50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 26
The Officer of the Deck (OOD) is the one responsible for keeping order in Bancroft Hall on any given night. He patrols the passageways, checks on the midshipmen, and makes sure everyone’s where they’re supposed to be. Plebe year, winter, my roommate and I found out just how thorough one particular OOD could be.
It was a regular Saturday night in the Hall. As plebes, we had no town liberty, which meant our options for excitement began and ended within the halls of the world’s largest single college dormitory. Bancroft Hall has 1,639 rooms, 4,663 beds, and 4.8 miles of passageways. All of it was ours to wander, and none of it ours to leave.
So we went ice skating. Dahlgren Hall was a short walk away from our room, skating was free for midshipmen, and we had nothing better to do. We laced up and had a fine time of it until we noticed the OOD circling the rink, and circling us in particular. With so few women at the Academy, invisibility was not really an option unless you stayed in your room.
We hadn’t done anything wrong. But the attention made us uneasy enough that we turned in our skates early and went looking for a friendlier scene.
We found our classmate Harvey studying alone in his room and talked him into a break. Door open, as required for mixed-gender visits. We were plebes, not fools, not yet anyway. We sat around his desk and talked about nothing in particular.
Thirty minutes hadn’t passed before a knock at the open door, and there he was again, the same OOD. “Funny to see you two again,” he said as he poked his head into the room. What do you say to that? Yes, sir. He asked what we were up to. I couldn’t tell you now what either of us answered. I only remember what I said to Harvey the second the OOD walked out of the room and moved on: We’ll talk later. We’re getting out of here.
Taps was closing in, and as plebes, we were required to be in our room by the stroke of it. We had just enough time to make it back if we didn’t dawdle and went straight back there.
We did not go straight there.
We swung by one more room, classmates we knew in another wing, and knocked, and walked in, and froze. They were drinking. Peppermint schnapps, out in the open, like Bancroft Hall, wasn’t the one place on the Yard where that was an automatic major conduct offense, consumption, possession, or introduction of alcohol strictly prohibited for every midshipman, regardless of age.
We declined the offer with more horror than grace. I remember standing there doing the math on how fast I could reasonably leave without looking like I was fleeing a crime scene, which, strictly speaking, I was. We found our classmate Harvey studying alone in his room and talked him into a break. Door open, as required for mixed-gender visits. We were plebes, not fools, not yet anyway. We sat around his desk and talked about nothing in particular.
Thirty minutes hadn’t passed before a knock at the open door, and there he was again, the same OOD. “Funny to see you two again,” he said as he poked his head into the room. What do you say to that? Yes, sir. He asked what we were up to. I couldn’t tell you now what either of us answered. I only remember what I said to Harvey the second the OOD walked out of the room and moved on: We’ll talk later. We’re getting out of here.
Taps was closing in, and as plebes, we were required to be in our room by the stroke of it. We had just enough time to make it back if we didn’t dawdle and went straight back there.
We did not go straight there.
We swung by one more room, classmates we knew in another wing, and knocked, and walked in, and froze. They were drinking. Peppermint schnapps, out in the open, like Bancroft Hall, wasn’t the one place on the Yard where that was an automatic major conduct offense, consumption, possession, or introduction of alcohol strictly prohibited for every midshipman, regardless of age.
We declined the offer with more horror than grace. I remember standing there doing the math on how fast I could reasonably leave without looking like I was fleeing a crime scene, which, strictly speaking, I was. The guys just laughed and stashed the bottle up in the ceiling tiles like that solved everything. After a few more strained minutes of conversation, we got out.
Now we were chopping, moving fast but not running, since a woman running down the passageways would only draw more unwanted attention. We hustled up ladderwells and squared the corner into our room with taps seconds away.
We made it. We hope we’ve made it. Whew! We shut the door behind us.
Someone knocked.
We opened it, and there he was. The same OOD, who was standing at the end of our hallway, had apparently clocked us coming in right at the wire. Three times in one night. Right place, wrong time. Wrong place, right time. Wrong place, wrong time. We had run the whole set.
What we didn’t know yet was that our late arrival was about to connect a few dots we badly wanted left unconnected. The lateness, the wing we’d come from, the room we’d been in minutes before taps, it was all traceable. With events unknown to us at the time, it eventually traced its way back toward the schnapps in the ceiling tiles.
We hadn’t brought it up. We hadn’t meant to bring anyone into it. But between the honor code and a major conduct offense we hadn’t committed, staying quiet in response to questions wasn’t really a choice we had. We had to confirm what we’d seen. This did not endear us to those who were caught, but we were cured, at least for a few weeks, of much roaming the halls.
My roommate and I still shake our heads about this one, decades later, over coffee on our walks around the yard. It usually starts the same way, and you remember when, and ends the same way too, with one of us insisting some detail happened to the other person instead.
But we agree on this part: it was one of those nights where every single door we walked through had the same guy standing behind it.