Plebe Summer

Navy Midshipman Jeffrey W. Sauers, Jr , son of Suzette W. Sauers and Jeffrey W. Sauers, Sr. of Glen Arm recently completed Plebe Summer while attending the United States Naval Academy. Sauers will go on to complete the academic year as a midshipmen. He is a 2011 graduate of Calvert Hall College High School of Towson.

Chastity Brione Dunnaville, a Navy lieutenant junior grade and Naval Academy graduate who had played on its women's rugby team, died of rhabdomyosarcoma Sunday at University of Maryland Medical Center. She was 24 and had lived in Lauraville. Born in Baltimore and raised on Catalpha Road, she attended Garrett Heights Elementary School. While in fifth grade, her parents took her to private schools for visits as a prospective student. One day, she stopped at Notre Dame Preparatory School in Towson.

Donning new white uniforms, more than 1,000 plebes at the U.S. Naval Academy greeted their families yesterday at the end of the grueling Plebe Summer -- a six-week program that includes rigorous physical training and instruction in academy rules and lore. The members of the Class of 2008 are enjoying three days of liberty and time with their families before beginning their first academic year. Above, Midshipman Erica Reid-Dixon gets a hug from her 10-year-old brother, Jarred, of Delaware.

Navy Midshipman Jeffrey W. Sauers, Jr , son of Suzette W. Sauers and Jeffrey W. Sauers, Sr. of Glen Arm recently completed Plebe Summer while attending the United States Naval Academy. Sauers will go on to complete the academic year as a midshipmen. He is a 2011 graduate of Calvert Hall College High School of Towson.

Lorraine and Roy Milark said they weren't the least bit apprehensive about sending their 17-year-old daughter off to the U.S. Naval Academy, an institution with a reputation almost as tough as its standards."

They all were dreaming of the same thing -- a normal, quiet meal.Not the type of meal these plebes had been used to for the past seven weeks, poised inside King Hall like grim marionettes: a sit-at-attention, eyes-front, harsh-questions-from-upperclassmen meal."

Doug Williams today may have taken history's longest and slowest walk down an aisle to a barber's chair.But then Williams had about the most hair of any of the 996 young men who reported, along with 148 women, to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis to begin Plebe Summer. The six-week training period at the school has been compared to boot camp."I've seen men go faster on their way to death row," said academy barber Steve Plemens as Williams finally sat down.Plebe Summer began today with medical examinations, uniform fittings and the issuing of equipment, not to mention the often traumatic severe haircut.

STUDENTS IN SEVERNA PARK had plenty of access to the negative publicity swirling about the U.S. Naval Academy, just a few miles down the Severn River. If scandals involving cheating, auto theft and drug abuse would deter prospective applicants, they might well be high schoolers from Anne Arundel County.Yet five members of Severna Park's Class of '97 are headed to the Naval Academy for "plebe summer" -- the start of their first year as midshipmen.Rachael Benton, Adam Kuehne, Chris Sergeant and identical twins Danielle and Dana Kaegel comprise what is believed to be the largest contingent from a Maryland high school ever to enroll at the 152-year-old academy.

By 8:20 a.m. yesterday, the hair was ankle-deep in places. Black tresses mingled with blond locks, angelic curls with gel-stiffened spikes. Here, the remains of a bob. There, a tuft from a surfer's mop-top. Though hair styles come and go, one fact about the Naval Academy's Induction Day never changes. On the first day of school, freshmen surrender their hairdos at the door. "I guess I don't have a choice," Michael McHugh, 18, of Pittsburgh, said jokingly as he sank into a blue vinyl seat in the Alumni Hall storage room serving as the day's bustling barbershop.

In a blur of duffel bags and lacrosse sticks, tennis rackets and coffee cups, countless cameras pointed toward children entering a new world yesterday, trying to capture the military alchemy that in just a morning would change them from civilian to soldier.This is Induction Day, the seminal experience for midshipmen entering the peculiar life of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. But in many ways, the weeks ahead will be harder for parents left with only snapshots and imaginings of the rigors awaiting the 1,191 new midshipmen.

