What Is It Like Attending a Military Academy?

Winter can be bleak.  I never really understood this.  Growing up in Houston, our winter months had some of the best weather and we had holidays to kick it off.  Then I went to military school in Virginia.  And tried my hand at shoveling snow.

Our school was located nestled in the foothills just before the Blue Ridge mountains.  It was a picturesque place, to be honest, and featured all four seasons – including winter.  It did not snow all the time, but we were good for at least 5 honest-to-goodness snowfalls, and at least one of them would be at least 4-6”.

I joined military school in January 2003, halfway through my freshman year.  I had no idea what was in store for me.

I was miserable at first.  I didn’t know anyone (my family and friends were 1,000 miles away in Texas).  I was a RAT (Recruit At Training), I couldn’t keep any electronics in my room, just cleaning supplies, clothes, and books.  The one thing I wasn’t depressed about was the weather – there was snow on the ground!

A few weeks in, while I still struggled to fit in, make friends (or at least avoid enemies), a fresh round of snow fell overnight.  This was fantastic for me.  Instantly my spirits were buoyed –  outside of one Christmas I spent at my grandma’s house in Ohio, I had never really seen snow fall and stick like that.

After classes, the assistant commandant (who we all, affectionately or otherwise, referred to as “Mast Sarnt”, that is, Master Sergeant) was gathering a crew of troublemakers to shovel the snow.  I had so far stayed out of trouble, but I asked them if I could join them to shovel snow.  I had always wanted to, it looked like fun to my idiot 14-year-old self.  He looked at me like I was crazy, for a minute, and then shrugged and gave me a shovel.

That was when I realized, not just intellectually but deep into my muscle memory, that snow is really just ice, and calling it fluffy is an insult to the accumulated precipitation that is snowbanks.  It was heavy.  It was slippery.  It was freezing, burning cold.  And at the bottom wasn’t the sidewalk, but a thick layer of nothing but pure ice.  We were scraping snow off the ice, but never getting to the pavement.

It wasn’t perfect.  It was messy and it was exhausting.  I hacked away at the ice, but got nowhere.  Eventually I moved on to the battles I could win – clearing off snow from other parts of the quad.  Eventually, though, we had removed as much of the snow as we could, and we were finished.  We couldn’t get it perfect, but we did enough.

The environment did the rest.  We added salt afterwards, and that lowered the freezing temperature.  Meanwhile, the sun heated up the now-exposed sidewalk.  It was enough for the pavement to be clear by the end of the day.

I think about that day every December.  It helps me remember that sometimes, you need to pick your battles.  You cant fix everything.  Instead, sometimes its enough to work hard on what you can take care of, and let nature take care of the rest.  Another lesson military school taught me.