#SBRLLR: Afterword

My wife Sally and I conceived this book as a joint project.  We wanted to show off our partnership as one of the world’s great love affairs.  I gradually came to realize, though, that Sally doesn’t quite have the time to write a whole book about her formative years, and even if she did, the resulting two-volume biography would read like The Winds of War.  Part of me still wants to do it that way, but I wonder who would read two hundred thousand words about a couple who are not famous and not looking to become famous.  

It seems like a tough sell.

My next cut was as a straight sports book.  I outlined the story and decided to put training tips at the end of each chapter.  My initial draft of that first chapter gave equal time to the basics of freestyle stroke mechanics alongside the more personal bits that inform the actual story.  You teach enough people to swim, and you gradually come to realize that there are a few fundamentals that most novice swimmers could stand to hear or read.  The problem with this, though, was not only that it wasn’t scintillating reading, but also that teaching swimming is a fundamentally interactive experience.  It’s one of those “show me, don’t tell me” kinds of things that translates poorly to the written word.  Part of me still wants to do it, of course, but I don’t think anyone wants to read it.  

But who knows?  I blog about swimming—and about my physical training in other sports—and people are consistently polite and at times unaccountably fascinated by my various workouts.  This does not mean that there’s enough there to build an entire book.  I mean, there might be.  But there are already a zillion triathlon books.  I’m not sure that the world needs mine.  Maybe someone will eventually write The West Point Guide to Triathlon, but that someone probably ought to come from the Academy’s actual triathlon team.  You know, the one that’s a perennially ranked national powerhouse.  Personally, I’m more of a talented dabbler, albeit one who writes about his dabbles.

In any event, I thought a long time about why I wanted to try to tell this story and then tried to double-down on the why of it.  As that  first draft developed, my daughter Hannah got interested in it as a kind oral history of our family.  My buddy Chris then patiently test-read the chapters as I went through my first rewrite, and conceptually, that’s where we wound up.  Chris knows me, and he knew my parents; when he told me that he thought I was being fair--and even generous--I thought, “Okay.  This is a good start.”

Putting the pieces together turned out to be a worthwhile project all on its own.  My mom and I didn’t end on the best of terms, obviously, but I felt like I came to understand her better after writing about her.  I came to see her in a different way.  My friend Elizabeth repeatedly counselled me to stop trying to draw conclusions from my memories but to instead simply tell the story as it happened, and let the conclusions present themselves.  This has not been easy—at all—but the process was endlessly worthwhile.  Hannah, I think, just wanted to know where she came from.  It’s not like she can ask her grandparents to tell her stories from back in the day.  

The historian’s art is often in deciding what’s important.  What incidents are germane to the outcome at hand?  Or, to put that another way, how does an old ex-girlfriend wind up getting more page-space than some of the guys who have been my very best friends for more than twenty-five years?  It’s certainly not because she was more important than they were (or are), but because the few days I spent with her are part of a particular story, the story of how I met my wife and came to realize that I wanted to marry her.  I could describe ten thousand backyard barbeques, nights on Ft. Stewart’s gunnery ranges, drinking in the dive bars of rural Korea…  Maybe I should have.  But to what end?  We got drunk, we fell asleep in a pile, we woke up hungover, and then we went back to work.  We called out The Days before breakfast formation and shot sabot rounds at giant wooden cut-out targets.  It was the little things that mattered, the cups of coffee out on the back of my platoon sergeant’s tank, or that time that Mike and I tried to do flaming shots without blowing them out first.  The midnight phone calls that could have meant war but never quite did, thank God.  Those experiences in uniform were fun or miserable or both, but they were the workaday parts of living in the service.  We were far from home for the best and the worst of them, and we were occasionally unsure of what our futures held.  Yes, there were tough times, but those were also the best times.  The irony of the human condition is that we bond over misery and ecstasy in equal measure.

West Point is such an interesting place.  It wasn’t my goal to write some “Rah Rah Army” book, but I wound up with several chapters set at the Academy, and I don’t see how I could tell this story without accounting for the particular nature of those experiences.  Over time, the Academy relationships have come to mean more to me, not less.  In some ways, I’ve come to think of this project as a story for would-be West Point athletic recruits.  Not because the Academy guarantees you’ll have a happy life after you graduate.  They definitely DO NOT guarantee that.  Rather, it’s because the Academy is a challenge worth facing, because the friends you make amidst those challenges are the most amazing people you can ever hope to meet, because even if you succeed beyond your wildest dreams, still you find yourself in awe of your classmates and the things that they will accomplish in their own time.  

They really are the best.  You have no idea.

We have to take care of each other.  Not only because other people need help, but because we ourselves need to do the helping.  West Point is great because it forces this lesson down one’s throat.  Other people need to hear it though, not just West Pointers, and here we are.

As a last note, I will mention that any editor worth the name will tell you that a story like this ought to eschew footnotes.  I mention this so that you will realize that I know it and intentionally ignored it.

Take care of each other and stay safe out there.

With Honor We Strive.