As a senior in high school outside Pittsburgh, Ed Malinowski was the quarterback on an undefeated team. His parents were both English teachers. So when he entered the Naval Academy during his plebe summer in 1998, he wasn't thinking much beyond playing football and getting an English degree. Like a popular Navy recruiting ad once said, Malinowski figured his post-graduation military commitment was going to be spent seeing the world. When Bryce McDonald entered the academy the following year, his mission seemed clear.

The meeting seemed innocent enough. Because they were dispersed among the brigade of midshipmen and saw little of each other, the first class of women to enter the Naval Academy had a meeting to discuss common experiences. During their first plebe summer in 1976, 55 of the 81 female students on campus met for 45 minutes in a room in Mitscher Hall and complained about being harassed, catcalls they termed "emotional rape" and men who routinely walked around naked in front of them in the dorm.

Naval Academy plebes march at the Annapolis institution to mark the halfway point of Plebe Summer, a six-week indoctrination fea turing 16-hour days, as the first-year midshipmen begin four years at the academy. The academy said the Saturday ceremony was when the first-set training cadre of upperclassmen officially turned over plebes to the second-set cadre.

As he reported to the Naval Academy yesterday to begin the arduous six-week indoctrination of incoming freshmen, Jed Lomax didn't bear the look of fear so familiar on those who first arrive on the campus. Lomax, 21, said he figured that Plebe Summer, notorious for its 16-hour days of grueling physical and mental training, would be nothing compared with running convoys in Iraq every day for seven months. "It's a relief," said the former petty officer second class, who returned from his deployment in April.

The Naval Academy, rocked by a number of high-profile sexual assault and harassment scandals in the past year, plans to require all 4,000 midshipmen to take at least five hours of specialized instruction during each of their four years on the Annapolis campus. The addition to the curriculum will begin in the fall and include coursework on dating, sexual consent, defining rape and violence prevention, Vice Adm. Rodney P. Rempt told a civilian panel of congressmen and presidential appointees yesterday.

Navy freshman slotback Luke Lagera looks drained after another up-tempo, two-hour football practice in the hot sun. But the plebe from Lake Travis High School in Austin, Texas, destined to spend his first season playing on the scout team and junior varsity, has some cause for celebration. He's getting his legs back. Lagera's demanding, introductory summer at the Naval Academy - a seven-week endurance test of the body and mind known as "plebe summer" - has a way of slowing down an 18-year-old football player.

Karl Wick of Glen Burnie had his hair trimmed short for the occasion, in a modified crew cut that he figured would satisfy the requirements for induction into the U.S. Naval Academy.He was wrong.Wick found this out yesterday morning when he sat down in Chuck Arconia's barber chair in Alumni Hall in a room furnished with 20 barber chairs, all of them occupied by young people aiming to become leaders in the Navy or the Marine Corps. Electric razors buzzed hungrily and hair fell everywhere in clumps.

Far from his South Carolina home, Gary Moody sat glassy-eyed and tremble-lipped amid the din of the Naval Academy dining hall as upperclassmen pummeled him for answers eluding him: You got a 1500 on your SAT but can't remember our names or what's for dinner?"

Six weeks ago, Zachary P. Anderson was confident, even a bit brash. Plebe summer? Pshaw. He knew what he would face as a Naval Academy freshman during the indoctrination period. After all, his brother, a Navy SEAL in training, graduated in May. Break 'em down, build 'em up. He had heard all about it. Living it, however, was far different. "There are no words to describe it," the Hunt Valley teenager said. "I honestly thought I had it figured out, but you have to experience the whole thing."

Ben Zintak had missed some important links to the outside world during plebe summer, a punishing orientation to life as a U.S. Naval Academy midshipman. His family members didn't forget his iPod, digital camera or the newest Harry Potter book when they left suburban Chicago to visit him for parents weekend in Annapolis, which ends today. Rather than race off campus Friday after seven grueling weeks, Zintak wanted to show his parents and 15-year-old brother the vast dining hall and his dorm room - and solicit their help folding laundry.