I hit the pool for captain’s practices and was dismayed when my buddy Dave smoked me for more than an hour doing the kinds of rote 100-yard interval sets that had been the mainstay of our time together for the past three years. Try as I might, I simply could not keep up. Soon I realized that it wasn’t just Dave. Over the course of that first week, I found myself swimming back a lane and then two, following kids I’d led through the last year and more. I’d swim as hard as I could, going completely balls-out, but my body simply would not perform the way that it was supposed to. To that point, I’d set my Cruise Interval at 1:05 or better for three years running. As a firstie, I realized that I’d be lucky to set it at 1:15.
 |
| Firstie year at Crandall Pool. |
By the end of that first week, I was sullen and miserable. I thought the problem was simply poor physical conditioning, that a summer of hard partying had hurt me more than I’d imagined. Then I got the results back from my Commissioning Physical.
I’d failed for a blood disease!
“What?!” I hope I didn’t yell at that poor Army doctor, but I almost certainly did. “Sir, you can’t fail me! I’m a badass swimmer. I’ve been this school’s number one butterflyer for the three years! I’m gonna be an armored cavalry officer. What the Hell do you mean I failed? What’s going on?!”
A few tests later, and it turned out that I had mononucleosis. Or rather, I’d had it. I’d gotten it kissing God-knew-who and had unknowingly suffered through the worst of it in a drunken stupor during my time at Fort Drum. If those weeks had been more intense physically, I surely would have noticed. As it was, I’d been able to skate through none the wiser. Now I was in recovery, but it would be months before my blood was right again. I could swim—in fact, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted—but if I pushed it, I risked relapsing and might even wind up in the hospital.
The Army Swim Team went on without me. My classmate Matt actually flourished, putting up best times in the 200 Butterfly and winning the event at Navy that year. We actually swept the 200 Fly for the first time in memory, but I finished a disappointing third—and last—for the Army team, and I didn’t feel like I’d contributed at all. But what else could I do? I’d long since made a commitment to my teammates. In my final year, I wasn’t about to abandon them.
I suffered through it. I would swim a little, feel a tinge of weakness, and head back to my room for a nap. I’d come back the next day determined to put in better quality work, but when I pushed it, I wouldn’t feel right for the next week. It went on like that for months, a seemingly endless cycle of frustration and pointlessness. I retained enough pure strength and ingrained muscle memory to stay generally competitive through the course of our early dual meet schedule, but I couldn’t do any real training for fear of a setback, and I could feel the difference in my performance in every lap that I swam.
After years of feeling like my best possible self in the pool, I now felt distinctly out of place.
For the first time in a decade, I couldn’t focus on swimming. Perhaps as a result, everything else in my life started coming together. I met a new girl, made excellent academic grades, and was even picked at the start of the semester to be on our battalion’s staff--as the firstie supply officer. That assignment that caught me so completely off-guard that I nearly talked our battalion tactical officer out of giving me the job.
“Sir?” I said with genuine astonishment, “why’d you pick me?”
He got a scared kind of look in his eyes. “Why? Is there some reason that I shouldn’t have picked you?” he asked. He sounded suddenly wary.
“Uh, no sir!” I realized belatedly that I’d just make a truly stupid mistake. “I was, uh, just kind of wondering what the criteria were.”
He shrugged but still looked a little sheepish. “You’ve got good grades, you seem like a smart guy, and you’ve never been in any trouble. Why? Is there something that I should know?”
That I’m a complete military fuck-up?
“No sir!” I replied, trying to sound confident. “I won’t let you down.”
“See that you don’t,” he replied.
I wanted to sigh with relief, but I didn’t dare. So far as I could tell, battalion supply officers had no duties whatsoever beyond occasionally forwarding emails to their subordinate company supply officers. This presented no difficulty, and I got to room with my good friend Brian in a separate barracks reserved for members of the battalion staff. This put us well outside the regular room inspection regime and far away from the areas typically patrolled by the Academy’s various Officers-in-Charge-of-Quarters. We waited a week, realized that no one was ever going to check on us—ever—and then ran a dual-strand thirty foot copper wire out our back window and up the side of the barracks to enhance our radio reception. This was the first and only time I’d ever cut an antenna to a specific length to enhance radio reception, and it worked like magic. We were lucky to be located on the top floor of our barracks on the building’s back side, meaning that our makeshift antenna could not easily be seen from the common areas. Soon Brian and I were bringing girls back to our room with what should probably have been alarming regularity, and when I started dating a yearling named R___ later that semester, I doomed my poor roommate to a half-semester’s ill-advised walking-in unannounced.
Thankfully, Brian didn’t seem to mind.
He decided to buy a plant. It was a little green thing, almost like a fern, and after some consideration, he named it Bernie. He got a blank white cadet name tag, labeled Bernie’s pot, “Bernie, T.P.”—for Bernie, The Plant—and then made another nametag, which he stuck on the door alongside each of ours. Bernie, The Plant, became our unofficial third roommate, and neither of us thought anything about it. In fact, he became the ranking cadet in the room, since “Bernie” came alphabetically before either Brian’s last name or mine.
Months passed.
Then one night we saw our first tactical officer. She was the Officer-in-Charge-of-Quarters, and she was a major, and she came barging into our room unannounced, luckily finding us both fully clothed. We were lucky there. But she was aghast—aghast!—at the state of our room.
“What is wrong with you two?” she screeched. “Don’t you ever clean up around here?” We stammered a response, but she cut us off. “Nevermind! I see that Cadet… uh, Bernie… is the alphabetically ranking cadet. Tell him that he’s got five hours of Area Tours this weekend, and I expect to see him out there this Saturday. I’ll be out there as well to make sure he shows up.”
She spun on her heel and stomped out before either of us could respond, and then we burst into laughter. Our plant had just gotten punishment tours on the Area!
In due course, Brian dressed Bernie up with a little shoulder sash and belt and put him out on the Area under arms, explaining to the Cadet-in-Charge-of-Quarters exactly what had happened. Bernie stood his five hours, and that was the end of it. Brian even wrote up an official 2-1 punishment slip and submitted it through the proper channels to make sure that it was all legal.
No one ever brought the matter up again, nor did we ever again see that tactical officer.
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