50 Stories for 50 Years — Post 29
After plebe summer, after a full academic year of being told exactly where to be and exactly what to do, and after climbing Herndon, the Navy hands you a ship and says, “Run it.”
Not entirely. Not alone. But it felt close enough.
A tension is worth naming before this story starts.
Throughout the academic year, we trained alongside our male classmates: same classes, same formations, same YP training on the Severn River. The integration was real. What wasn’t equal was what happened in the summer.
When women entered the Academy in 1976, the military’s Combat Exclusion Policy barred us from serving on combatant ships. Destroyers, cruisers, and submarines were legally off limits. This created an immediate problem: the traditional fleet cruises that male midshipmen took every summer aboard those vessels were not available to us. A cadre of co-ed midshipmen weighted toward women, for obvious reasons, were routed to YP cruises instead. Yard Patrol craft. Small training vessels, officially classified as non-combatants, which meant women could serve aboard them without running afoul of federal law.
It took a rather mature guy not to think he’d gotten a second-rate cruise experience. I was grateful for those classmates.
Our particular officers in charge of our summer cruise were generous and good-humored. The male midshipmen aboard our crew were, mostly, the same. Mostly.
Seamanship cannot be learned solely in a classroom.
We had studied celestial navigation. Dead reckoning. Nautical charts. I knew the theory. What I did not know, until we got underway, was what it felt like to be responsible for applying it.
During Plebe Year training on the YPs in the Severn River, we rotated through watch stations. I remember one afternoon on the Conn. (The Conning Officer gives direct steering and speed orders. We had been maneuvering all afternoon, and the last evolution fell to me: bringing the craft alongside the seawall for docking.
I ran the approach in my head—distance, angle, speed. I was a beat away from giving the rudder order when the supervising officer leaned over and told me exactly what to say. I passed the order along. Glad I was planning to give the correct order. Annoyed that it was not going to be viewed as mine.
I was frustrated in a way I couldn’t quite justify. He was doing his job. So was I. But there is a difference between giving an order and relaying one, and I knew and could feel the difference even then.
Youngster Summer was different.
We loaded sea bags. We stowed food and supplies. Two officers in charge, a craft master, three enlisted to manage the diesel machinery and oversee deck and line safety. And a crew of midshipmen, fairly evenly split male and female, with the knowledge that for the women the YP cruise was the only option open to us, organized into watch teams and expected to run the ship.
Midshipman Officer of the Deck. Conn. Quartermaster. Helmsman. The roles rotated. During your watch, you were not a passenger.
Our destination was Governors Island, New York City. The route took us north from Annapolis, through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, down Delaware Bay, up the Jersey coast, and into New York Harbor—about 240 nautical miles.
Before we left, our chief bet on who would get seasick—told stories designed to hedge those bets. I won’t repeat them. I was resolved not to give him the satisfaction.
I didn’t lose the bet.
Passing under the Bay Bridge leaving Annapolis, I remember thinking: I’m doing this.
Not the Academy’s version of doing this. Not simulated, supervised, graded. The ship was moving. The water was real. The Bay Bridge passed overhead, and then it was behind Annapolis, and we were behind it, and there was nothing ahead but the route we were responsible for navigating.
The diesel smell was immediate and permanent. You stop noticing it after a few hours, and then you never fully stop recognizing the smell for the rest of your life. The engine room noise and heat. The running lights and interior red lights at night.
I stood my watches. I held my course. On the Conn, coming up the Jersey coast, the ocean moving under us, I gave my own orders.
We tied up at Governors Island with the Manhattan skyline across the water.
I don’t remember every detail of the transit. I remember the Bay Bridge. I remember the chief’s seasickness stories and my private refusal to oblige him. I remember the rudder order I relayed instead of gave, and the one I gave myself later, when no one was leaning over to help.
Plebe Year had taught me to follow instructions. The cruise taught me three things instructions can’t teach: what real responsibility feels like, what it means to earn a shipmate’s trust, and what you are actually capable of when no one is telling you what to say next.