Army-Navy is closest thing to combat

[Snowden]

Army-Navy is closest thing to combat

Special to FOXSports.com

The winds of war forever sweep across the West Point campus, stirring the souls of officers and gentlemen and the young halfbacks in training for the day they must confront a sniper or roadside bomb.


In this culture, Earl Blaik never had trouble inspiring his Army cadets on the eve of the one and only football game that ever mattered on their schedule.



"Playing Navy," Blaik would say. "is the closest thing to combat."

Nearly 50 years later, Bob Anderson can still hear the Colonel delivering that scouting report. It was 1958 when Anderson and Pete Dawkins formed the all-American backfield that defeated Navy to punctuate the last undefeated season posted by either academy team.


The world was a different place back then, and so was the world of major-college football. Vince Lombardi was in the Municipal Stadium stands that day in Philadelphia, because Army-Navy wasn't just an occasion to celebrate the young men courageous enough to man America's war machine for the bloody conflicts to come.


Army-Navy was also a big-time sporting event, a game that could turn over the national polls and Heisman races just like that. So there was Lombardi, the former West Point assistant, just months away from becoming head coach of the Green Bay Packers, standing up and screaming at Blaik to ignore his eventual Heisman winner, Dawkins, in favor of his lesser known friend. "Give the ball to Anderson," Lombardi kept shouting.


It seemed like only weeks later when Anderson found himself in a Fort Campbell theater, a member of the 101st Airborne Division listening to secret lectures on some middle-of-nowhere trouble brewing in Vietnam. "We were highly trained," he recalled, "so we all ran down and volunteered."


Peter Dawkins won a Heisman Trophy at Army ... and two Bronze Stars in Vietnam. (Time/Life Pictures)
Anderson was ultimately turned down because of a wrecked knee.
Healthy friends and teammates would be killed in Vietnam, where Dawkins would win two Bronze Stars for Valor.


"That's why the Army-Navy game is bigger than life," Anderson said. "The game always makes you think of the guys sitting out in the jungle somewhere halfway around the earth."


That's what the Army and Navy players will have on their minds Saturday when they collide in a rivalry unlike any other in college sport. American servicemen and women are bleeding and dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. The soldiers now standing guard will have their radios and monitors tuned into the far-away game, a game offering the best and the brightest a three-hour sanctuary. A temporary place to hide.


"The pause button gets pushed on the world of toil," Dawkins said, "and everyone gets to share in another chapter of this rivalry."

Through an electronic hookup, the former Heisman winner and Vietnam hero and Brigadier General is scheduled to talk Sunday with a rifle company of the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. Dawkins hopes to talk to the soldiers about touchdowns scored and denied to take their minds off all the devastation and death.


Army and Navy have played 106 times, and the scoreboard shows an entirely appropriate standoff: Navy has 50 victories, Army has 49, and they've managed seven ties. Nobody cares that Navy is a 20-point favorite this time around, or that Top 10 positioning is never settled in this forum anymore.


Everyone cares that these young athletes are all signed up to trade in their helmets and pads for warriors' armor, and to do so at a time when half the planet is up in flames.


"Upon the fields of friendly strife," said General Douglas MacArthur, "are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory."


MacArthur once addressed Anderson, Dawkins and their fellow teammates in the training room of the old Army gym, assuring them that troops stationed in all corners of the globe were tracking their every punt, pass and kick.


Blaik never let his players forget that, either. The Colonel wouldn't allow any disconnect between the soldiers in distant foxholes and the cadets in fourth-and-goal scrums.


War is the business of West Point, after all, and football is that business's most fertile recruiting ground.


"I want an officer for a secret and dangerous mission," said General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, World War II. "I want a West Point football player."


In 1958, that dream Army season, Dawkins was a senior who knew he couldn't use the Heisman stiff-arm to shield himself from the unforgiving reality of the times. Vietnam wasn't yet a household word, but the U.S. and Soviet Union were feeling the Cold War heat, and citizens of both nations feared a nuclear war that could claim hundreds of millions of lives.


"This wasn't long before the Bay of Pigs," Dawkins said, "and we had forces in Europe staring right across at one another. We were conscious of the fact that very soon we'd shed our cadet uniforms and man the barricades of the Cold War.


"But I think with today's cadets, it's much more dramatic. Every day they're immersed in studying the tactics of counter-terrorism and learning the lessons of Iraq. There's an unavoidable awareness that very soon all of them will be engaged."


For the senior football players, Army-Navy is their last regular-season game, their last stand.


"We always had a big bonfire before we left for the Navy game," Anderson recalled. "And every night there was a rally after Taps, and you'd hear the windows creak down and somebody would start yelling, 'rally, rally, rally,' and the cadets would flood in from all over onto the parade grounds, and it would be chaos.



"But there was always a somberness to Blaik before that game, a somberness you saw no other week."


Yes, Army-Navy is the closest thing to combat, the Colonel would tell his cadets. At West Point, they never say these things lightly.


"It does have a feature of being a war," Dawkins said, "in the sense that it's kind of all out, caution cast aside, with a headlong commitment to doing whatever it takes to achieve victory.

There's no question that's accurate, at least from my experience in it.


"And one of the marvels about this competition is that when it's over and you can look back on it, most of us remember not the combat and the laser commitment to winning, but the pride in taking part in something with such a long history. You feel you were able to paint your piece of the tapestry."


Dawkins won the Heisman and his combat medals. His backfield partner, Anderson, won all-American honors, a place in the 101st Airborne, and the undying respect of an academy he attended after his father told him that West Point produced the finest officers he'd served under in World War II.


Almost 50 years later, Army is 3-8 and a loser of four straight to Navy. The West Point seniors don't fear the possibility of extending the streak to five.


They fear the end of innocence, marked when the fourth-quarter clock expires.

Award-winning columnist Ian O'Connor is a regular contributor to FOXSports.com.

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