Back on the wall in the office, visitors often asked who it depicted. “They all looked at it and said, ‘Man, what year was that? It looks like the 1800s,’ ” said Canadian Lt. Col. Brook Bangsboll.
That was the light-bulb moment. On one of his last days at the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Bangsboll went to a jewelry shop to have a brass plaque engraved, egged on by colleagues and co-conspirators. “We didn’t know what to do so we said, ‘Let’s just lose him at sea,’ ” Lt. Col. Bangsboll said. “It makes it interesting and kind of mysterious.”
He kept the circumstances of the ensign’s death vague because he thought some nosy Navy historian would spot the ruse if the plaque cited a specific battle.
The jeweler made a typo, engraving “Chuck” instead of “Tuck.” Lt. Col. Bangsboll felt that was fitting, given the surreptitious nature of his endeavor. It read:
ENS CHUCK HORD
USNA, CIRCA 1898
LOST AT SEA 1908
Lt. Col. Bangsboll scouted the halls for the right spot. He planned to put the portrait in a foyer dedicated to logistics—the office’s specialty—but feared those responsible for displays in the area would catch on.
He settled on a previously unadorned hallway which gets less foot traffic. At 6:15 a.m. on July 29, 2011, Lt. Col. Bangsboll spirited the portrait to the hallway and drove a large screw into the wall.
“The place was quiet,” he recalls. “No one noticed.”
For the next seven months, the portrait attracted little attention. One Pentagon official, as he walked by the photo, said it had never crossed his mind to look twice.
Apparently, the modern haircut eventually aroused suspicion. Reporter Adam Entous is surely safe in his pronouncement that this “may be the greatest—or perhaps only—prank in Pentagon art history.”
