thedrifter
07-15-07, 07:56 AM
From the Baltimore Sun
First in a series
Playing field to battlefield
The concept of sports as preparation for war dates to ancient times - and still thrives as military recruiters seek out future warriors among teenage athletes.
By Rick Maese
Sun Reporter
July 15, 2007
Running has always been an integral part of Kevin Diggs' life, from a childhood accident in which he tripped, knocked his head against the corner of a table and earned an inch-long scar beneath his left eye to a high school career in track and cross country for Southwestern High.
At graduation last month, Diggs had to fight the urge to pump his feet and start sprinting in his black gown. When his name was called, he blew a kiss to the crowd and walked proudly across the stage to accept his diploma. As he walked off the stage, Diggs knew his high school athletic career was behind him and, without a chance to play college sports, a career in the military ahead.
"Of course, there's risk that I'll be sent into war, but I'm not afraid of that," Diggs says matter-of-factly. "I live in Baltimore. It's dangerous in the city. I could die for something as stupid as somebody wanting the watch I'm wearing. I'd rather die in a war for my country than for something stupid like that."
Coming from one of Baltimore's worst-performing schools - the embattled Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts was housed in Southwestern High last year -Diggs, 18, has enlisted in the Marine Corps. He's one of dozens of Marylanders who have recently graduated from high school and soon will learn how an athletic background translates into a military career.
The relationship between sports and the military, a link historically celebrated by presidents, generals and athletic coaches, is more debatable than ever, as the role of each American institution has undergone significant change in the past half-century. But in wartime, as the Department of Defense spends millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to restock its military ranks, many continue to view high school athletic programs as an unofficial feeder system, relying on sports teams to help build the very best soldiers.
"This is a war where you kill or get killed! And I don't know anything that prepares a man for bodily contact, including war, than the kind of training we get on the football field."
Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, 1940-1944
None of the military branches keeps records on the number of troops whose informal training might have come on youth and high school playing fields. A half-dozen recruiters interviewed by The Sun, though, estimated that about 50 percent of the young men and women sent to boot camp each year competed in high school sports.
The best way to quantify the military's reliance on athletics is to look at the nation's esteemed service academies, which chart such figures. The Naval Academy, in Annapolis, and the U.S. Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., both report that about 90 percent of their students competed in high school athletics. At the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs, Colo., 85 percent of last year's student body lettered in at least one high school sport.
In addition, at all three academies, every cadet and midshipman is required to compete in a varsity or intramural sport. In that sense, "every cadet is an athlete," according to one West Point official.
Col. William Walker is a deputy athletics director at the Air Force Academy. He's also a former student, athlete, helicopter pilot and wrestling coach. He can't go a day without running across one of his department's favorite slogans, "Tomorrow's leaders forged through competition today," and says sports is a crucial part of the academy's bigger mission.
"The high level of competition we put our athletes through, that experience really translates well," Walker says. "In the Air Force, obviously a pilot is not as physical as maybe other areas. I see it in the mental aspect, that fierce competitiveness, that indomitable will to win."
Diggs, the graduating senior, chose the Marines, he says, because he felt his athletic achievements in high school prepared him for the military better than his academic experiences prepared him for college. Marine officials say that an athletic background is just part of what they feel makes an ideal warrior. Physical, mental and moral standards are all taken into consideration.
Mark Holman, a master gunnery sergeant, has been recruiting Marines from the Baltimore area for 20 years. He says a high school athlete should have a significant "head start" over a non-athlete.
"I know you think, 'Hey, he's athletic, he's in shape,' but actually, the first thing in my mind is, 'This guy understands what it means to be a part of a team, and he knows what it means to participate in something that's bigger than just himself,' " Holman says.
The sentiment might look good on a poster, and it's precisely what inspires a basketball coach like Bob Knight to accept a nickname like "The General." And it inspires a young Kellen Winslow to declare himself a "soldier," though his battlefield is the football field.
