Peace Conference At Navy Limits Pranks

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
December 1, 2007
Pg. D4
By Adam Weinstein
In Annapolis, Md., what is good for peace in the Middle East may be bad for the Naval Academy’s fighting spirit.
Navy ends the regular season with its 108th meeting against Army at noon today in Baltimore. But this year, Army Week — a traditional period of pranks and revelry leading to the game — coincided with a Middle East peace conference on the academy’s campus.
Peace won out. Academy administrators postponed the football celebrations while the representatives of 54 nations and global organizations gathered on the campus, which is beside Chesapeake Bay. Army Week lasted only three days this year, said Jennifer Erickson, a Naval Academy spokeswoman. Festivities opened Wednesday evening with “mandatory fun,” an all-hands pep rally that included a burning effigy of a mule, West Point’s mascot.
Before that, said Midshipman Anthony Chioccarelli of Florida, N.Y., “there were Secret Service and Diplomatic Security Service everywhere.”
“And they didn’t want any surprises,” he said.
Surprises usually abound during Army Week: nighttime “recons” to unfurl spirited banners with pithy messages left by camouflaged members of the academy’s freshman class; grand theft, torpedo; and acts of vengeance visited upon upperclassmen and officers that involve maple syrup, glitter, paint and fresh sod.
These pregame exploits afford the midshipmen and their counterparts at West Point a degree of freedom from the rules and rigor of their everyday routines.
Such freedom was lacking this year. Even after the pep rally Wednesday, students’ mischief was tame compared with that of previous years, Chioccarelli said as he stood a quiet security watch Thursday night in Bancroft Hall, the academy’s dormitory.
“It’s much more contained, yes, in the lengths to which the pranks will go,” he said. “If you go too far, they’ll lock it up.”
Many midshipmen were reluctant to speak on the record with reporters, because the academy imposed a news media blackout during the peace conference, but all who spoke supported Chioccarelli’s judgment.
That is a far cry from Army Weeks past, when “people were just going crazy,” said David Ricci, a 1997 Navy graduate who lives in Manhattan. “When I was a plebe, every morning that week I had to drink ‘the grog,’ ” he said, referring to an improvised concoction that included everything on the breakfast table, including ketchup, mustard and butter. “It was curdled, and I threw it up all over this girl who sat next to me.”
Ricci also said the academy punished him after he committed a “wild man,” a salad-dressing attack on one of the upperclassmen. His punishment was missing the Army-Navy game. “I had to sit on the penalty bus with the other restricted midshipmen,” he said.
Still, not even an international summit and the accompanying heavy security presence could prevent a little mischief. A quick search of YouTube revealed at least one video of “carrier landings,” in which midshipmen flood a dormitory passageway, then slip and slide down it on mattresses.
Besides the usual water balloons and harmless but messy shaving-cream bombs, Chioccarelli noted, in academy jargon, “there were various recons with mids running all over the yard taping up signs and moving stuff around.”
There was also a jaw injury from a carrier landing gone wrong, he said. Army Week was almost shut down Thursday, when some midshipmen dumped a mixture of milk and old crab remains in a dormitory room.
Chioccarelli noted a new Army Week rule: Any act that damages a uniform is forbidden. “You can take uniforms,” he said, “but you have to give them back.”
None of this mayhem was visited upon the handful of exchange cadets from West Point who are spending the fall term at Annapolis, Erickson said. Those cadets will participate in today’s “prisoner exchange,” a traditional pregame ceremony in which exchange students from each academy are returned to their classmates’ custody for the game’s duration.
Neither the Middle East peace conference nor the abbreviated spirit week fazed Navy’s football players, said Scott Strasemeier, the sports information director, from the game’s site, M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore. The campus lockdown may actually have given Navy an advantage, he said, noting, “We were able to practice a little earlier, actually, with classes being scheduled earlier.”
That pleased Ricci. Even looking back on his Army Week transgressions, he was quick to say that the football game was what really mattered. “You can go 0-10, but if you win Army-Navy, it’s a winning season,” he said.
Chioccarelli agreed. When asked what Army Week had to do with football, he responded with the speed of a plebe rapping off a nautical datum. “It’s to energize a competitive rivalry between two prolific institutions,” he said.
He paused for a moment, then added, “It definitely sounds corny, but that’s my feeling.”
 
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