There are times in your life when you don’t want any attention. You want to keep your head down, your nose clean, and your name out of the public eye.
Plebe Summer at the United States Naval Academy was one of those times.
Attention meant correction. Correction meant public scrutiny. Public scrutiny meant some calibrated blend of humiliation and demerits. The safest strategy was invisibility. If I could have faded into the granite and brick of the Yard, I would have gladly done so.
But invisibility was not really an option.
It was hard enough being a woman in the early years of integration. Out of a class of roughly a thousand, about ninety of us were women, and that number dropped as the summer wore on. Almost anything in our physical appearance stood out against the majority. We were new. We were watched. We were evaluated, sometimes fairly, sometimes not.
I had an additional identifier: eyeglasses.
This was before vision correction surgery was available. My glasses were not optional. I had even received a varsity swimming team waiver for legal blindness. Without my “eyes,” I navigated the world in impressionist watercolor.
And yet part of Plebe Summer training involved learning to sail, a cornerstone midshipman training, heavy on seamanship, knot-tying, and basic navigation on the Severn River and Chesapeake Bay.
Growing up in Annapolis on the Severn River, my family operated a Boston Whaler for waterskiing. My sailing experience mainly consisted of crewing for friends. I did fine learning to helm a Knockabout, competent, cautious, determined not to attract attention.
We also trained on larger vessels, yawls used for offshore sailing. They felt serious in a way the smaller boats did not. Heavier lines. Taller masts. More ways to be noticed if you made a mistake.
I can still picture the day we were disembarking from one of those yawls as we tied up in the Santee Basin.
I was standing behind a classmate, a heavyweight wrestler who towered over me. As we shuffled forward, he swung his body over the bow rail. His hand swept back as he cleared the railing.
It caught my face.
My glasses lifted cleanly off and arced into the air.
I saw a blurred image of them turning once, maybe twice, before disappearing into the green water of Santee Basin.
In that instant, I understood two things.
First, I was not going to retrieve them. Even as a strong swimmer, diving blindly into an opaque basin of water was not going to restore my eyeglasses.
Second, invisibility was officially over. I was going to need help, or I was going to get into trouble.
I chopped, double time, back toward the hall, squinting at a world that had dissolved into indistinct shapes. I ran straight into my squad leader, Mr. Vierra.
“Plebe halt! Miss Andrews, where are your glasses?”
“At the bottom of Santee Basin, sir!”
He stared at me. Or at least I assume he did.
“Holy @#$%&! How bad is your vision, Miss Andrews?”
“Sir, if you were standing next to Lt. Holder, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference by looking at your shoulder boards.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Holy @#$%&!”
For context, midshipman and officer shoulder boards are vaguely similar, but good eyesight is required to make the distinction.
“Well, sir,” I offered, “I can call home and see if I have another pair of glasses.”
Growing up in Annapolis had its advantages. My mother could make a delivery to the Yard in under ten minutes.
Unfortunately, the only spare pair at home was a pair of prescription sunglasses. Sunglasses!
And so, for several weeks during Plebe Summer, I marched, saluted, and stood at attention in full uniform wearing sunglasses.
In a place where standing out was the last thing you wanted, I had managed to become unmistakable.
It was already challenging to blend in as one of ninety women in a thousand. Add dark lenses to a regulation uniform, and subtlety was no longer an option. In a word, non-regulation.
But here’s what I remember most clearly, ironically, given the circumstances.
No one suggested I didn’t belong.
They were exasperated. They were stunned by the degree of my blindness. They were undoubtedly inconvenienced. But they did not lower the standard. They expected me to meet it, sunglasses and all.
Plebe Summer was not designed for invisibility. It was designed to expose weakness, sand it down, and see what remained.
What remained, in my case, was someone who could not see shoulder boards clearly
but could see, with perfect clarity, that quitting was not an option.