As the Naval Academy counted down to its 100th football game today against archrival West Point, Dan Rouse and his crew at the academy's public works department also rallied for the contest, their cleaning supplies at the ready.
Each morning for the past week, Rouse has taken a quick tour around campus "to see what might have been done the night before."
That's because this is the time of year, in the exuberant days before the annual end-of-season Army-Navy game, that the midshipmen sometimes express their team spirit with a spray can.
"It's part of the culture," Rouse said. "They try to top last year's prank."
For 152 years, traditions have evolved in which midshipmen playfully lash out at the academy's strict military and academic culture. Occasionally, a few dozen midshipmen have lifted an unarmed Tomahawk missile off its pedestal and moved it, in the dead of the night, onto the superintendent's lawn. Or they've rolled an old F-4 jet across campus to the courtyard outside their dorm.
During Army-Navy Week, as the period before the big game is called, graffiti and defacement have become some of the more popular traditional pranks. Most of the time, the paint washes right off. In fact, war-painting the face of a bronze statue known as Tecumseh has become a school-sanctioned pre-game event. But other spontaneous acts of artistic flair have become permanent.
The roof of Nimitz Library has been marred for years by "Beat Army" and the likes of "94" and "98" -- spray-painted slogans of school spirit and class loyalty. The artists behind those black scrawlings broke an unwritten code at the academy: If you're going to paint something, use water-based paint that can be washed off.
"We tried to strip it once, and it didn't come off too well," Rouse said.
Someone spray-painted "Go Navy" on the trunk of the 220-year-old Liberty Tree at nearby St. John's College, the night before the storm-damaged tree was cut down in October. The perpetrators weren't caught.
In recent years, academy officials have tried to redirect Mids' school spirit toward less destructive outlets. This week, the school sponsored a contest for the best painted bedsheet, along with a paper airplane flying contest and a competition to see how many Mids could fit into a cleaned-out portable potty.
"We try to stress that spontaneous energy doesn't need to translate to property destruction," said Cmdr. Brian Burlingame, the operations officer for the office of the commandant, the academy equivalent of a dean of students office. "There are certain ground rules when it comes to spirit-related activities. I think we've grown from the experience of past years, where some of those spontaneous activities have gotten out of hand."
It's been a few years since the Tomahawk missile and the F-4 were surreptitiously relocated. And not since 1991 has Navy attempted to swipe Army's mule mascot. That was the year Army helicopters chased Mids dressed in Army fatigues, who were stopped by Pentagon security agents at the Naval Academy gate.
To be safe, Rear Adm. Gary Roughead, the commandant, reminded Mids at a meeting Sunday to "stay within the box."
The message has taken root in recent years. "We have very few property damage issues now," said Rouse, the assistant public works officer.
But it hasn't been easy. Beating Army is an obsession. Academy phones are answered, "Beat Army." And the jokes are making their way over the Internet.
Why doesn't Army have ice on the sidelines during games? (The guy with the recipe graduated.)
What are the best four years of a West Pointer's life? (Third grade.)
Sometimes, officials look the other way, as they did recently when a couple of Mids -- in their spare time -- rented Cessnas at a local airport, flew to West Point in New York's Hudson River Valley, and dropped 1,000 foam ships that read "Go Navy, Beat Army" onto cadets' heads.
"For the most part, the kids know what's right and wrong," Burlingame said. "And if they start to deviate, they just need a nudge to get back on course."
As for the graffiti, he said, "as long as we can wash it off, we're OK."
