Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (7 page)

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“I think I love you”

Teams of uniformed, rock-faced upperclassmen ushered Shepard into his new world, a regimented and hierarchical military domain for which he was ill-prepared.

The U.S. Navy had first attempted to create a training academy in 1842 aboard a Brooklyn-based training ship, the American Brig
Somers.
But during the inaugural cruise a student and two enlisted sailors rebelled against their strict captain, were found guilty of mutiny, and were hanged. The Navy decided to replace its floating school with a land-based one, which it built beside the remote fishing village of Annapolis, Maryland, where students—called midshipmen—would be taught far from the distractions of city life.

From the start, in 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy was an institution where no rebellion or insubordination would be tolerated. Its founders never again resorted to hanging, but the plan—“to develop midshipmen morally, mentally, and physically,” the founders said—was, bluntly put, to create hardened officers by first breaking their will.

The Naval Academy’s spectacular, ivy-covered gray granite buildings, most of them built in the sturdy but elegant French Renaissance style, occupied a picturesque stretch of waterfront along the Severn River, which flowed into nearby Chesapeake Bay. Separated from Annapolis by a ten-foot stone wall, the grounds were known as the Yard. The academy looked like a pastoral Ivy League college campus except for the occasional military cannon or war hero’s statue. Beneath a copper-domed chapel lay the body of John Paul Jones, and midshipmen quickly learned the words to an irreverent song about how Jo
nes “lies around all day, body pickled in alcohol.”

More than three thousand midshipmen lived in one of the world’s largest dormitories—Bancroft Hall, known as “Mother B.” When Shepard arrived, construction crews were adding yet another wing to the imposing granite building, which would soon house five miles of hallways and nearly two thousand rooms—so big that Bancroft Hall would eventually earn its own zip code.

In a tradition of antagonistic first-day routines honed across the school’s first century, upperclassmen subjected the incoming class to a torrent of insults, screams, put-downs, and various other forms of physical and emotional abuse. For starters, freshmen are known as “plebes.” The term comes from the Roman word
pleb,
which means “crude, low, vulgar.”

In Shepard’s first hours as a plebe, upperclassmen marched him through dank basement hallways from one orientation checkpoint to another. After an exhaustive physical exam, Shepard was told to strip off his coat and tie and was issued a stack of new uniforms—the clothes he’d wear each day until Christmas. They taught him how to salute, then screamed in his face when he did it wrong. After hustling him into a barber’s chair, his hair was unceremoniously shaved down to a stubble. Shepard was then taught how to adopt the subservient posture o
f the plebe—back straight, chin down, and “eyes in the boat,” meaning that plebes were to keep their eyes straight ahead, never making eye contact with upperclassmen.

Finally, after a long day of insults and indoctrination, Shepard stood in his white pajamalike plebe uniform, sweating amid rows of fellow plebes, and raised his right hand, promising to “support and defend the Constitution.”

Some of the rules weren’t difficult, just annoying. Shepard and his fellow plebes were ordered to call all upperclassmen “mister” or “sir”—and to become their servants. Plebes scrambled each morning to spit-shine their black shoes, to make their beds so a coin could bounce off the taut blanket, and, while getting dressed, to memorize the day’s meals so they could recite a “chow call”—that is, stand in the hall barking out the menu of the day for the benefit of their elders. Just getting to and from class carried its own set of rules: Plebes had to march down the center of the hallway, “
square” each corner with perfect right-angle turns, and slam their backs against the wall and salute when upperclassmen approached. Plebes had to always be aware of how many days there were until graduation day; seniors would demand without warning to know the number, and those who failed had to drop and do forty-five push-ups (because they were the Class of ’45).

