Prelude

Narrator

Marcia Shevat was fourteen years old when the event that would shake her life occurred. Born and raised on Army posts, she had lived in and moved to more military towns by age twelve than most civilians move in a lifetime. Marcia was living in Fort Riley, Kansas, with her parents at the time of the event that would determine the course of the rest of her life.

Marcia had learned to swim the summer before she started Kindergarten and had continued to take swim classes through fourth grade. Then, at age ten, Marcia was taught to swim competitively at Fort Leonard Wood. Marcia was a member of the YMCA swimming team under the twelve divisions and transferred to the YMCA all-swimming team.

From age twelve until she was fourteen, Marcia would swim in every event she could. It looked as if she would compete in the Pan Am Games, then the Junior Worlds, and be ready for the Olympics during her college years.

One day she returned home after a high school swim meet to find a chaplain, a Major from her father’s unit, and a Senior Master Sergeant sitting in the living room of the base house. Her mother was weeping, her brothers were stone silent. Marcia knew this was very bad. She dropped her swim duffle bag and ran in to ask her mother what had happened.

“Your father,” her mother sobbed, “he’s...” and could go no further. The Chaplain said, “Marcia, your father has died in a field training exercise. ’Training my ass,’ Marcia thought. ‘He died on a mission in a country he shouldn’t have been in.’ It happened to the hummer your father was in. He was trapped after it rolled over while they failed to climb a muddy grade bank. He died when an exposed tree root busted the windshield and penetrated his chest. There was nothing anyone could do.”

Life was a blur after that, and although the Army was very sorry for our loss, the Shevat family still had to vacate the post-housing within six months of the death. The only plus was the Veteran’s benefits (money, the continuation of medical, and the IDs that let us shop at the base PX Note: PX stands for Post Exchange. Think of it as a military version of a Walmart supercenter). They settled into a smaller modular home in Lawrence, Kansas, and tried to get on with their lives as normally as possible.

Modesty was not something swimmers and divers were known for, as ill-fitting team suits were notorious for dropping off a diver in an entry or a swimmer hoisting her body up a ladder from the pool. Indeed, Marcia herself had been a victim of such a ‘water stripping.’ When she first transferred to the civilian high school and tried out for the swim team she was issued a team swimsuit marked her size but felt loose. Launching off the starting block for a hundred-meter freestyle event she lost the straps on the top of the suit entering the water and lost the rest of the bathing suit mid-pool on the return.

A newspaper photo of Marcia, with one hand raised in victory while the other clutched a hastily grabbed towel barely covering her front, was clipped and pasted in many of the school’s lockers, both male and female.

A fifth place in the Olympic trials, while not good enough to secure a place on the team higher than the second alternate, got the attention of several good Midwestern Universities. Marcia decided on the all-expenses scholarship to the University just outside Chicago. In exchange for her athletics, Marcia would receive room, board, books, fees, travel expenses, and a team uniform allowance. A mandatory grade point average of 3.0 was an expectation of the school. She and her mother expected a 3.5.