Army-Navy is the can't-miss game that some must miss

They are national stalwarts in every way, including when it comes to simply showing up in the stands. It’s the Army-Navy game, so there they are. They almost never miss. For decades, they have rearranged their lives to be there.

Why do they go?

How could they not?

“When you go for that first time, you’ve heard about it, but when you’re in that stadium, you get it, my goodness, you really get it,” Clint Carroll, Navy Class of 1989, said on the phone this week. “You realize you’re connected to these people. The word I would use is noble. It’s the nobleness of who we are and why we serve.”

There have been times for almost all of them, however, when an Army-Navy game comes and goes, and they could not be there. They had their reasons.

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“I missed in 1968,” said Al Vanderbush, a retired colonel and former Army athletic director who played football and baseball at West Point, Class of 1961, and later was inducted into the Army Sports Hall of Fame.

“I was in Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta, working as an adviser to a Vietnamese unit.”

Carroll is an active-duty Navy captain who serves as the Navy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I’ve watched the game while deployed in the Arabian Gulf, the South China Sea, the coast of Africa and the Mediterranean until 2007, when I started going again in person,” he said. “I missed it again last year when I was returning from deployment and was about three days out from home port in San Diego.”

They’ve gathered around radios in Quonset huts in the Korean DMZ in the 1960s. They’ve awoken early in Hawaii to watch on television in the 1970s. They've put up movie screens to watch on ships at sea in the 21st century.

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Then, when they come back home, they return to the game. Vanderbush and his wife, Carin Cone Vanderbush, the 1956 Olympic silver medalist in the 100-meter backstroke, have been in attendance at about 25 Army-Navy games. She sees some parallels between the Olympics and this game.

“The electricity is equal,” she said. “It’s very meaningful. Both are played for the glory of winning that particular game or event, not for whatever money they’re going to get later in the pros. In my day, everyone left the Olympics and went on to their lives, and for those involved in the Army-Navy game, they go on to defend our country.”

Cadets and midshipmen understandably and admirably miss the game on occasion, but there are others who have almost perfect attendance records.

Larry Katz, a 62-year-old clinical scientist from Newtown, Pa., will attend his 38th Army-Navy game Saturday. “I’ve been going to West Point for games for 53 years in a row and Army-Navy games for 45 years. My father started taking me and now I’m taking my son, who has been to about 25 Army-Navy games — and he’s only 30.”

Why? “It really can stir your patriotism and make you feel good,” he said. “I was not in the military and am not a military nut by any means, but I’m very supportive of our troops, and these are the people who will be leading the military and protecting our freedoms. These men and women are sacrificing themselves and making a commitment to something bigger than themselves.”

Kerry O’Shanick, 61, was an assistant men’s lacrosse coach at Navy who hasn’t missed an Army-Navy game since 1983.

“It’s the best thing in sports,” he said. “It’s Army-Navy, yes, but it’s America’s game. Look at who plays in the game. They might not be as talented as the athletes at the big Division I football schools, but their heart is bigger. People should be so proud of them and what they do for us.”

Vanderbush left for Vietnam not long after attending the 1967 game — won by Navy — and arrived at his post on Christmas Eve, little more than a month before the North Vietnamese launched the bloody Tet offensive.

By the next fall, “things had quieted down,” he said. “It was relatively calm in the area we were in.”

So, on the day before the 1968 Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, in the South Vietnamese town of My Tho, he and his fellow Army officers, as well as some enlisted soldiers, challenged a group of their Navy peers to a game of flag football.

Vanderbush played quarterback for Army. The score has been lost to history, but he said it wasn’t close. “We won by a good margin.”

A day later, Vanderbush got up in the middle of the night and turned on Armed Forces Radio to listen to the real Army-Navy game. It turned out to be a very good weekend. Army was two for two.

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