There was no escape from the small cruelties of plebe life, not even at mealtime, which plebes dreaded. In the cafeteria, plebes served the upper-class midshipmen first. When they sat down to eat, plebes had to sit only on the front few inches of their chair and eat only one bite at a time, chewing and swallowing it before taking another bite. Every now and then, a senior midshipman might yell, “Fire in the paint locker,” and the plebes would have to dive under the table and cower as upperclassmen dumped water, ketchup, or milk on them to douse the imaginary fire.

When Shepard was forced to dive under the table, he often tried to smear butter on his protagonists’ shiny-clean shoes, in a typical Shepard prank.

Plebes learned the hard way that breaking academy rules could hurt worse than all the memorizing and protocol. While most plebes felt some of the hallowed traditions and rules were silly and useless, few were impudent enough to defy them. Shepard was among those who at times resisted.

One day, a few months into the fall semester, an upperclassman found him yelling out of a second-floor window in Bancroft Hall. Shepard was ordered to shut his mouth and return to his room. He complied, waited until the upperclassman had disappeared down the hall, then went back to the window and began yelling again to his friend. The upperclassman heard him, returned, and punished Shepard with repeated smacks in the ass with a wood-soled shower sandal. Other upperclassmen recalled numerous instances of swatting Shepard in the backside with a broom, making him do push-ups, or forci
ng him to “shove out,” which required a plebe to sit on an invisible chair, his back against the wall, knees bent, until his thighs screamed.

Some upperclassmen who took seriously their job of reshaping plebes found it difficult to make much of a dent in Shepard. For one thing, he’d already, in his own way, been shaped—Shepard had withstood plenty of military protocol from his father. Second, Shepard had the temperament of a mule, refusing to tremble and cower like some of the other plebes. “As an Army brat, conforming to academy procedures was natural—at least Alan made it appear so,” his classmate Bob Kirk once remarked.

What troubled some of the upperclassmen, though, was that he didn’t seem to take any of it too seriously. Friends called him “Shep” or “Schimpf” (a classmate’s young niece’s mispronunciation of “Shep,” which Shepard and his new fri
ends found hilarious). “Full of piss and vinegar” is how Dick Sewall remembers Shepard, who was three years his junior. Shepard was “pretty crafty,” Sewall said, and he often found routes around the academy’s rules. Sometimes Shepard would get caught and punished, but half the time he’d talk his way out of it, and Sewall would agree not to report him. Instead of openly resenting his superiors, Shepard had a way of befriending them, adopting them as his allies and protectors. When they did chew him out, he would just smirk. One classmate called Shepard “ratey,” an academy moniker for someo
ne who acts as if he rated better than the rest. “He was supposed to be subservient to his master and he was not.”

One annoying duty forced upon plebes was waking thirty minutes before the upperclassmen and walking quietly into the older boys’ rooms to shut windows so that they wouldn’t be too cold when they awoke. One morning Shepard organized a small rebellion—he and a few other plebes stole the left shoe of every upperclassman and hid them in a bathroom. When the firsties learned Shepard was the ringleader, they made him bend over and grab his ankles while they took turns with a broom.

“But he didn’t get broken by it,” Sewall said. “He was thinking:
Next time I just won’t get caught.”

At the time—the late summer of 1941—the two-year-old war in Europe had crept steadily closer to America’s shores and minds. German submarines, or U-boats, were sinking British ships in the Atlantic Ocean, and the U.S. Navy had begun patrolling through the Atlantic and Caribbean, searching for German subs and escorting convoys of merchant ships and war supplies across to Europe. Day by day, as Hitler’s aggressions stomped further across Europe and then out into the seas, it was becoming obvious that America couldn’t wait on the sidelines much longer. Indeed, the United States’
alignment with and support of England had put it essentially in an undeclared war with Germany. Shepard
and his classmates knew it was just a matter of time before their nation headed to battle, and that they’d play a part in the fight.

