Annapolis Stories: The Stories of the Class of 1971

Although we didn’t suspect it at the time, the USNA Class of 1971 is a special group. Graduates might argue – and often do - about what a Plebe Year should be, but many in our Class actually had one - some would say the last real one. And maybe we are the better for it. Back then the motivation for harsh and sometimes humiliating training was to toughen us up. Vietnam loomed large, and recent graduates had been killed in combat or were prisoners of war. We needed to be ‘tested’ and found worthy of following in the footsteps of those brave young men. In many cases our Plebe year was brutal, harsh, humiliating, and ridiculous, but also hopelessly poignant. We rose to the task, and boys became men.We were one of the last classes to graduate free from the distraction of females. Nothing negative is intended in that statement – it is simply fact, and as John Adams said, facts are stubborn things. In 1967 we were able to say and do things that men in polite company would never dream of today. We considered them warrior things – ‘Morituri te salutant’ things. We understood that Annapolis is foremost a place to train fighting men, and fighting men sometimes die, and death is preferable to dishonor. But before you can die with honor, you must first live with abandon – like men.It was also a time when Navy football was less a professional competition than a weekly battle against overwhelming odds. Our Navy teams didn’t win many games, and that was okay. We were training for bigger goals than football.The words ‘Politically Correct’ had not yet wounded the lexicon of the country’s vocabulary. We were not politically correct back then. We were expected to be militarily correct and become as John Paul Jones said, “gentlemen of liberal education, punctilious courtesy, with the nicest sense of personal honor”, and be ready to kill our country’s enemies wherever they were, whenever we were ordered.But, damn, were we smart! Every graduate received an Academic Major and a Bachelor of Science degree, and the Class of 1971 graduated the Academy’s first group Accredited Engineering Students – more than 200 of them. We believed that nowhere else in the country could there exist such a group of motivated, intelligent, and talented young men – and we were most probably right in that assumption. We still believe that today. As a class, we strained the right side of the Bell Curve into an asymptote. All our athletes were scholars and all our scholars were exceptional.Vietnam raged while we trained and studied; and the Cold War simmered in the background. The Age of Aquarius passed us by, and what love we gained was never the free variety. We thought we were rebels, but that was only pretense. What we were, really, was the eager rock stead soul that kept America great even when it struggled (and still struggles) to be mediocre. We never did anything easy – that was not to be. And in doing things the hard way, we did ourselves, our loved ones, and our country proud.To say that those four years might have been the most intense and portentous period in the history of the country would be an understatement. This was shocking even by ‘Future Shock’ standards. No wonder we acted and reacted as we did. Like Men!And these are our stories from those four years in Mother Bancroft. More than one hundred fifty of the class contributed stories or vignettes. And what stories did they tell? Read and find out.