Switchblade by Alan Householder

Author:Alan Householder [Householder, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1733515348
Amazon: B0917C8D59
Publisher: Thomas A. Sawyer
Published: 2021-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

37

The Secret Army-Navy Prank of 2368

I can’t remember when I first met Edgar Whitaker. He was one year ahead of me at the Naval Academy, and I only had a few conversations with him during the time we were midshipmen. None of those exchanges were especially memorable, with one exception. I had lost my identification card. He found it, and he returned it to me.

Although I didn’t really know Edgar, I certainly knew about him, mainly because of his reputation as a shooter. He was on the men’s rifle-team all four years of his time at the Academy, though he didn’t complete his fourth academic year, for reasons that will become obvious. Edgar was one of the top marksmen in Naval Academy history.

I was on the women’s rifle-team all four of my years at the Academy, so our times on the rifle teams overlapped for three seasons.

Now, regarding why Edgar left the Academy early, I’ll mention what I knew at the time, or what I heard.

We used to play a lot of practical jokes on each other at the Academy. Well, actually, not me. But most others did. The ones that were played on me were pretty harmless. I never pranked anyone back, because I considered it a waste of time. As a team-building exercise, it had no value whatsoever, and on the contrary it created a certain amount of friction and animosity between students. Additionally, those kinds of activities seemed juvenile—like things we all should have outgrown by the time we entered the Academy. Finally, even pranks which may seem harmless on the surface sometimes lead to serious injuries.

Army-Navy pranks were an altogether different matter. We pulled epic pranks on Army before the Army-Navy game all four years I was at the Academy. I was intimately involved in each of those. The best was the “Secret Prank of 2368,” as it came to be called.

This involved forged work-orders, disguised vehicles, impersonation of military police, and the cooperation of the President of the United States, who was a Naval Academy graduate. The point of the prank, or its principal goal, was the theft of a statue of Alvin York, one of the Army’s great heroes. It’s called the “secret” prank, because the statue’s absence wasn’t discovered by the Army until nearly a year had gone by. The Army had thought we had skipped all pranks that year.

Well, anyway, most of the midshipmen seemed to enjoy pranking each other, so I always went along with whatever anybody else did—by which I mean I tolerated all the tomfoolery, even when I was the victim, which was almost never.

But all of this pranking business finally leaped the track, and one of the casualties was Edgar Whitaker’s Annapolis career.

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