I came home wearing a Harvard Swimming t-shirt and carrying a head full of possibilities. I thought a lot about what David Berkoff had told me and a lot about what Harvard’s coach had said.
What kind of man did I want to be?
I didn’t know.
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| With my dad after graduation. |
I tried to picture myself as Dan Head, Harvard graduate, successful corporate lawyer. My father loved this idea. He had this idea of Harvard in his mind, of immaculately dressed businessmen secretly ruling the world. It matched his image of me from the ground up. That was what he wanted, full stop.
It looked doable. Harvard’s first cut at financial aid offered sixteen thousand per year, leaving my folks to pay ten against what was then an all-in cost of just over twenty-six. It was still a lot of money, but even my mother admitted that they could manage it. It was also negotiable, as it turned out. Regardless, I didn’t want to make the choice based solely on costs. Not at that level. Not when the payback seemed so obvious. That Harvard would be worth what they were asking was beyond question.
I had to admit, too, that the idea of going through Beast Barracks, West Point’s cadet basic training, seemed wholly unappealing. Not when I knew that I could be living the good life in the Ivy League. With Harvard behind me, I would be as respected as a man could get, and I would start my career with the best possible connections. The guys at Harvard were serious, I’d seen that, but so was I. I also knew that they had fun. I’d struggled to find balance for much of my life, but I knew that I could have it now, that it was within my grasp—perhaps for the first time ever.
But.
My mother was a card-carrying member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. My great-grandfather served in World War I, all three of my grandfathers served during World War II, and my father had made a career as a Marine infantry officer. Could I really turn my back on that? Could I take my place at Thanksgiving dinner as the only man in the entire family--in the last two hundred years--to completely ignore the call to service?
Would I really not serve at all?
It seemed unfathomable. I tried to picture myself as the kind of man who could do that, who could just take without giving anything to his nation in return. I couldn’t do it. I could in no way reconcile the reality of that man to the image of myself that I’d carried in my head for the past seventeen years. It was totally impossible. Even if my father could respect that version of me, I wasn’t sure that I could respect such a version of myself. It felt false in every way. I owed too much to the nation and to the family that had given me everything.
Besides, the choice wasn’t, in the final analysis, about what my father wanted. I had to make myself become the man I’d always believed that I could be.
My recruiting trip to West Point confirmed my feelings. I met a pair of swimmers, Rob and Flip, on that first day, and I knew immediately that I’d found my people. I could perhaps have learned to fit in at Harvard, to be the kind of guy who would find glory in a corporate law office. After seventeen years as a Marine-brat, however, I was already the kind of guy who went to West Point. Every single cadet I met that weekend was smart, ambitious, and athletic, and they all wanted to be leaders in their fields. Those words described everyone at West Point.
They described me as well.
Rob took me to an engineering class. The day’s instruction covered the rotation of any object about a fixed axis, or RAFA, a staple of the Academy’s engineering instruction. There were twelve cadets in the class, and the instructor gave them the most interesting and entertaining mathematics lecture I’d ever seen. With AP Calculus on my resume, I could follow—barely—but at the same time, I realized that here I’d found an instructor was completely unafraid of pushing his students.
This was in stark contrast to Harvard.
Folks said, “The hardest thing about Harvard is getting in.” No one has ever said that about the United States Military Academy.
I got back home, and within a week I’d made the first moves towards toward accepting my appointment to West Point. That’s when Harvard came back with a better offer. If I wanted, I could go for three-thousand a year.
By then it didn’t matter.
I’d developed a new conception of myself. I would compete in the greatest rivalry in college sports. I would take my rightful place as a man in my own family, serving our great country before going on to do whatever else my future might hold. I would be the best swimmer that I could be, but I would also be more than that, too.
I would be a soldier.
I would be a West Pointer.
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