(06-07DEC2008)
I grew up a Navy brat*, though I can’t say I was ever very invested in the annual Army-Navy football game.
My father brought my brother and I to the Officer’s club on the Navy base near our childhood home to watch the game a few years, and in that atmosphere it was very easy to root for the “home team”. Certainly at that point I had only a connection to the USN and no inkling that I’d later work for the US Army.
My father didn’t attend the Naval Academy, however, and I always got the impression that while he certainly wanted Navy to win, the whole affair was as much an excuse for him to hang out and have a few beers with his friends, and his sons. The passion and excitement (or vulgar frustration and despair) wasn’t there for these games as it was when we would watch his alma mater.
I’ve worked for the Army for just over 3 years now, but I don’t think civilians in roles like mine really grow the roots in a service to feel as connected as those who enlist. We’re all part of one team, to be sure, but I’m not ‘brothers-in-arms’ with the soldiers I work with, and my career track and my obligations are very different than theirs.
The Army-Navy game is on today, right now as I write this in fact, and all week the AFN channels have had commercials for it – spots sponsored by one service or the other and ending with either “Go Army! Beat Navy!” or “Go Navy! Beat Army!”.
Just after the game starts, I walk up to the MWR nearest my hooch to watch the game in a rowdy atmosphere with soldiers and sailors, but they’re showing the South Park movie on the big screen. I get sucked into that for a good twenty minutes or so before walking over to try my luck at the MWR clamshell... where there’s salsa dancing.
Salsa dancing?
I didn’t know they had salsa dancing.
I walk back to my room and turn the game on to watch it by myself, and Navy has now built a commanding lead through 3 quarters, leading 24-0. In fact, Navy has won this game the last 6 years and 9 out of the last 11. While I don’t feel connected to either team more than the other, I’m definitely more a part of the military than I have ever been in my life.
I have been working nights a lot lately, as I will tonight, and so I’ll have this game on in the background and then some other intriguing college football games as the night turns into morning turns into exhaustion turns into sleep. And then we do it all over again.
USN = United States Navy
CDR = Commander
AFN = American Forces Network
HMMWV = High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle
MRAP = Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle
*My father is a retired Navy CDR, having served just over 20 years including a stint in Vietnam where, he once told me, he “counted jeeps”. More than 30 years later, I'm in the Middle East, in the midst of a very different war, and part of my job could be summed up similarly, though the military has long since graduated from jeeps and so I find myself counting HMMWVs and MRAPs.