Finally, on October 31, 1941, Germany sunk its first U.S. ship—a torpedo that split open a Navy escort ship, the USS
Reuben James.
More than a hundred men died—“Tell me, what were their names?” Woody Guthrie wrote in a tribute song— marking the first U.S. Navy ship to be sunk in the escalating, expanding war. Meanwhile, Japan had begun snatching pieces of coastal China and numerous volcanic islands across Indochina, leading to increased frictions between Japan and the United States, which responded with an oil embargo that infuriated the oil-hungry Japanese military machine.

Such escalations soon began to touch Shepard’s life at the Naval Academy. On November 29, as German panzer divisions marched steadily toward Moscow, Shepard and his classmates rode a train to Philadelphia for the annual Army-Navy football game. Before ninety-eight thousand fans, Navy beat Army 14–6, capping a 7–1–1 season under coach “Swede” Larson, a major with the Marines. Right after the game, Larson resigned as coach and rejoined the Marines, proclaiming: “There’s a bigger game, a bigger battle coming up and I’m going to be in it.” A week later, on a lazy Sunday morning, A
dmiral Husband Kimmel and his fleet of ships at Pearl Harbor were caught completely unprepared for Japan’s surprise attack. At the academy, the superintendent interrupted a tea party with the football team to take a phone call. He returned ashen-faced, closed the doors to the ballroom, and said, “Gentlemen, we are at war.”

The news immediately charged the atmosphere of the Yard. Officers strapped on pistol holsters, and the ranks of midshipmen buzzed with talk of battle.

The next day President Roosevelt announced that the “day of infamy” at Pearl Harbor put America undeniably at war with Japan. When America’s declaration of war was announced over the academy’s loudspeakers that afternoon, deafening c
heers echoed through the corridors of Bancroft Hall. That was followed by the announcement that the Navy had decided to pull Shepard and his classmates into the imminent conflict by lopping a year off their four-year academic lives. Graduation would be moved up to 1944, and the news further electrified the Yard.

As one classmate put it: “This was war and we had to hurry out to get at least a small share of it for ourselves.” Many were ecstatic that their warrior days were nigh. Said one to a reporter: “Hey, that’s why we were all there.”

But some of Shepard’s classmates had to wonder why he was there. For his country? For the war? For the boats? His father? Shepard meandered through his first year at Annapolis and by the start of his sophomore year nine months later was languishing among the bottom-dwellers of his class. Friends and teachers considered him a remarkably smart young man, quick to grasp the most complex of lessons and capable of anything he leaned his head into. At Farragut he had impressed teachers with a 145 score on an IQ test. But through his plebe year at the academy, his head was rarely buried
in books. He preferred
Esquire
magazine’s special “Annapolis Issue,” with sexy photos of Rita Hay-worth, an article on “what young naval officers should know about the art of swinging a cocktail shaker,” and a cartoon of a topless woman in front of a mirror speaking to her friend: “That midshipman I go with adores slim blondes. Loan me your girdle and hand me that peroxide.”

Shepard kept
Esquire
in his footlocker atop his airplane magazines, with pictures of Mitsubishi Zeros and Supermarine Spitfires and “The Story of the Flying Tigers: Japs Are Their Specialty.” Instead of his studies, he seemed to work hardest on matters involving women or water.

Shepard found that his childhood love of aquatic sports— sailing, rowing, swimming—served him well at a waterfront school with an armada of sailboats and rowboats. At Annapolis
he quickly became a standout sailor, winning many races and even a regatta series at the hoity-toity Annapolis Yacht Club. He methodically learned to sail every type of boat the school owned—small knockabouts, fourteen-foot dinghies, eighteen-foot sloops, and the spectacular ninety-foot schooner
Freedom.
Then, at the start of his second year, called “youngster” year, he signed up to race the school’s eight-man sculling boats as part of the crew team. It was a bold move, and more than a few friends scoffed because Shepard would be competing for a spot on the team against rowers six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier. Still, he spent long hours on the rowing machines in the gym, packing on the muscle and increasing his stamina, and eventually made the crew team.