Posted on Miami Herald on May 24, 1990 by Mike Wilson (Herald Staff Writer)

Diary of a year in hell the navy called it 'plebe year.' Midshipman fourth-class Victor Vaca called it harassment


    Victor-Hugo Vaca Jr. suffered many humiliations in his first year at the United States Naval Academy. Among the worst involved his name. When an upperclassman asked him to identify
himself, he was told to respond by shouting, "Sir, I am Midshipman Fourth-Class Caca."

"What do you have?" the upperclassman would say. "Sir, I have no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, sir." "What will you amount to?" "Sir, nothing, sir." Vaca, 20, kept a diary of the awful things that happened to him. When an upperclassman ordered him to eat and drink until he vomited, he made a note of it. When someone threatened to beat him with a pool cue, he noted that, too.

The people who run the Naval Academy like to think of it as a "leadership laboratory," a tough but caring place where boys and girls grow into naval officers. For Vaca, 20, it was more like a gulag. Two months ago, he got fed up with his treatment and gave Annapolis authorities his diary. On April 23, after hanging on long enough to finish his first year, he gave them his resignation. "Before I went in, I had a Hollywood image of the place," said Vaca, who lives with his parents in Kendall. "It's really beautiful on the outside. "But when you go inside, it's a different world."

He is not the only midshipman who thinks so. In April, sophomore Gwen Marie Dreyer resigned after two upperclassmen handcuffed her to a urinal and taunted her while others took pictures. Dreyer, of Encinitas, Calif., said upperclassmen threatened to retaliate if she testified against them. Two midshipmen lost leave time, but no one was expelled. Academy officials acknowledge that, in both cases, things went awry in the leadership laboratory. "I expect the midshipmen that work within the brigade to use good judgment and to make correct decisions," Rear Adm. Joseph W. Prueher, the commandant of midshipmen, said in an interview about Vaca. "In this case I think they transcended the bounds of good judgment, and that concerns me quite a bit. We need to definitely learn a lesson."

The first year -- "plebe" year -- at any military academy is notoriously tough. Freshmen are expected to learn to follow orders, whether that means making a bed in precisely the right way, memorizing facts about the fleet or eating in the proper cadence. At dinner time, Annapolis plebes are allowed to chew twice before swallowing.

Many don't make it through the first year. Of the 1,403 students who entered the academy with Vaca, 173 have quit or have been expelled for misconduct or poor performance. Of the 1,373 who entered four years ago, more than one in four didn't make it to graduation, Prueher said. "The plebe year is designed to be stressful, though not overly harsh and cruel," he said. "But it is designed to be a stressful environment to give people an opportunity to become accustomed to pressure and react well under it." In short, he said, "Plebe year is a nice thing to have behind you."

The way Vaca sees it, his naval career began to collapse because of an incident involving a packet of salad dressing. The incident happened early in his plebe year. He was eating dinner with his classmates when his squad leader -- an older student assigned to train plebes -- ordered him to steal a packet of Italian dressing from another table. When he did so, the victims of the theft chased him back to his table. In retrospect, Vaca said, the scene seems comical. Vaca's squad leader ordered him to sit down and eat, so he sat down. The squad leader from the other table ordered him to stand up, so he stood up. Vaca bounced up and down this way for a while before deciding to listen to his own squad leader and ignore the other one. After that day, Vaca said, he was branded a troublemaker.

The reputation would eventually ruin him. Vaca, who grew up in Long Island, attended Brooklyn Technical High School, where he edited the literary magazine and competed on the swim team. In his senior year, a high school teacher suggested he try to go to the Naval Academy.

He got a congressional appointment from his congressman, Democratic Rep. Gary L. Ackerman of Queens. But the academy suggested he enter the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, R.I., to bring up his grades. He entered Annapolis in July 1989. Vaca entered the academy an idealistic young man.