But it also inspires many others to line up and poke holes at the relationship between sports and military, denouncing the parallels as naive or absurd.
"The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."
Duke of Wellington, an Eton alumnus and 19th-century British general who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo
Ilove that," says John C. Phillips. " 'Won on the playing fields of Eton.' ... You develop a winning attitude and learn to test yourself; I like that idea. What a great idea. It just isn't true."
Phillips is a sociology professor at the University of the Pacific. He served in the Army from 1965 to 1967. It's not that he doesn't understand the parallels between sport and military. He can insipidly recite the same buzz words used by football coaches and by military leaders.
"You can talk about these words - competition, discipline, effort - but what goes on in the military is so different from what goes on in sports. The connection is almost zero," he says. "It just doesn't connect with what a soldier actually does."
For starters, he points out that the concept of warfare has evolved, so the idea that a wrestler, a boxer or an offensive lineman might have to replicate his athletic duties on a battlefield is antiquated.
"Today, if you're out of ammunition, you go back to where there is some," he says. "The idea of people facing each other with bayonets just doesn't exist. The reality is, today you can't even see the enemy."
Not only are the stakes different, says Earl Smith, a Wake Forest sociology professor and past president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, but the surviving comparison between sport and military is merely a byproduct of "sociological imagination." Smith has spent a professional lifetime studying sport, and he served in the Air Force from 1964 to 1968. He says the strongest parallel he sees is the "hyper-masculinity" that festers in the underbelly of both.
In addition, "there's the same sense of gender segregation, and when you have that, you get rapes, you get harassment, you get Abu Ghraib, you get the Colorado football mess," he says, referring to sex and abuse scandals that rocked the U.S. Army and the University of Colorado's football program. "Other than that, it's a stretch. The analogy really doesn't make sense.
"I know what basic training is like, and I know what a war zone is like, and I know what being on an athletic field is like. I just don't see how they're all similar. It's a metaphor; it sounds good. But that's it."
While those who encourage recruiting athletes point to a long line of successful military people who played sports, critics say the perceived connection is a carryover from history lessons that today's coaches and military leaders refuse to let fade. No one doubts that there was once a strong correlation, from Roman soldiers and Greek Olympians to American Indians who considered lacrosse to be the "little brother to war."
Andy Kozar has studied the writings of many football coaches from the first half of the 20th century, and he says most followed a similar blueprint from the same group of architects, all of whom used war analogies - perhaps none more than Kozar's own college coach.
Some called him Bull and some called him Coach, but to most, Robert Neyland was "The General." That's because the University of Tennessee Hall of Fame coach was also a decorated Army general, going back and forth between his military duties and his football team.
Kozar was an All-America fullback for Neyland more than 50 years ago and vividly remembers sitting in a locker room before a game, studying words Neyland jotted on a chalkboard, maxims such as "Football is a battle. Go out and fight all afternoon."
At practice, Neyland would march around his players, reciting words he believed inspirational to his athletes as well as to his troops. "It's not the guns or armament or the money they can pay. It's the close cooperation that makes them win the day," Neyland would say. "It is not the individual or the army as a whole, but the everlasting teamwork of every single soul."
Long after his playing career was finished, Kozar spent six years studying the writings left by his former coach, eventually publishing a book, Football as a War Game: The Annotated Journals of General R.R. Neyland.
"It really is remarkable the tremendous connection many of these coaches made," Kozar says, "relating the game of football to war and ... to military procedure."
"Upon of the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory."
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, painted on gym wall at West Point
On a clear afternoon in late May, as high schools across the state prepared commencement ceremonies, military recruiters continued to hold regular unofficial inauguration ceremonies. As they awaited their shipping dates for boot camp, recent enlistees regularly met at recruitment centers for physical training.
Behind a strip mall in Glen Burnie, a staff sergeant led the drills. Facing him were two rows of Army recruits - including a high school wrestler, a lacrosse player and a football player - and then a row of cars and minivans, parked against the back of a Home Depot.
