Old School

It was the 41st time that mess dress and tuxedos had been dragged out of the closet, five decades of pleasure at seeing that the old uniform still fit, or dismay at the way the thing had shrunk while hanging at the back of the closet. It was the annual formal dinner, the no-spouse meeting of the Mess for the Dining-In.

The ground rules are strict. Officers only. The wives hated it; we all went out in our little penguin suits for a night on the town, and they had no opportunity to get a new dress or show off. But this was part comradery, and part serious business.

I ditched the mess dress when I retired, and bought a real tuxedo. I only put the miniature medals on it once, the first time I went to the annual dinner not in uniform. It is appropriate to wear the decorations at a formal function, but it felt weird. A sardonic old pal told me I would get over it, and he was right. Still, I like the look of the little blue waiter’s jacket on the junior officers gathered before the bar, and the way the golden cummerbund peeks out coyly, and the glitter of the gold stripes on the sleeves, and the way the tiny medals shine and clink on the lapel.

The Annual Naval Intelligence Officer’s Dining In was held last Friday night, strangely late in the calendar. Normally it is held in October, part of the ritual of the changing season. This one seemed to get away from everyone; maybe it is the War, or the Hurricanes, or something.

In any event, the dinner snuck up on me, and I was lucky to have remembered to take the formal shirt to the laundry, and on a whim that morning bought a snazzy bow tie that I swore I would learn to tie myself . It was liberating to abandon the dorky clip on version that most of the officers wore.

I was also happy that the dinner was held at historic Fort Myer , home of Arlington National Cemetery . That is only a few minutes down Route 50 from Big Pink, and thus the chances of encountering police sobriety check-points is minimized.

I think that is when the real adventure of these affairs began to wane. It was a pretty straight-laced ritual, back in the day, and surviving it with professional reputation intact was justification to go out on the town later, all dressed up, and tear up the bars. It was like going on liberty in some strange country, on the prowl, happy to be what we were.

The ancient ritual of the affair has changed, to meet the times. The strictures are looser, and there is more genuine laughter in the air. They have moved the program around. Now, the after-dinner speaker comes first, before the beef, and the smoking lamp from the USS Constellation is never lit, not even present at the head table.

That was part of the agony. The Lieutenant Commander tasked with organizing the affair had to drive across town to the Navy Museum and sign the little copper lamp out of custody for the evening, and God help him if someone purloined it. The silver cup for the dram of ritual scotch whiskey for the piper was important, and the sound system.

Part of the ritual was the call-and-response relationship between the President of the Mess, who in this case was Director of Naval Intelligence, and the junior officer who was selected as Mr. Vice President.

Mr. Vice was traditionally the junior member of the mess, and thus paradoxically empowered over his more senior comrades. The ritual called for the officer to address the mess by requesting permission from Mr. Vice, who in turn would ask the President if the remarks were But the way it actually worked out was that the poor kid was browbeaten by his messmates, bullied into submission. Then the dinner could get out of control, and ugly things would happen.

Dinner rolls might be thrown, which was fun, but sometimes one might be dunked in red wine to provide a little extra pizzazz on impact. If the dinner was early enough in the month that we were still in Whites, you could lose the jacket to red wine stains.

I think I had to survey two of them, over time. But that was then, and this is now, in the brave new world. I often think there are two Navies living in uneasy coexistence. The Old Navy that I was part of is fading away, now mostly alive in the minds of the retirees. We were a raw bunch, hard working and hard partying. Ribald and arrogant, and relentlessly all-male out in the Fleet.

The new Navy that emerged after the Tailhook Scandal and the end of the presence at Subic Bay in the Philippines is kinder and gentler. The threat of terror ashore, and the conscious decision to minimize the length of deployments by cutting back on port visits changed a lot, just like banning smoking on the ships, and introducing mixed-sex crews.

So everyone is more sensitive now, and I think that is a good thing. But I miss the old days. Or better said, I miss my youth.

Purists would squirm at the changes to the ritual, but they had to come. I remember being Mr. Vice, and having to travel to the tobacco store to find the right cigars to light for the after dinner speech, great clouds of blue smoke rising over the wreckage on the white tablecloths. And matches, and commemorative wine glasses, and keeping the whole thing on the private books, so no one could complain that government money was financing anything.

There are storm clouds around this year, and it is not just the changing of society, or the War. The nature of the sea-service is the subject of discussion in the Quadrennial Defense Review. Big Navy and Big Air Force are thinking hard to justify their shares of the defense budget. In the War on Terror, the focus is on special operations, and lean, agile ground forces. What is the role of a sleek destroyer, or a massive aircraft carrier?

There are great arguments about that, and the intelligence community that supports the military is being transformed. Technology and mobility are the keys to the Information Age; the code-breakers have abandoned their traditional junior partnership in naval intelligence, and decamped and changed their name. The Naval Security Group is no more; now, there are Information Warfare Officers and talk of unifying the intelligence and public affairs corps under their leadership.

But for this night the challenges of the present are put aside. Once upon a time, the ritual was as elaborate as a Kabuki Dance. Begun in 1964, the Cuban Missile Crisis not far in the past, the Dining-in was closely patterned on the traditions of the Royal Navy’s Mess night.

Decorum was of the utmost importance. Spouses cringed at the potential consequences of misplaced exuberance. The Dining In had a serious and potentially career-threatening aspect to it, and that may account for why the post-party was so important for the Junior Officers.

There must have been some incident back in the day, some scandal. One of the old Directors decreed that the banquette would be held on a Thursday night, to minimize the revelry afterward, or perhaps just to make it more painful. The long faces in the office early the next Friday were the mark of the intensity of the merriment that usually followed the dinner, usually at Murphy’s Pub in Old Town Alexandria.

With the Mess assembled, the keening of the pipes brought the crowd to its feet with the arrival of the official party. The Piper has been with us for over twenty years, and his presence is as much a part of the tradition as the Roast Beef of Olde England .

War is a young person’s business, and the decorations on the trim mess dress uniforms showed that a whole generation of naval intelligence has been off to see The Elephant, which is what the troopers of the Civil War called battle.

They have been to war in the land of the Silk Road, and seen places no American had been to in years, much less at the head of a wild swirling column of commandos and tribesmen. The names tripped off the tongue: Masar-E-Sharif, Kandahar , Kabul .

To fight that sort of war you need speed, and you need relationships. I sat in the back of the room and picked at my beef. I looked at the crowd, mostly young, and I thought about where they would be off to when this dinner was done.

We toasted the past, and we toasted the future, and we toasted our leaders. And then the dinner was done, and the Mess dismissed. In the old days, the Admiral would ask us to join him in the bar. But that would be wrong these days, official sanction encouraging unacceptable behavior.

I agreed, in principle. But as I left, I saw the post-party arrangements being settled in little knots of officers in the hall, and on the porch. Two young men stood tall, ties somewhat askew, and smoked long Cuban cigars. Very Old School, I thought.

I wished I had thought to bring one. They used to be provided. It was good to know that some rituals of the past were being enjoyed to their fullest, in the bracing chill of an Arlington night.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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