Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson Page B

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 of 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 forcing 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