"One-two-three," the staff sergeant said, as they stretched.
"One!" his soldiers-in-training barked in unison.
"One-two-three."
"Two!"
The strip-mall scene is nondescript, but when you pick it apart, you get a better idea of the task facing recruiters. This group represents exactly what the Army is after: young men and women, nearly all of whom have competed in a sport, and all dedicated enough to meet for voluntary physical training before boot camp begins.
Each was sold on the military by an Army recruiter, who masters a variety of techniques and pitches. Area recruiters say that in addition to visiting school campuses and speaking to classes, they attend athletic practices and games. They visit gyms and fields, challenging students to chin-up competitions during halftime or strolling through the bleachers during timeouts. Some say they even try to work as volunteer assistant coaches with local athletic teams.
Twenty years ago, Sgt. 1st Class Scott Geise played football, basketball and baseball for Chesapeake High, and today he's a station commander who oversees a staff of eight Army recruiters that covers Anne Arundel County.
Some of Geise's best years in recruiting came when he volunteered as an assistant football coach in Richmond, Va. He attributes his success during that period to being around the school every day and says that many young athletes today cling to ambitions of an athletic scholarship. In his opinion, athletes aren't more prone to enlist.
That hardly stops any military branch from targeting young sports enthusiasts. In fact, numbers reviewed by The Sun revealed that each branch spends several million dollars annually advertising through sports-specific media.
Last year, the Marines spent $1 million in advertising with Spike TV - the cable leader in mixed-martial arts programming - and the Navy sponsors the winter and summer X Games. The Air Force spends money on the Motor Bike Series, the Snowcross racing team and the Pro Wakeboard Series. In addition, the Army, Navy and Air Force each sponsors NASCAR teams, and the Army also stages the U.S. Army All-American Bowl, the annual all-star game featuring the nation's top high school football players.
You can hardly watch a big sporting event without seeing at least one of the branches' commercials. The Army spent more than $6 million in sports-related television advertising last year, including nearly $4.4 million on ESPN alone. The Marines spent $6.5 million with ESPN during the 2005-06 fiscal year.
The target demographic is clear, which is why all branches are continually monitoring the sports viewing habits of 17- to 24-year-olds and why the Air Force has abandoned print advertising to focus its media spending online.
"Those people who watch sports are more inclined to play sports, so it makes good sense for us to communicate to these people," says Cmdr. David Hostetler, director of advertising for the Navy Recruiting Command.
"I want an officer for a secret and dangerous mission. I want a West Point football player."
Gen. George C. Marshall, during World War II
While high school sports might have an impact on a graduate's military career, increasingly schools are taking note of the impact a player-turned-soldier can have on a sports program.
Seventy-seven Marylanders have died in the Iraq war. Of those, at least 29 are known to have had an athletic background before enlistment.
At Hereford High, football coach Steve Turnbaugh's desk is full of photos, including those of former players who have enlisted. In recent years, he says, nearly a dozen of his players chose a life in the military after graduation.
"All those qualities we're asking of kids on the football field, those are the same things the armed services are asking for," Turnbaugh says.
Not a day goes by that Turnbaugh doesn't spend a couple of seconds looking at photos of Norman Anderson and Joshua Snyder, close friends and former teammates who died in Iraq within six weeks of each other in 2005.
Turnbaugh sees Grant Hemmerly, too, a former linebacker who graduated from the school in 2002. He played with Anderson and Snyder on a team that won a state title in 2001. Hemmerly is on his third tour in Iraq. Last fall, he was back in Parkton and visited football practice, telling the new players about life after football, about life in the military.
"When you look at the big picture, a football hero and a military hero just don't compare," Turnbaugh says. "We know that one's a game and one's life and death. All it takes is a bad day, a bad practice or a bad class, and I look at these pictures and it puts it all in perspective. Reminds you that even though you might be able to sit here and identify some similarities, they'll always be very different."
"Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of [bull]. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. ... [Y]ou are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight. When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ballplayers, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American."
Gen. George S. Patton, address to troops, June 1944
In some neighborhoods, it's an aspiration of Baltimore youths: How are you going to get out?
For Kevin Diggs, the answer is the military. To him, going from a high school track career to the Marines is a logical step, but those first several weeks after he enlisted, that didn't stop his mother, Ethel Julius, from calling him into the living room every time she saw a television report of a soldier who had died in battle.
Ken Smith, the athletic director at Southwestern, also wonders sometimes if the military is Diggs' best option. "He's such a special kid," Smith says. "Sometimes I just had to pinch myself."
He knows that Diggs is different from a lot of the other students who have passed through the doors of Southwestern, a giant complex that more closely resembles a prison. After 36 years, the failing school has finally shut its doors for good.
At the high school commencement ceremonies, the graduation motto was repeated by several speakers: "Given less, we still strive for success." Still, beneath the day's festive mood, many seemed to know and accept that for most, high school graduation was a conclusion, not a transition.
"I really wouldn't have anything better to do after high school," Diggs says. "This will be a good opportunity for me to get away from Baltimore. I like to challenge myself - that's why I did sports in the first place - and from what I hear, the Marines have the most challenging training."
In August, Diggs is scheduled to report to basic training in Parris Island, S.C. He has explored his outlets and says he hopes to continue running and competing, no matter where he's stationed. As a child, Diggs played sports and army games with neighborhood friends. His stepfather, Kevin Julius, didn't like him playing with guns, but there were no such restrictions on sports. So Diggs ran from one sport to another.
"You never really think about it when you're a kid, you know," Diggs says. "You're just playing games. It's the same stuff now, but I guess it's not really a game anymore."
On Diggs' graduation day, a red tassel dangled in his face, tickling the skin beneath his scar. He knows that even though what lies in front of him might resemble what's behind him, they're hardly identical. But Diggs says he finds comfort knowing that one might have prepared him for the other.
rick.maese@baltsun.com
Ellie
First in a series
Playing field to battlefield
The concept of sports as preparation for war dates to ancient times - and still thrives as military recruiters seek out future warriors among teenage athletes.
By Rick Maese
Sun Reporter
July 15, 2007
Running has always been an integral part of Kevin Diggs' life, from a childhood accident in which he tripped, knocked his head against the corner of a table and earned an inch-long scar beneath his left eye to a high school career in track and cross country for Southwestern High.
At graduation last month, Diggs had to fight the urge to pump his feet and start sprinting in his black gown. When his name was called, he blew a kiss to the crowd and walked proudly across the stage to accept his diploma. As he walked off the stage, Diggs knew his high school athletic career was behind him and, without a chance to play college sports, a career in the military ahead.
"Of course, there's risk that I'll be sent into war, but I'm not afraid of that," Diggs says matter-of-factly. "I live in Baltimore. It's dangerous in the city. I could die for something as stupid as somebody wanting the watch I'm wearing. I'd rather die in a war for my country than for something stupid like that."
Coming from one of Baltimore's worst-performing schools - the embattled Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts was housed in Southwestern High last year -Diggs, 18, has enlisted in the Marine Corps. He's one of dozens of Marylanders who have recently graduated from high school and soon will learn how an athletic background translates into a military career.
The relationship between sports and the military, a link historically celebrated by presidents, generals and athletic coaches, is more debatable than ever, as the role of each American institution has undergone significant change in the past half-century. But in wartime, as the Department of Defense spends millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to restock its military ranks, many continue to view high school athletic programs as an unofficial feeder system, relying on sports teams to help build the very best soldiers.
"This is a war where you kill or get killed! And I don't know anything that prepares a man for bodily contact, including war, than the kind of training we get on the football field."
Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, 1940-1944
None of the military branches keeps records on the number of troops whose informal training might have come on youth and high school playing fields. A half-dozen recruiters interviewed by The Sun, though, estimated that about 50 percent of the young men and women sent to boot camp each year competed in high school sports.
