Making Friends at the Army-Air Force Game
My weekend road trip!
The Army-Air Force football game was played on Saturday, November 4, at Empower Stadium, the home of the Denver Broncos. I drove over from Sioux Falls on Friday, attended the game on Saturday, and returned on Sunday. It’s a 600-plus mile drive each way. I am a road trip kind of guy.
Going to a top-tier stadium and experiencing the experience was a lot of fun. The actual game, not so much. Air Force played a terrible game, and Army beat them badly. The Army quarterback scored a long touchdown on the first play from scrimmage, and it was downhill from there—final score, Army: 23, Air Force: 3.
Back at my hotel, I drowned my sorrows with a $50 pour of 20-year-old bourbon. It was excellent whiskey!
I stayed at the Hotel Indigo in downtown Denver. The location allowed me to walk to the game and back. A significant number of West Point class of ‘77 grads stayed in the hotel. I had interesting conversations with several of them.
One such Army grad was Chris Fishunt, USMA, ’77. He was a high school classmate of one of my Air Force Academy classmates and a fellow F-16 pilot. When Chris found out I would be driving back to Sioux Falls, he asked if he could join me and be dropped off in Scottsbluff, NE. I knew that Scottsbluff wasn’t much of a detour to my return route, so I said OK.
Early on Sunday, we loaded our gear (Chris had a lot of gear!) in my truck, and we were on the road by 6:30. It was a fun 3-hour drive to Scottsbluff. Chris is quite the storyteller and shared tales from his days as a USMA cadet, Ranger school, and his current life in Alaska.
I most enjoyed comparing life at USMA to that at USAFA during the same time frame. We had very different experiences. Life at West Point was very focused on class rank. Even to the point that cadets there would be divided into class rank groups. Chris seemed to spend a lot of time in Group D while attending his classes.
We also compared a few of the many meaningless lists, poems, and sayings we had to memorize as first-year cadets and spew out when pressured by upperclassmen.
Chris was fascinated by what I told him about the USAFA physical fitness test. He said they just had to run two miles in combat boots. We had to take and pass the test twice a year at the Air Force Academy.
The following exercises had to be completed within 15 minutes:
Pullups
Standing long jump
Pushups
Situps
600-yard run
Each exercise scored points for the number of reps completed (time for the 600-yard run) with a minimum score. There were also minimums for each exercise. If you hit the min for every exercise, you would earn a passing score. I quickly learned the mnemonic that would guarantee a passing score. Chris made me repeat it so he could record a video. Here is how it goes:
Seven drop, Seven hop, 30, 50, Two, Stop
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