A Team for America: The Army-Navy Game That Rallied a Nation at War by Randy Roberts

Author:Randy Roberts
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

Backfield coach Andy Gustafson picked him up in New York and drove him to the Academy. Barney was almost twenty-one years old, a shade over 6-3, 220 pounds, with enormous pass-catching hands, a shock of dark uncombed hair, and a friendly smile. He had an open, likable expression, and Gustafson had to ponder how he would fare during Beast Barracks. He suggested that Barney might not be cut out for the Academy. “He says just very coyly that I might not be able to take the harassment, that I was a pretty mature individual. I might not like to put up with that childish type of hazing,” Barney recalled, but he accepted the challenge. “You couldn’t have pulled me out with a bulldozer ’til I finished that plebe year.”

But Gustafson was at least partly right. Barney Poole never fully bought into the West Point program. When he walked through the sally port, he was not even aware of the four-year military commitment after graduation, and he regarded many of the most venerated formalities and traditions of the Academy almost as jokes. He was not exactly a rebel, driven to break all the rules, but he chose to bend some of them when it tickled his fancy. The longer he stayed at the Academy, the bolder he became.

Morris Herbert remembered fondly that when he became a plebe, Barney Poole was already an established character on and off the field. Herbert recalled the joy of watching Barney at mess during his Beast Barracks summer. It was a stressful time for all plebes, and mess was a time of particularly high anxiety when new cadets barely had time to gobble a few mouthfuls of food. Three times a day the entire Corps of Cadets dined together on linen-covered tables in Washington Hall. Mess involved so many rituals that it was impossible for a young cadet not to break a few. Plebes removed their hats at the foot of the mess hall steps, double-timed to their tables, and stood at attention until an upperclassman ordered, “Take seats!” Then, as one observer wrote, they “sat braced on the forward three inches of their chairs, eyes locked on the helmet of Pallas Athena embossed upon each plate.” And that was only the beginning. Different cadets were assigned to cut food into precisely equal portions, serve coffee or water, and make sure that the table was adequately supplied with silverware, dishes, and food. During the brief meals upperclassmen peppered plebes with questions about weather reports, the schedule for the day (or week or month or year), the movie playing at the post theater, or any poop trivia they were expected to know. Joy and mirth were generally excluded from the plebe diet.8

But Herbert remembered furtively scrutinizing Poole as he went out of Washington Hall. “Barney Poole would leave the mess hall with the rest of the first class . . . ahead of the plebes. We would watch him leave the mess hall, and as he left it [he] walked out through the area called the ‘poop deck’ where the officer in charge sits.

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