...that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same...
July 1st is always a doozy for me. Eleven years ago today (wow), at almost this exact moment, I was standing on a field in Annapolis with my hand raised taking the Oath of Office. This is going to be a bit of a pointless ramble. Apologies in advance if you read the whole thing.
The whole day is kind of a blur. You wait in lines. You’re issued a crapload of gear. You get your hair cut. The upperclass are all very nice and accomodating as you drop your new wares off in your new room and meet your new roommate(s). It’s a lot like camp.
You change into a uniform for the first time. You stand in your first formation, and you march with your first company in your first squad down to T-court to take the Oath. (Eleven years ago, T-court was under construction, so we took ours around back in some field: inauspicious when compared with the majesty of T-court, but then again, so was my tenure there inauspicious, so maybe that’s fitting.)
It’s pretty. The sun is low, casting that same light over the Severn, and over us and our families, that it’s casting now, right this minute. The same light it will cast tomorrow at this time when the class of 2012 takes its Oath. You don’t have feelings of trepidation yet. You don’t have doubts. You haven’t really examined what you’re about to say and do. You stand before family and amongst strangers you’ll come to think of as family in due course, bathed in the waning light of the day, and you say the words.
At least, that’s how it went for me. Doubts came later. Remorse, fear, and shame all came later. Not immediately, of course. After the Oath you say goodbye to your parents, and you walk up the stairs into Bancroft, for the first time a Midshipman. That’s when the shit hits the fan. Camp is over.
The doozy though? That’s not the worst of it. The shit hitting the fan, the yelling, the push-ups, having “all your basic human rights taken away and given back one at a time as privileges”? That’s the best of it. If you’re me, that’s the part you like, the part you almost crave. That’s the part you’re good at. Weirdly, it’s the calm before the storm. It’s the bite-sized insurmountables you can conquer if you shut your mouth, put your head down, and drive on.
But, if you’re me, you can’t drive through the next part. You’ve got a full head of steam that’s not enough to get you through the storm. You grow, you learn, you start to doubt. You start to think, and then you start to hate all the things about yourself that got you where you are.
But you’ve never killed anyone. You haven’t been in combat. You haven’t left Maryland. You’re in class all day. The rifle they gave you for parades hasn’t functioned in 30 years. But none of that matters. It gets bad. You get out.
Time heals. It gets better, kind of.
You still spend eleven years thinking about that Oath, asking yourself how you ended up there in the first place, wondering if you’ve gleaned some salvageable truths from the experience, and hoping beyond hope that one day you’ll make a difference that will make it all okay. There’s a penance, and you owe.
It’s July 1st, again. 2008! @ 7:19 PM