We marched back from Camp Buckner a day before the plebes returned from Lake Frederick, and in no time, my classmates and I settled back into Academic Year rhythms. I watched my own plebe struggle through Reorganization Week, eventually pulling him aside that Friday afternoon as my own team leader had done with me the previous year.
“Cangolosi! Go take a shower right now! That’s an order!”
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| The Army Men's Swim Team back in the day. |
Despite the inestimable pleasure of being out from under the nadir of West Point’s social structure, I soon discovered that yearlings were treated with only marginally more respect than plebes. No one wanted to hear The Days anymore, but the upperclasses still had little use for my classmates and me. At the same time, academics became exponentially more challenging. I took Russian, a second semester of Calculus, enough Physics that I would one day be able to work as an honest-to-God electrical engineer, and Statistics, which I found both needdlessly complicated and far less intuitive than the engineering-oriented mathematics on which I’d spent the majority of my previous education.
I took my first course in my major as well, a general survey of Europe from the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 to the start of the Cold War. Besides providing some basic perspective on the ways in which modern Europe had developed, I came to understand that an historian’s life was equal parts reading and writing, with the ability to quickly process and convey written information serving as the field’s primary skillset. This fit my own inclinations perfectly, but it was also a considerable challenge based on the sheer volume of my workload.
I was a little slow to realize how hard things would get. Before that semester, I’d only ever had to push myself in the pool. Now into my chosen coursework, I found that just keeping up and becoming an historian in my own right would actually be a significant accomplishment all on its own.
I again won the 200 Butterfly against Navy, handily this time. But the team as a whole lost again, too. Navy’s margin of victory was exactly four points, the value of the second place finish in the 200 Freestyle put up by an exchange cadet who’d chosen to swim and study for a semester at the Naval Academy. His decision to swim for the other team put the Mids over the top.
To say the very least, he was not a popular man when he returned to West Point. I personally had a vicious argument with him one day just after his return, which ended with the following exchange:
“What?” he said. “You think I shouldn’t have gone? That I should have turned my back on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? How would that have served my best interests?”
“We’re a team,” I replied hotly. “Your interests aren’t the ones that matter. They never were. You should have done what was best for your teammates.”
He just stared at me for a moment, disbelief etched onto his face. Then he shook his head and stalked away in disgust. We spoke only rarely afterwards.
Years later, I would arrive for service with the 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry, at Camp Garryowen, South Korea, roughly eighteen months after this same officer had departed. My former friend had earned a Rhodes Scholarship, spent eighteen months studying in England, and then shown up in South Korea acting like he owned the place. His attitude had made him deeply unpopular. In his wake, when guys found out that I’d also been an Army Swimmer, they groaned audibly. One long-time staff captain pulled me aside early in my tour and asked pointedly, “Are you a selfish bastard like that last swimmer-asshole? Because we don’t need any more like him, my man. That dude really pissed people off.”
I got onto the podium at the Patriot League Championships as a yearling, in both the 100 and the 200 Butterfly, placing second in the 100 Fly to a tall, red-headed guy with whom I didn’t much get along. Easterns31 came a week or so later, and I did okay, placing somewhere near the top of the consolation finals and again beating Navy’s Brian Blaylock. By now, I’d gone 4-0 against the man who’d previously owned our event in the Army-Navy rivalry.
I was astonished when Toad pulled me aside after consuls that night, the last race of his collegiate career. “Come here, Dan,” he said, “there’s someone here that I want you to meet.” He was standing next to Blaylock, whom he seemed to know pretty well. “Dan, this is Brian.”
Brian stuck his hand out eagerly, saying, “Hey man, congratulations on a terrific swim. You’re a great swimmer, and I’ve really enjoyed racing against you.”
I stared at him for a long moment, unaccountably embarrassed and unsure how to respond. I’d assumed that Brian would hate me after coming up short four times in a row, but his smile was both large and genuine. He struck mem right off as a legitimately good dude.
I shook his hand. “Thanks, man. You too.”
“What are you gonna do in the Army?” he asked. “Do you know yet?”
“Armor branch, I think. I wanna be a tank platoon leader.”
“I’m going into the Marine Corps. Man, I can’t wait.”
“Hey, my dad’s a Marine. I’m sure you’ll do great.”
“Thanks. Good luck out there. Enjoy the next two years.”
I watched him walk away, unsure what I should be feeling. I sensed that there was a message there, a lesson that Brian was trying to teach me. I couldn’t quite figure it, though.
* * *
Spring Break found me, Dave, my roommate Chris, and our mutual friend Steve all down in Cancun, Mexico. We’d survived being stranded for a full day in Newark Airport amidst a thigh-deep snowstorm by building something like a dismounted patrol base atop one of the airport’s raised luggage carousels. We’d then boarded an Air Mexico plane with, no shit, red shag carpeting on the walls and ceiling exactly like the carpeting that had once adorned the bordello-turned-garage at my old house in Fallbrook. We’d gotten drunk on the plane and hadn’t been sober since. As our first full day dawned to brilliant sunshine, we wandered slowly up a sand-strewn streets a half-mile or so from our hotel. The sky was crystal blue, and the air felt clean and comfortably warm, especially compared to the brutal winter we’d just escaped in Upstate New York.
The first restaurant we saw had a sign out front on a folding wooden placard. “Breakfast Burritos! 4-for-1 Beer!”
Dave pointed and shrugged. “Hey guys! Four-for-one beer.”
“Yeah man,” Chris replied. “You can’t beat that.”
We wandered in and ordered what proved to be literal bucket-loads of beer bottles packed in ice. From there, the week passed in a sun-scorched blur of drunken debauchery. We took a booze cruise, wound up in a foam-filled dance pit, and met some girls from the University of Miami (Ohio). We were sunburned and hung over by the time we got back, but I felt alive in a way that I’d forgotten I could be during the rigors of swim season and the heavy pressure of the Academic Year. Chris and I sat in our room that night, staring out the window and contemplating our lives and the imminent resumption of intense academics.
“My God,” I said. “It sucks to be back.”
“Yeah man,” Chris replied. “We’ve just got to power through these next few months. Then it’ll be summer.”
“It’s like a nightmare.”
“It is,” Chris agreed.
I looked over at him. “You know, I’m failing, like, four of my classes right now.”
“Seriously?”
“Eh.” I shrugged. “Maybe I’ve got D’s. I don’t know. I got so focused on swimming towards the end of the season. I have no fucking clue what we’re doing in Russian or Statistics. The rest is just a few bad quiz grades, but I’ve got some serious shit to catch up on.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“I guess. I’ve just got to buckle down and get after it for a while.”
Chris laughed. “Dude, that sucks.”
“Tell me about it.” A beat passed, and then I stood up, feeling restless. I grabbed the World Atlas I’d been issued for plebe history and threw it to Chris. “Seriously, though. Where are we going next?”
Chris didn’t need my atlas. “I’ve always wanted to go to Australia.”
“Shit. How much is that gonna cost?”
Now it was Chris’s turn to shrug. “We start saving now, we can make it happen. We’ll go after graduation.”
I rolled this over in my mind but could find no flaw. “Alright. I guess I’d better start saving.”
Chris smiled, deeply satisfied. “Damn straight.”
31. The Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC) championship meet.
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