The best way to quantify the military's reliance on athletics is to look at the nation's esteemed service academies, which chart such figures. The Naval Academy, in Annapolis, and the U.S. Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., both report that about 90 percent of their students competed in high school athletics. At the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs, Colo., 85 percent of last year's student body lettered in at least one high school sport.
In addition, at all three academies, every cadet and midshipman is required to compete in a varsity or intramural sport. In that sense, "every cadet is an athlete," according to one West Point official.
Col. William Walker is a deputy athletics director at the Air Force Academy. He's also a former student, athlete, helicopter pilot and wrestling coach. He can't go a day without running across one of his department's favorite slogans, "Tomorrow's leaders forged through competition today," and says sports is a crucial part of the academy's bigger mission.
"The high level of competition we put our athletes through, that experience really translates well," Walker says. "In the Air Force, obviously a pilot is not as physical as maybe other areas. I see it in the mental aspect, that fierce competitiveness, that indomitable will to win."
Diggs, the graduating senior, chose the Marines, he says, because he felt his athletic achievements in high school prepared him for the military better than his academic experiences prepared him for college. Marine officials say that an athletic background is just part of what they feel makes an ideal warrior. Physical, mental and moral standards are all taken into consideration.
Mark Holman, a master gunnery sergeant, has been recruiting Marines from the Baltimore area for 20 years. He says a high school athlete should have a significant "head start" over a non-athlete.
"I know you think, 'Hey, he's athletic, he's in shape,' but actually, the first thing in my mind is, 'This guy understands what it means to be a part of a team, and he knows what it means to participate in something that's bigger than just himself,' " Holman says.
The sentiment might look good on a poster, and it's precisely what inspires a basketball coach like Bob Knight to accept a nickname like "The General." And it inspires a young Kellen Winslow to declare himself a "soldier," though his battlefield is the football field.
But it also inspires many others to line up and poke holes at the relationship between sports and military, denouncing the parallels as naive or absurd.
"The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."
Duke of Wellington, an Eton alumnus and 19th-century British general who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo
Ilove that," says John C. Phillips. " 'Won on the playing fields of Eton.' ... You develop a winning attitude and learn to test yourself; I like that idea. What a great idea. It just isn't true."
Phillips is a sociology professor at the University of the Pacific. He served in the Army from 1965 to 1967. It's not that he doesn't understand the parallels between sport and military. He can insipidly recite the same buzz words used by football coaches and by military leaders.
"You can talk about these words - competition, discipline, effort - but what goes on in the military is so different from what goes on in sports. The connection is almost zero," he says. "It just doesn't connect with what a soldier actually does."
For starters, he points out that the concept of warfare has evolved, so the idea that a wrestler, a boxer or an offensive lineman might have to replicate his athletic duties on a battlefield is antiquated.
"Today, if you're out of ammunition, you go back to where there is some," he says. "The idea of people facing each other with bayonets just doesn't exist. The reality is, today you can't even see the enemy."
Not only are the stakes different, says Earl Smith, a Wake Forest sociology professor and past president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, but the surviving comparison between sport and military is merely a byproduct of "sociological imagination." Smith has spent a professional lifetime studying sport, and he served in the Air Force from 1964 to 1968. He says the strongest parallel he sees is the "hyper-masculinity" that festers in the underbelly of both.
In addition, "there's the same sense of gender segregation, and when you have that, you get rapes, you get harassment, you get Abu Ghraib, you get the Colorado football mess," he says, referring to sex and abuse scandals that rocked the U.S. Army and the University of Colorado's football program. "Other than that, it's a stretch. The analogy really doesn't make sense.
"I know what basic training is like, and I know what a war zone is like, and I know what being on an athletic field is like. I just don't see how they're all similar. It's a metaphor; it sounds good. But that's it."