He had formed his views of the military partly by watching An Officer and a Gentleman and Top Gun. But after the salad dressing incident, he became, in academy vernacular, a "s--- screen" -- someone who always catches grief. Could salad dressing really cause so much grief? Certainly. A plebe who is seen as a nonconformist invites all kinds of trouble. And Vaca concedes that, in some ways, he was unwilling to conform.

When he saw something he considered unfair or improper, he wasn't afraid to say so. In a place where "Yes, sir!" is all the explanation a plebe is expected to offer, his superior officers didn't appreciate it. His reputation preceded him: When other plebes met him, they said, "Oh, so you're Mr. Vaca." Upperclassmen took every opportunity to abuse him, he said. In October, one forced him to eat until he vomited. Vaca was sick in bed for two days, he said. The next month, an upperclassman repeatedly swung a pool cue near Vaca's head as Vaca ran in place. The older student tried to bait the plebe into punching him, but he refused. "I'd love to bash your head in with this stick," Vaca quoted the other student as saying. Vaca's superior officers badgered him so badly at meals that he couldn't eat, he said. His father, Victor-Hugo Sr., a mechanic for Pan Am in Miami, visited him in Annapolis last fall. His son looked drained, he said. Vaca didn't want to tell his father what was happening, so some of his fellow plebes did. "If I had had a chance to bring Victor back home right then, I would have done it," the father said. Vaca Sr. called the Naval Academy and asked officials there to look into his son's treatment. Academy officials say some students were disciplined, but they won't say who was punished or how it was done. Something apparently did happen, though, because the angry upperclassmen began to treat Vaca even more harshly, he said.

On March 25, according to Vaca's diary, several midshipmen surrounded Vaca and harassed and taunted him. One called him a "loser" and told him, "You've been no good ever since you were born." Another stood behind him and pretended to fire a shot through the back of his skull. A third told Vaca he was going to frag him. Vaca was not allowed to eat dinner that day.

"The mood was that of a freak show with me as the main attraction," Vaca wrote in his diary. Finally, Vaca turned over his diary to Rep. Ackerman, who gave it to Naval Academy officials. Prueher, the commandant of midshipmen, would not discuss the particulars of what happened to Vaca. "I'd rather not get into the blow-by-blow," he said. Nor would he say how many upperclassmen were involved in each incident. The academy has disciplined several midshipmen in the case, Prueher said. Three received 5,000-level offenses, the most serious offense a midshipman can be given without being expelled. These students lost the privileges of leaving the academy grounds, driving cars and wearing civilian clothes. He said three or four other midshipmen received lesser punishment. In discussing the case, Prueher seemed to suggest that Vaca brought trouble on himself. Vaca did poorly in class and in military training, he said. His grade-point average was below 2.0, so he would have been brought before an academic review board, and possibly dismissed, if he had stayed at the academy.

The midshipmen who trained him, the commandant said, "became frustrated" with his poor performance and "objectivity was lost." Vaca said the academy has it exactly backward. He said he did poorly at the academy because he was harassed, not the other way around. In the spring, the academy moved Vaca to a new company in hopes that he would do better. But it was too late. Within weeks, Vaca decided to resign. Carl and Carol Reichart, who run a veterinary clinic in Riva, Md., were Vaca's local sponsors while he was at the academy. Says Carol, "When Victor realized that these people were not going to have to bear many consequences for what occurred, that was the breaking point." Vaca put it this way: "I didn't want to be one of the sadists who graduate from that place." Vaca's plebe year may have disillusioned him, but it didn't rob him of his ambition. He would like to continue his college education, possibly at Cornell University. He also plans to write a book about people who have gone through experiences similar to his and Dreyer's. "The Naval Academy is a great place. It has the potential to make really fine leaders," he said. "But right now, they're going nowhere fast."

The people who run the leadership laboratory are sorry for what happened to Vaca. But they're not sorry he's gone. "My personal view," Prueher said, "is that Mr. Vaca made a wise decision for himself to leave the academy."