My dad retired from the Marine Corps at about the same time that the West Point Class of 1995 hit Branch Night.
 |
| Graduation: June 3rd, 1995. |
Dad wanted to retire to Washington, D.C. Having spent a lifetime serving the nation in uniform, he had more than his share of contacts at the Pentagon and Marine Corps Headquarters. My mother, though, had spent a lifetime following in my father’s baggage train. Finally given a say in her future, for once, she put her foot down and insisted that she and my dad move back to Tullahoma. She wanted to be near her parents, and I think she had some fantasy of reliving her high school glory days in the place where she’d grown up.
Dad reluctantly agreed, and for a while he pretended to be happy. My folks bought a beautiful two-story house on the nice side of town, and after a perfunctory job search, Dad started selling life insurance and other financial services through MetLife.
It looked like it was going to be great for a while, but my dad was no salesman. He tried to tell himself that he was helping people, that they needed his advice and his company’s insurance products, but I don’t know if he ever truly believed it. Moreover, the salesman’s life was a decidedly poor fit for Dad’s personality. A lifetime of combat unit command proved poor preparation for the pleasantries and patient listening required in sales. He didn’t want to hear what people had to say, and he was all too prepared to tell them truths that they did not want to hear. Besides that, he just couldn’t move product.
When he sat me down and sold me literally the best, most expensive life insurance that money could buy, I didn’t even try to argue. After just a few months, it was clear that he needed the favor, and I could afford to do it if it would help him get started with the next phase of his life. Still, I was not at all surprised when he started looking for another job after less than six months.
Meanwhile, my mother’s health began deteriorating. She’d tripped over one of the family’s dogs while my folks were living in Newport, cracking a vertebra. Her doctor prescribed a back brace, but Mom hated it. She complained constantly and ultimately refused to wear the damn thing. Her injury never healed. She began compensating for her back in a hundred little ways, inevitably developing knee pain and then shoulder problems. She was prescribed all manner of pain meds, and she started taking Xanax whenever she got “nervous”.
This started slowly at first.
* * *
I opened my envelope on Branch Night and found a tank with cross sabers. This had never been in doubt, but I was relieved beyond measure to have it confirmed. My buddy Brian, now my roommate for the entirety of firstie year, also branched armor. We sat down one afternoon to decide where we were going next. In my mind, there was only one choice.
“We’re not high enough to get Hawaii,” I said.
“What about Colorado?” Brian asked. “3rd ACR? That could work.”
“We won’t both make it. There’s only three slots.”
“So what?” Brian asked. “Fort Polk? And hope the Army fields the new XM-8 Light Tank41 fairly soon?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Yeah,” Brian said ruefully, “it looks like that program’s gonna get cancelled.”
“I can’t believe you’d volunteer for Fort Polk.”
“Fair point.”
“Fort Stewart,” I said at last. I pointed to the map. “Savannah, Georgia, and the 24th Infantry Division.”42
“18th Airborne Corps?” Brian shot me a long look.
By virtue of its being near a major port, Fort Stewart was home to the heavy component of the 18th Airborne Corps, the Army’s rapid deployment force. Going there meant that Brian and I would spend the next three years on two-hour recall, perpetually awaiting orders that would send us into action against God-alone-knew-who or what.
I shrugged. “It’s near the beach. Not many Army posts are. And Savannah is supposed to be a really cool town.”
“I like it,” Brian said. “Let’s do it.”
We headed down to a small auditorium in Washington Hall a few days later. The hundred twenty or so cadets who’d chosen armor branch sat assembled en masse, waiting to choose our first posts. Our branch officer switched an overhead projector on, listed out each post on a clear plastic overlay and putting dashed spaces next to each potential posting. The dashes represented the number of slots for each assignment. Hawaii had three, Fort Carson had three, Fort Stewart had seven, Korea had about the same, and Fort Hood, Texas, had maybe half of the rest.
Every spot had to be filled.
The first man chose Hawaii, the second chose Fort Carson, Colorado, and our mutual friend Neil drew a standing ovation when he chose Korea with the third overall pick .
Brian and I both chose Fort Stewart.
Brian, my buddy Chris, and I spent our last months lifting weights together as often as we could. I’d started at West Point weighting something like one hundred fifty pounds. By firstie year, I’d gotten all the way up to one-sixty-two. I had functional strength, but I was tired of being skinny. When I got to Fort Stewart, I wanted to look like a gym rat.
Enforced weight-lifting and a steady diet of Samuel Adams beer put me up to almost one-seventy-five by the time we graduated. Beyond that, I spent as much time as I could with my teammates and my other friends down at the Firstie Club. With just a few weeks left, Chris and I bought our tickets to Australia and began talking seriously about where we were going and what we were going to see. After that, all we had to do was wait.
I turned in my final thesis shortly after Spring Break. This had started as a discussion of Lloyd George’s role in the British peace movement of 1940 but eventually devolved into a rather standard argument in favor of Winston Churchill as the savior of Western Civilization. Despite genuine interest within the History Department for a potential revisionist take, I could not find enough facts to justify a new telling of events. My final conclusion, that Churchill’s heroic treatment of the Battle of Dunkirk as a victory enabled the British to sustain the war effort domestically, fell well within the track of established historical theory. My paper earned an A-. It was well-written, but my professors felt that I’d missed an opportunity. My oral defense, however, got an A+. I astounded my board by naming off the entire British war cabinet along with their portfolios when Churchill came to power, and the board members themselves were sympathetic to my decision not to create history where the evidence suggested that the traditional interpretation was in fact correct.
Ultimately, truth is truth, especially at West Point.
My parents and grandparents came up for graduation. Surprisingly, I found Graduation Week itself to be stressful in the extreme, both because of the difficulty of managing my folks’ logistics and because the Academy had no punishments left for graduating cadets save delaying graduation itself. But then there I was, no shit, walking across the stage, saluting the Superintendent, and receiving my diploma from the United States Military Academy.
We threw our hats in the air, and my childhood was over.
I was an officer in the United States Army.
 |
| Chris took this shot of me at Sidney Opera House. |
 |
| Chris & some folks we met on a tour of an Australian rain forest. |
 |
| About to head out for the Great Barrier Reef. |
 |
| Against Sydney's Skyline. |
41. The U.S. Army is badly in need of a deployable light tank. Brian commanded a cavalry squadron equipped with Stryker Fighting Vehicles at Fort Lewis, WA, a couple of years ago and can talk for an hour straight about the Stryker’s shortcomings.
42. The 24th Infantry Division reflagged to become the 3rd Infantry Division in our first years at Ft. Stewart.
No comments:
Post a Comment