50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 28
I was chopping down the middle of the hallway. Chopping is the naval term for running, square corners, eyes forward. All plebes chopped whenever we were out of our rooms. It was one more thing that marked us as plebes, and there was only one way plebe year ended. Climb Herndon.
Herndon is a 21-foot granite obelisk on the grounds of the Naval Academy. Like every monument in the Yard, it honors a naval officer who showed heroism and leadership under fire. To a visitor walking through the Yard, it’s one monument among many. To anyone who has been a midshipman, the word alone calls up a whole year. Herndon stood between us and the end of plebe status. The language of it, moving from plebe to fourth class, sounds small. The shift in us was not.
That May morning, chopping the hallway in my whites, already soaked through with Annapolis humidity, squaring my corners the way I’d been drilled to do since Plebe Summer, my mind was on the afternoon ahead. My class would work together to build a human monument around Herndon, tier on tier, until one of us reached the top, pulled off the plebe dixie cup, and set an upperclassman’s combination cover in its place. Tradition said whoever placed that cover would be the first of our class to make admiral. I had no interest in flag rank. I wanted to be part of the class. I wanted to climb Herndon, get it done, and start walking the halls like everyone else.
A classmate came around the corner. We were alone in the hallway, so I took the chance and said, “See you on Herndon.” He said it back easy, like it cost him nothing: “NGOH.”
I stopped. I turned around and called after him with fury, “How can you even say that?”
NGOH was the other thing circling the halls that week. No Girls On Herndon. We were the second class of women at the Academy, so we didn’t carry the full weight that the first class had. But the sexism was still there, still heavy in the air. I’d heard NGOH before, at a distance, from people I didn’t know and who I assumed didn’t know me. This time it came from someone I did know. Someone who had chopped the halls with me.
I don’t remember the rest of what either of us said. I left that hallway sorely disappointed that a year of surviving plebe year together could be undone so easily, sorted out solely by gender, not by whether I was smart enough, strong enough, brave enough to belong in this particular tradition. However, I left that interaction certain. I was going to be part of Herndon and part of whatever else the Navy required of me.
When the climb started, I ran in and linked arms with whoever was next to me. A few of the men pulled back when they saw a woman grab on. Others didn’t notice or didn’t care, too locked into the climb to sort out who was helping. As the struggle continued, I ended up with my back against the cold marble, and men pressed in on every side, one narrow column of air left to breathe. When they started climbing onto my shoulders to build the next tier, someone shouted for me to get out before I got hurt. He was right. It wasn’t an NGOH moment. It was a plain fact that I wasn’t in the best position to help. I crawled out from among the sweaty mass, got myself clear, and watched the rest of the climb from the ground.
Almost fifty years later, many of the men I climbed with have mellowed, married, and raised daughters of their own. We’ve had plenty of chances since to sit together and talk about our naval service and the years after it.
What I still carry from that day is this. A tradition doesn’t stop being itself just because something new gets thrown into it. It still looks like Herndon. A crush of bodies, moving together toward one impossible thing. You find your part in it, even the part that sometimes stands apart.