No More Mister Nice Guy
Vice Admiral Jeffrey Fowler took over as the 60th Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy on 8 June; the place hasn't been the same since. Within weeks of his change of command, he dramatically tightened the rules governing the lives of the Academy's 4,400 midshipmen. Perhaps most telling, he made it mandatory for midshipmen to take all meals during the week in the Mess Hall, something that has been optional for the upper classes in recent years. For many older graduates, the Mess Hall lay at the heart of the crucible that is Plebe Year, a place of rolling demands and challenges that many thought they could never meet—until the day they realized they could.
Running a close second on the strictness scale of what might well be called Fowler's Rules was the admiral's dictum scuttling weeknight liberty, another privilege that midshipmen of an earlier day never even dreamed about. Combined with the relaxed regulations on drinking, weeknight liberty had resulted in a number of embarrassing episodes for the Academy.
Some have labeled the crackdown as unnecessarily Draconian, a flashy solution to non-existent problems. Admiral Fowler answers those critics in this issue of Proceedings, explaining what impelled him to act as he has. In a time of war, he writes, Academy graduates must be prepared to command Sailors and Marines from the day they are commissioned; anything that detracts from that has no place in the midshipman's world.
There is an interesting sidelight to Admiral Fowler's actions. Though he discusses the changes he's implemented in a positive fashion, one cannot escape the conclusion that those actions constitute a rebuke to his recent predecessors. He seems to be saying of the Academy, this place has gotten soft; to the Superintendents who preceded him, You shouldn't have let this happen.
Readers who think the U.S. Navy is being shortchanged may feel flush if they gaze upon the lot of our British cousins. For the past decade, the Royal Navy has been steadily shrinking while still facing multiple commitments around the globe. Sir Jeremy Blackham, a retired vice admiral, and Professor Gwyn Prins, a naval and defense specialist at the London School of Economics, warn that the Royal Navy is at the brink of losing the capability to project global power.
Last month the Academy football team played Rutgers at its home field in Piscataway, New Jersey, and lost. Late in the Friday night game, senior slotback and captain Reggie Campbell, a slight 168 pounds, took a kickoff up the middle and was pounded into the turf. As he limped toward the sideline, the Rutgers student section chanted:
"You got f---ed up. You got f---ed up. You got f---ed up."
This obscene serenade was chronicled by Mark Di Ionno of the Newark Star-Ledger, who also reported that the Navy team was greeted by chants of "You suck!" when it came on the field for both halves. And, Di Ionno writes, near the end of the second half Rutgers students pelted Navy fans and uniformed midshipmen with the words:
"F--- you, Navy. F--- you, Navy. F--- you, Navy."
Di Ionno quoted an Academy grad in the stands, Bill Squires, '75, of the Garden State, as saying, "At one point, I thought, we defend this country for people like this? I wasn't embarrassed as a New Jerseyan. I was embarrassed as a human being."
Of the offending Rutgers students, Di Ionno wrote, "You'd hope they'd be sensitive enough to realize that some of those midshipmen may soon be among the young American men and women fighting and bleeding and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Robert McCormick, the president of Rutgers, was at the game, but did not hear the chants. On learning of them, he wrote a letter of apology to Admiral Fowler for what he called "the disrespectful and disgraceful behavior exhibited by some of our fans." He noted, as did others, that a large number of Rutgers fans stood to applaud the Navy players as they left the field at halftime.
Reporter Di Ionno gets the last word. "The game," he wrote, meaning football, "is always likened to war by coaches, players, announcers, and writers who haven't been to war.
"But to Reggie Campbell and his Navy teammates, Friday night's game wasn't war. It was a game. War is around the bend."