While those who encourage recruiting athletes point to a long line of successful military people who played sports, critics say the perceived connection is a carryover from history lessons that today's coaches and military leaders refuse to let fade. No one doubts that there was once a strong correlation, from Roman soldiers and Greek Olympians to American Indians who considered lacrosse to be the "little brother to war."
Andy Kozar has studied the writings of many football coaches from the first half of the 20th century, and he says most followed a similar blueprint from the same group of architects, all of whom used war analogies - perhaps none more than Kozar's own college coach.
Some called him Bull and some called him Coach, but to most, Robert Neyland was "The General." That's because the University of Tennessee Hall of Fame coach was also a decorated Army general, going back and forth between his military duties and his football team.
Kozar was an All-America fullback for Neyland more than 50 years ago and vividly remembers sitting in a locker room before a game, studying words Neyland jotted on a chalkboard, maxims such as "Football is a battle. Go out and fight all afternoon."
At practice, Neyland would march around his players, reciting words he believed inspirational to his athletes as well as to his troops. "It's not the guns or armament or the money they can pay. It's the close cooperation that makes them win the day," Neyland would say. "It is not the individual or the army as a whole, but the everlasting teamwork of every single soul."
Long after his playing career was finished, Kozar spent six years studying the writings left by his former coach, eventually publishing a book, Football as a War Game: The Annotated Journals of General R.R. Neyland.
"It really is remarkable the tremendous connection many of these coaches made," Kozar says, "relating the game of football to war and ... to military procedure."
"Upon of the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory."
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, painted on gym wall at West Point
On a clear afternoon in late May, as high schools across the state prepared commencement ceremonies, military recruiters continued to hold regular unofficial inauguration ceremonies. As they awaited their shipping dates for boot camp, recent enlistees regularly met at recruitment centers for physical training.
Behind a strip mall in Glen Burnie, a staff sergeant led the drills. Facing him were two rows of Army recruits - including a high school wrestler, a lacrosse player and a football player - and then a row of cars and minivans, parked against the back of a Home Depot.
"One-two-three," the staff sergeant said, as they stretched.
"One!" his soldiers-in-training barked in unison.
"One-two-three."
"Two!"
The strip-mall scene is nondescript, but when you pick it apart, you get a better idea of the task facing recruiters. This group represents exactly what the Army is after: young men and women, nearly all of whom have competed in a sport, and all dedicated enough to meet for voluntary physical training before boot camp begins.
Each was sold on the military by an Army recruiter, who masters a variety of techniques and pitches. Area recruiters say that in addition to visiting school campuses and speaking to classes, they attend athletic practices and games. They visit gyms and fields, challenging students to chin-up competitions during halftime or strolling through the bleachers during timeouts. Some say they even try to work as volunteer assistant coaches with local athletic teams.
Twenty years ago, Sgt. 1st Class Scott Geise played football, basketball and baseball for Chesapeake High, and today he's a station commander who oversees a staff of eight Army recruiters that covers Anne Arundel County.
Some of Geise's best years in recruiting came when he volunteered as an assistant football coach in Richmond, Va. He attributes his success during that period to being around the school every day and says that many young athletes today cling to ambitions of an athletic scholarship. In his opinion, athletes aren't more prone to enlist.
That hardly stops any military branch from targeting young sports enthusiasts. In fact, numbers reviewed by The Sun revealed that each branch spends several million dollars annually advertising through sports-specific media.
Last year, the Marines spent $1 million in advertising with Spike TV - the cable leader in mixed-martial arts programming - and the Navy sponsors the winter and summer X Games. The Air Force spends money on the Motor Bike Series, the Snowcross racing team and the Pro Wakeboard Series. In addition, the Army, Navy and Air Force each sponsors NASCAR teams, and the Army also stages the U.S. Army All-American Bowl, the annual all-star game featuring the nation's top high school football players.
You can hardly watch a big sporting event without seeing at least one of the branches' commercials. The Army spent more than $6 million in sports-related television advertising last year, including nearly $4.4 million on ESPN alone. The Marines spent $6.5 million with ESPN during the 2005-06 fiscal year.
