Free Republic

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4, 2008 – A Navy Web site showing midshipmen crawling through mud and carrying rifles was all Lauren Reisinger needed to see to set her military future in motion. Then a high school sophomore and now a Marine midshipman, Reisinger couldn’t have predicted the extreme pain of her first five-mile “hump” or the absolute thrill of graduating No. 1 in her Marine Corps ROTC class and receiving the top awards for leadership, military knowledge and physical fitness. She also couldn’t have predicted where she would be now: spending a year abroad at the University of Jordan to...

ANNAPOLIS (AP) — The all-day physical exercises that mark the end of a midshipman's first year at the Naval Academy were never exactly fun. But this year, they've gotten even more serious. Dodgeball is no longer on the program. Parents aren't allowed to gather on bleachers anymore to cheer. And each stop of the exhausting day is dedicated to a fallen service member. The academy has put greater emphasis on wartime sacrifices, hoping to inspire plebes — the term the academy uses for freshmen — to think about what they are doing behind the academy's walls on the picturesque Severn...

A female midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy testified Tuesday that a fellow midshipman raped her in her dorm room after he had been drinking. Mark Calvanico is accused of rape, making a false statement to investigators, conduct unbecoming an officer and unauthorized absence.

College Park, Md. (AP) -- The sexual assault case against a U.S. Naval Academy football player was dropped Monday, a day before it was to go to trial, but school officials said new charges could be filed. Kenny Ray Morrison, a senior from Kingwood, Texas, who was accused of taking advantage of a drunken female midshipman on Feb. 4 in a Washington hotel room, was to face a special court martial Tuesday at the Washington Navy Yard. Morrison had pleaded not guilty. His attorney said he first learned the case was dropped when his witnesses were informed they were no...

But sentry duty at Annapolis has been a 155-year tradition for Marines. Naval tradition is the lifeblood of the Corps, and I believed – until my former Marine Corps commandant disabused me of that belief – that to remove Marines from the guard posts at Annapolis would somehow lessen the potency of that lifeblood. Other Marines I’ve spoken to have felt similarly.

PHILADELPHIA -- A judge dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit against the U.S. Navy that was filed by the family of a Naval Academy student who died in a fall from his dormitory window. Midshipman John Paul Ruggiero, 20, of Gouldsboro tumbled 53 feet from a window at the academy in Annapolis, Md., following a night of off-campus drinking in August 2002. Navy lawyers argued that the legal claim, filed by the midshipman's parents, is barred by a doctrine that protects the military from being sued over injuries to servicemen and servicewomen on active duty. The rule was generally intended to...