to say that Hart hated us. He had acute tunnel vision as he focused, often to the exclusion of all else, on our flawed characters. He knew what we were doing, and he was consumed by an intense desire to apprehend us in midcrime. With any luck, he would rid the Academy of our odious presence. He couldn't stand the sight of us, and believed me to be the worst of a very bad lot. At times, his loathing was comical.

Every company officer was obliged to host the members of his company in their last year, inviting them in small groups to dine at his quarters. The implicit purpose of the custom was to provide us with a little practical training in the social graces before we began our careers as officers who would be expected to know our salad fork from our soup spoon.

No doubt Hart had by this time wearied somewhat of chasing us, but his contempt for Frank, Jack, and me was still palpable. Nevertheless, he couldn't contrive a legitimate reason to refuse us our moment at the Hart dinner table. Accordingly, the three of us and our other, more respectable roommate, Keith Bunting, were invited to join Captain and Mrs. Hart for dinner on a pleasant spring evening in 1958. We anticipated the experience with a mixture of amusement and dread. We did not find very appealing the prospect of spending several hours awkwardly pretending to enjoy the company of a man who clearly despised us. But on the other hand we expected the evening to have enough entertainment value to provide material for a few jokes when it was over.

Before the event we laughed while conjuring up the image of our earnest company officer temporarily suspending his blind hatred of us to help us grasp the rudiments of gentlemanly deportment; watchfully presiding over the table; fussing over deficiencies in our table manners; noting whether we navigated the cutlery correctly and whether we paid the lady of the house the proper amount of formal deference; weakly attempting clever repartee; raising his glass aloft and booming, “Gentlemen, the Academy,” or “the Corps.” As it turned out, the captain had planned a considerably less ostentatious affair than we had imagined.

At the appointed hour, Captain Hart picked us up at Bancroft Hall, and drove us in silence to his home, where we presumed Mrs. Hart awaited our presence at her table. When we arrived at his quarters, we naturally headed toward the front door. Hart commanded us to stop. “No, gentleman, come around here,” he ordered. He led us around the house to the backyard, where a picnic table had been set for dinner. The grill had been lighted. Hart entered his kitchen through the back door. He returned a moment later with hot dogs, beans, and a few bottles of Coca-Cola. We ate the meal in silence, quickly. No formalities were observed. No toasts to the Academy or the Corps. No strained attempts at witty dinner conversation. No Mrs. Hart. A half hour after we arrived, he loaded us back into his car and returned us to Bancroft. Quite an etiquette lesson.