The target demographic is clear, which is why all branches are continually monitoring the sports viewing habits of 17- to 24-year-olds and why the Air Force has abandoned print advertising to focus its media spending online.
"Those people who watch sports are more inclined to play sports, so it makes good sense for us to communicate to these people," says Cmdr. David Hostetler, director of advertising for the Navy Recruiting Command.
"I want an officer for a secret and dangerous mission. I want a West Point football player."
Gen. George C. Marshall, during World War II
While high school sports might have an impact on a graduate's military career, increasingly schools are taking note of the impact a player-turned-soldier can have on a sports program.
Seventy-seven Marylanders have died in the Iraq war. Of those, at least 29 are known to have had an athletic background before enlistment.
At Hereford High, football coach Steve Turnbaugh's desk is full of photos, including those of former players who have enlisted. In recent years, he says, nearly a dozen of his players chose a life in the military after graduation.
"All those qualities we're asking of kids on the football field, those are the same things the armed services are asking for," Turnbaugh says.
Not a day goes by that Turnbaugh doesn't spend a couple of seconds looking at photos of Norman Anderson and Joshua Snyder, close friends and former teammates who died in Iraq within six weeks of each other in 2005.
Turnbaugh sees Grant Hemmerly, too, a former linebacker who graduated from the school in 2002. He played with Anderson and Snyder on a team that won a state title in 2001. Hemmerly is on his third tour in Iraq. Last fall, he was back in Parkton and visited football practice, telling the new players about life after football, about life in the military.
"When you look at the big picture, a football hero and a military hero just don't compare," Turnbaugh says. "We know that one's a game and one's life and death. All it takes is a bad day, a bad practice or a bad class, and I look at these pictures and it puts it all in perspective. Reminds you that even though you might be able to sit here and identify some similarities, they'll always be very different."
"Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of [bull]. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. ... [Y]ou are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight. When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ballplayers, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American."
Gen. George S. Patton, address to troops, June 1944
In some neighborhoods, it's an aspiration of Baltimore youths: How are you going to get out?
For Kevin Diggs, the answer is the military. To him, going from a high school track career to the Marines is a logical step, but those first several weeks after he enlisted, that didn't stop his mother, Ethel Julius, from calling him into the living room every time she saw a television report of a soldier who had died in battle.
Ken Smith, the athletic director at Southwestern, also wonders sometimes if the military is Diggs' best option. "He's such a special kid," Smith says. "Sometimes I just had to pinch myself."
He knows that Diggs is different from a lot of the other students who have passed through the doors of Southwestern, a giant complex that more closely resembles a prison. After 36 years, the failing school has finally shut its doors for good.
At the high school commencement ceremonies, the graduation motto was repeated by several speakers: "Given less, we still strive for success." Still, beneath the day's festive mood, many seemed to know and accept that for most, high school graduation was a conclusion, not a transition.
"I really wouldn't have anything better to do after high school," Diggs says. "This will be a good opportunity for me to get away from Baltimore. I like to challenge myself - that's why I did sports in the first place - and from what I hear, the Marines have the most challenging training."
In August, Diggs is scheduled to report to basic training in Parris Island, S.C. He has explored his outlets and says he hopes to continue running and competing, no matter where he's stationed. As a child, Diggs played sports and army games with neighborhood friends. His stepfather, Kevin Julius, didn't like him playing with guns, but there were no such restrictions on sports. So Diggs ran from one sport to another.
"You never really think about it when you're a kid, you know," Diggs says. "You're just playing games. It's the same stuff now, but I guess it's not really a game anymore."
On Diggs' graduation day, a red tassel dangled in his face, tickling the skin beneath his scar. He knows that even though what lies in front of him might resemble what's behind him, they're hardly identical. But Diggs says he finds comfort knowing that one might have prepared him for the other.
rick.maese@baltsun.com
Ellie