Better in their words…

I honor these men…
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WSJ 12/3/2016 By Bob Greene

It once was a big day in the United States, an end-of-autumn Saturday when, inside the walls of homes in huge cities, small towns and rural hamlets, everything seemed to stop for a few hours.

The black-and-white television sets would be turned on, the shades in the rooms drawn or lights dimmed to prevent glare. The families would gather—this was the fathers’ afternoon, and their children, almost by osmosis, knew it—and something quietly momentous would unfold on the screen: the Army-Navy game. It was considerably more than a football contest.

That annual game, of course, continues to be played and broadcast nationally; next Saturday’s game will be in Baltimore. It is always greeted with respect, although the teams from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis seldom are in the running for a national championship (the players had to meet rigorous academic standards to be admitted to those schools).

And it is getting harder to remember just how devotedly Americans watched the Army-Navy games in the 1950s, when television was new and the soldiers and sailors were still recently back from World War II and Korea. There was a reason for the rapt viewership: Service in the armed forces wasn’t purely voluntary back then; if you were an able-bodied male and you didn’t enlist, you’d undoubtedly be drafted, because your country flat-out needed you. This all-but-universal service for men brought a sense of shared sacrifice, and shared experience, that is largely missing today.

And on those Saturday afternoons in the ’50s, with the soldiers and sailors now back home and raising their young families in a nation whose peace they had won, the Army-Navy game would bring them together—even though they were scattered from one coast to the other—and would remind them of where they had been, and of what their country had asked of them. They may have been rooting for one team to defeat the other, but what mattered more was that they were holding on to something important, something that was already drifting away.

With rare exceptions the young athletes on the field were not headed to the National Football League—these were fighters playing football, not football players pretending to fight. Then, as now, the Army-Navy game makes all the more ridiculous the nomenclature of warfare that college football has appropriated for itself. Coaches as field generals? In the ’50s, as the recently returned soldiers and sailors watched the annual game with their children, Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House. No one was mistaking a head coach with a whistle around his neck for a general.

At next Saturday’s game, because of bloodshed around the world and threats at home, there will be what is routinely termed “heightened security.” Even with the Army and the Navy present at the stadium, there is a requirement for hired armed forces—what a dissonant, if understandable, concept. And the players on the field, with the commitment to future service they agreed to when they were accepted at the academies, will soon enough be headed to places considerably more perilous than a gridiron. You can bet that when the national anthem is played, the cadets and midshipmen in attendance will stand, and do so proudly.

The Army-Navy game over the years has been pushed deeper into November and now into mid-December, to accommodate the lengthening seasons and conference championships played by revenue-hungry non-military universities. In terms of who will be named the No. 1 team in the nation it may be considered a meaningless contest, but in the ways that count there perhaps is none with more significance. For some families, it is and always has been akin to a second Thanksgiving, a time for private reflection and gratitude.

Those were afternoons to store in the memory, those Army-Navy Saturdays in all those dens and living rooms, watched by all those still-young fathers who had joined together and traveled across the oceans to vanquish a fearsome enemy. Their eyes were fixed upon a game, but they were seeing something that would never appear on a scoreboard, something far away. And at kickoff time, their children still can recall the feeling.

My own dad, who was with the 91st Infantry in North Africa and Italy, died 18 years ago this month. Had he lived, I know exactly what he would be doing at 3 p.m. Eastern time next Saturday, with his family by his side, and why he, and we, would be doing it. As a discerning playwright, in a different context, once indelibly put it: Attention must be paid.

Mr. Greene’s books include “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War” (William Morrow, 2001).