The two men were severely reprimanded for stating their beliefs. Both were invited to resign from the Academy, and one man did leave the summer detail program. I ate dinner in the mess hall that night with a plebe summer squad. As I watched the so-called indoctrination on the mess-hall tables, several first-classmen stopped to speak of their disgust both for the article and for the treatment their classmates had received. None would speak for attribution, however. The system had scared them silent.
I do not understand such censorship. It is as if one statement of dissent left unrepudiated might beget a tidal wave of agreement. From my conversations, I would estimate that easily two thirds of the males in the brigade, with political philosophies that run the entire gamut, believe women should not be at the Academy. Why should they not be allowed to say so, and to say so without fear of retribution? A citizen does not give up his First Amendment right to free speech when he puts on a military uniform, with small exceptions. And the presence of women at the Naval Academy hardly constitutes an exception.
"I'm in a continual state of anxiety about this." Brad Taisey is muscular and lean, a former enlisted Marine who has done exceptionally well at the Academy. Taisey talks though. He is intense and direct, the kind of man I would want commanding one of my platoons if I were to take a company into combat again. "I've been enlisted. I know what a good leader can do to it. There isn't a woman here who's a military leader. Most of the midshipmen around here have only seen the Academy. They can only guess. I know. But what can I do about it? And look what it's done to this place. The word came down not to shout at the plebes anymore. Treat them with courtesy, they said. Yeah. You ask the enemy to do that in the next war, too."
Taisey served as Liz Belzer's subcommander on the plebe detail last summer. When he was initially assigned the position, he attempted to resign from the detail, which is a voluntary program. Taisey claimed that Belzer's appointment was political, and said that he wanted no part of it. His resignation was rejected.
"It was a token staff, from the word go. Belzer was the token woman, I was the token ex-enlisted Marine, we had a token ex-enlisted sailor, a token black, and a token high-school product. That's just the way it is now."
Taisey and Belzer argued frequently over the summer about women at the Academy. When the detail was over, Belzer marked Taisey deficient in a number of areas, giving him two Ds on his leadership evaluation. Taisey, who had an exemplary two-year enlisted career and is currently ranked first out of thirty midshipmen inside his own company, is amazed. "I'm going to frame the evaluation. She wrote that I would have scored higher if I could have gotten along better with women. Can you imagine what would have happened if things had been reversed, and I had written a chit like that on her for not being able to get along with men?"
Taisey is representative of, if perhaps more outspoken than, the majority of the men I talked to at the Academy. In fact, the men from the class of 1980 might have a theme song, I heard the quote so often: "I'd much rather have been in the last class with balls than the first class with women."
Taisey's objections are capsulized simply enough. "I used to look at officers who were Academy graduates and say, 'That man has been through hell. He's earned the right to lead me.' It's not true anymore. The whole place has been pulled down to the level of the women, and the most important area is grades."
Don Burlingham is not as intense as Taisey. "I want to say this just right," he began as we talked. He is a cautious man, who like Taisey has done extremely well at the Academy. He chooses his words carefully, and made clear his support of many of the goals of the women's movement. "It just doesn't work here, that's all. I could see it from the first few weeks of plebe summer. All summer we were lectured about the high standards we were expected to meet. Our squad leaders talked about honor, performance, and accountability. Then before you knew it, they were going after the women plebes, sneaking some of them away on weekends. How can you indoctrinate the women when you're breaking regulations to date them? And how can you indoctrinate the women when you're doing these sorts of things? The attitude I've seen and practiced is turn the other cheek and bide my time until I can get back into the real military."
Burlingham is aware of the many inequities that relate to a double standard discipline. "A male and female were convicted of the same honor offense at the same time. The man was thrown out. The woman was put on probation. That sort of thing has happened several times. It's almost impossible for a woman to be thrown out of here.
"The problem," notes Burlingham, "is that it's affected attitudes, and it will eventually affect our whole military. I'm not resentful of the women; I'm worried about the country."
So is Jeff Bush. A former enlisted Marine like Taisey, Bush spent time as a corporal with the elite First Reconnaissance battalion, and plans to return to the Corps upon graduation. But much of the Academy routine rolls off Bush's back. "I don't get too excited about much around here anymore. The place has lost a lot of its spark for me."
One thing Bush does get excited about, however, is the way he perceives women being forced down the brigade's throat. "When I first heard women were going to come, I didn't care that much. I was curious, if anything. I was a little worried that they might not get a chance to prove themselves. But it's been the other way around. The Academy has used a lot of pressure to establish women as stripers. Women are groomed from the plebe year. The scary thing is that it's creating a presumption that women can command troops. I'm not kidding— there isn't a woman here who could have handled the platoon I was in when I was enlisted. The whole thing has become like a fairy tale. And it's the operating military that's in for the biggest hurt."
Jeff McFadden, a wide-shouldered, broken-nosed Irishman who served as the deputy brigade commander for the recently graduated class of 1979, sees it from a different perspective altogether. McFadden, who is currently at Nuclear Power school preparing to become a submariner, spent the greater part of his senior year as a prestigious Trident scholar, studying the notions of chivalry and the military officer. He is an encyclopedia of information on what makes combat units function, on good leadership and bad leadership, and especially on the special chemistry of camaraderie, the bonding agent of men under arms. And McFadden, like many of his classmates in '79 who watched the Naval Academy change with the addition of women, believes the institution is dying, and with it a part of our culture as a whole.
"Historically," notes McFadden, "the academies and a few other areas of the military— Marine Corps boot camp, airborne training— have provided a ritualistic rite of passage into manhood. It was one small area of our society that was totally male. Women now have a full range of choice, from the totally female— motherhood— to what was once the totally male— the academies, for example. Males in the society feel stripped, symbolically and actually. I wonder if that doesn't tie into the increase in rapes over the past decade. Rape is a crime of revenge, not passion. In any event, the real question isn't the women. The real question is this: Where in this country can someone go to find out if he is a man? And where can someone who knows he is a man go to celebrate his masculinity? Is that important on a societal level? I think it is."
What of the women themselves? There are now about 300 female midshipmen at the Naval Academy, surrounded by some 4,000 males. The women wear men's clothes, with slight variations. They live in a closed, pressurized environment where they are outnumbered almost fifteen to one by men, 24 hours a day. They are emerging into womanhood almost alone, in an isolation that resembles a tour of duty on a desert island. They study a man's profession, learn the deeds of men, accept men as role models. They seem spirited but confused, tolerated but never accepted. They are for the most part delightful women, trusting and ambitious and capable in many ways, and I admire them, more for who they are than for what they are doing. As for what they are doing, it would be unfair not to mention that no other group of women in this country has ever undergone such a prolonged regimen, however watered down. But I cannot escape a feeling that even the women are losing, that someday they will come to believe they lost more than they gained inside those walls.
It is a delicate balance for any Academy graduate, looking back on those four years and measuring what he received in return for pouring every last hot ounce of his youth into Annapolis. But part of the price, until now, has never been sexual identity.
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