<p>In the hot sun hundreds of young men and women stand at attention, a physical posture that they're obviously not used to.
And, further at odds with their placid campus environment, each wears a grim expression, probably developed about the same time they all got their canteens, closely cropped haircuts and spotless white uniforms.</p>
<p>Its unspoken question: What have I gotten myself into? </p>
<p>The U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis is essentially a college campus (but here it's called the "Yard"), with an added military squared-awayness to everything.
While its French Renaissance architecture looks more like Parisian railway stations than the utilitarian office boxes on a typical Navy base, the educational mission here is different: the preparation of young men and women to be Navy and Marine Corps officers.</p>
<p>And that's why the arrival each summer of a new freshman ("plebe") class looks more like boot camp than the Welcome Week of a civilian university.</p>
<p>Visitors can see a mock-up of a typical midshipman's room, whose mandated neatness must give a degree of perverse pleasure to parents ("I tried for 18 years to get his room to look like that."). Built some 60 years after the 1845 founding of the Academy, Bancroft is the largest dormitory in the world, housing all 4,000 students. There are no fraternity or sorority houses at the academy.</p>
<p>The academy's 338-acre campus nudges downtown Annapolis, on land reclaimed from the Severn River. Visitors can wander around the Yard pretty much at will, but a guided tour will supplement the pleasing aesthetics with snippets of Academy history and descriptions of a typical mid's life.
Central to institutional memory, of course, is the figure of John Paul Jones, father of the American Navy and utterer of the immortal "I have not yet begun to fight!" Jones's body lies in the crypt of the Academy Chapel, whose copper green dome dominates the horizon in this part of town much as the State House commands the upper section.</p>
<p>The upper level of the chapel is illuminated through Tiffany and similarly styled windows, and, if that doesn't seem particularly military, the first line of the Navy Hymn, "Eternal Father Strong to Save," is inscribed above the altar. John Paul Jones figures prominently at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Preble Hall, as well. Glass cases hold some of his personal artifacts, including some of his handwritten correspondence. A gallery to the rear of the building presents a short course in 20th-century naval history, with heavy emphasis on the academy graduates who led or participated in historic actions.</p>
<p>The easily overlooked treasure of Preble Hall, however, is the basement gallery of model ships. Both upstairs and down, there are carefully crafted models from the age of sail, with the complex rigging forming spider-web pyramids around the masts. But the downstairs collection includes many "dockyard models" from the 17th to 19th century. Built at a scale where one inch equals 4 feet, they are remarkable in part for what you can't see - unless you're an orthopedic surgeon and brought your own laproscope. They were made to be historic records, and thus their interiors are just as detailed as the exteriors.</p>
<p>But most impressive is an eerie ghost fleet sailing behind the glass of their display cases, a small collection of model ships constructed of bone. They were carved principally by captured French sailors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries who sold them to their British captors. Locked away on prison ships, they worked from memory as they carved beef and mutton bones salvaged from meal scraps. The models are not dainty things, either: There's a lot of cow in some of them.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, future John Paul Joneses march in the hot sun, concentrating on surviving plebe year. </p>
<p>They have not yet begun to fight.</p>
<p>Copyright 2007 Newark Morning Ledger Co.
All Rights Reserved
The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)
August 26, 2007 Sunday</p>