50 Stories for 50 Years of Women at USNA — Post 19
There is a particular feeling that comes before impending chaos in Bancroft Hall.
Not a sound, exactly. More like a change in frequency. A rumble, then something electric in the air. If Bancroft were a forest, you would see it in the animals first – the way they stop, ears up, and begin fleeing before the fire is seen. Before the smoke. Like Bambi.
That is the only way I know how to describe the afternoon of the 2nd Company Wedgie War.
My companymate, Tom Frick, can give you the origin story. He was there, he remembers it, and he tells it the way we tell a good sea story – with memory and history embodied.
His room consisted of. Styron, King, and himself. The directive came from notoriously hardcore, 2/c Bob Harward ’79. The target was his classmate, also 2/c Steve Miller ’79, also known as a hardcore flamer. The plan: lights out, hide, ambush, wedgie. Simple enough.
The door opened.
It was not Steve Miller.
It was the entire Class of ’79.
What followed is the kind of thing that doesn’t have a plan. It has a momentum. Bodies poured into the passageway. Shouts for plebes to come and assist their shipmates. The fire doors swung shut. The heat of everyone packed into that corridor immediately fogged every window; you couldn’t see in, you couldn’t see out. Bancroft’s hallway became its own sealed world.
Tom remembers being thrown from the scrum, with essentially nothing left but his waistband, and turning to find himself face to face with the Officer of the Deck—a Navy lieutenant—standing next to the Midshipman of the Deck, Don Davis ’81.
The lieutenant looked at the scene.
He looked at Don Davis.
“You keep a tight deck, Mr. Davis.”
Then he turned around and went down the stairs.
I need to tell you what Debbie and I did.
We were not going to miss this.
Debbie and I strategized. We put on our one-piece swimsuits under our gym gear; a practical precaution, we told ourselves. Good thinking. Tactical. What could go wrong?
We entered the scrum. I found my target: Scott Riggins ’79, a heavyweight rugby player. I jumped on his back.
Scott Riggins reached over his own head, grabbed me by my shirt, and brought me around to face him.
There was a pause.
“Andrews, If you two don’t leave now, you will have your clothes torn off.”
We both left. Immediately. We did not look back.
The initial valor was replaced with discretion.
This is also a Naval lesson.
My male classmates tell me what came after in reverent terms. Epic. Bedlam. Clothes everywhere — not just scattered, reduced. Remnants. Shirts in tatters. The windows fogged so thick you couldn’t see a thing.
I have to take their word for it.
I’ve thought about this afternoon many times since. It sits in the space the Academy never quite mapped out, the territory between bonding and hazing, between shared absurdity and something that could go wrong. We were only the second class of women. We were still proving we belonged, which meant we needed to be in the story. Not watching it from a careful distance.
And yet here is what I remember most clearly.
Scott Riggins didn’t escalate. He gave a warning. He offered a choice. He could see what the situation was and where it was going, and he drew a line – without cruelty, without drama, just with complete clarity.
I took the exit he offered. I was grateful, even if I didn’t say so.
And the lieutenant – he gave Don Davis a fiction to stand behind, and he removed himself from a situation that would have required him to do something no one wanted him to do. He saw what was happening, and he made a decision about what kind of officer to be in that moment.
Both of them read the room.
That is no small thing.
The fire doors opened again. People found their clothes, or they didn’t. The hallway returned to regulation.
But for one afternoon, behind fogged windows, sealed off from the rest of the world, we were just people, not the classes of ’79 and ’81, not the men and the women, not the ones who belonged and the ones who were still proving it.
Just the animals. Moving together before the fire is seen.