Chapter 21: Senior Year

Tuesday, November 7, 1972

It was about halfway through the fall semester of my senior year. All sorts of things were going on. Today was the day Tricky Dick was reelected President of these United States. The man was a seriously flawed but seriously underestimated man. Nixon probably had the finest mind for foreign policy of any President since the end of the Second World War. He also, very surprisingly considering he was a hard-core Republican, signed into law a plethora of domestic regulation legislation, including the Clean Air Act, the EPA, the war on cancer, and the Title IX reforms that increased women’s presence in sports, all of which his future Republican successors would blame on the Democrats as socialism. He was also incredibly paranoid and committed any number of crimes as the President. Angel or demon? I’ve been following politics since his time, and I still don’t have the answer. He was certainly no worse than some of the buffoons who followed him.

Today was also the day I received my early admission notice to Rensselaer, along with a big packet related to financial aid. I shitcanned that. I wasn’t going to get anything in financial aid through the college. For one thing, looking through the FAFSA financial aid forms I noticed that it required a list of my assets. The average student at the time might have been able to save up anywhere from a few hundred bucks up to a grand; I had over seventy grand in the brokerage. No need-based scholarships for this student.

There were a couple of different alternatives. One was that I was way, way up in the class standings. Apparently, A grades at a college counted extra in the class rankings calculations. The odds were good that I would get some scholarships given simply to the top student in a field, probably math. However, the scholarship I was really banking on was different. I was applying for a ROTC scholarship.

I had given this a fair bit of thought, both this time and the first time around. I skipped it then. Back when I was choosing colleges and trying to figure things out, we were still involved in Viet Nam, and despite the glowing reviews of the beauty of Southeast Asia given by the recruiters, that was an insane and stupid war. My parents wouldn’t have stopped me from joining, but they wouldn’t have helped me along either. While I could join the army at seventeen, I would need their signatures to do it, and there was no way in the world they would sign off on me quitting high school to do that. I could get a military scholarship or drop out of college and join.

That brought me to a second reason I didn’t do it way back when. I went to school as a chemistry major, and the BIG topic in military science in the Seventies was something called binary nerve agents - nerve gas. Now, mind you, I was always a good lab chemist. I had excellent technique and routinely handled toxic and carcinogenic materials with ease. Nerve gas scared the bejeezus out of me! Forget about getting it on you in any way - just looking at it funny is enough to make you twitchy the rest of your life! I knew that if I got out of a high-end technical college like RPI with a chemistry degree, my duty station was going to be Dugway Proving Ground, hoping like hell the wind didn’t shift and spread gaseous hell all over me. No thanks!

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I knew the Army could be done safely. After we got out of Viet Nam, the Army saw relatively little action for about another decade. Grenada was in ‘83 and fairly small, and Panama was in ‘89 and not much bigger. Things didn’t start getting dicey again until the ‘90s. If I got out of RPI with a math degree or two, I would almost certainly be assigned to a nice warm non-chemical lab somewhere.

Furthermore, the military is something of a family business for the Buckmans. We’ve been here since the 1750s, and while we managed to avoid the Revolution, every generation of Buckmans since has served in some form of the military, right from the second generation, which served in the Maryland Militia during the War of 1812. (That might not be the best of examples, considering the Maryland Militia led the retreat at the Battle of Bladensburg. A Buckman probably led the way. We gloss over those details.) Mind you, we’ve never been movers and shakers, and I don’t think anybody got much higher than a sergeant or lieutenant, but we always served.

We had a wall in the family room with photos of family members in uniform that I can remember from when I was little; my mother laughingly called it the ‘Wall of Heroes.’ There’s a photo of my grandfather (Dad’s dad, who I’m named after) in his army uniform from World War I, complete to campaign hat and puttees. There were several photos of Dad in his naval uniform during World War II. Over the years it would include Hamilton in his army uniform when he joined the Maryland National Guard, and Suzie’s husband and two of her sons, who were in the Marines, and Parker, who went Navy. I was about the only family member who never served. There was never any pressure on us, but we always knew it was an honorable choice to make, and one which would be approved of. After Mom passed away, Suzie took over the wall and mounted it in her house; it will probably pass down to one of her boys.

The biggest reason that I was going the military route was that I just wanted to do something I had never done before. Was I supposed to go through this life just repeating what I had done before? Or could I do better? It wasn’t about the money, either. I had already proved to myself that my knowledge of future events could pay off for me. I wouldn’t be poor and would probably be much richer. Still the idea of just watching the money roll in was too sterile. Yes, I could do it, but couldn’t I do more?

So, I pushed myself to do things that I had never done before, things that I could say I had earned on my own, and not because I knew about the future. I did aikido and worked out. I was going to get a doctorate. Now I was going to try the Army. I wanted to be challenged. Before, in my first life, I had always wanted jobs where there was a challenge and a payoff, sales for instance, or something that would let me stand out.

I had solidified my acceptance with a school visit to RPI over the summer. One of the things I remembered dramatically from the summer of ‘72 were the school visits I made that summer. The first visit I was to make was to the University of Rochester (accepted) and then Syracuse University (not impressed.) Both were to be done the weekend of June 23-25, which just happened to be the same days that Hurricane Agnes came ashore and ran straight up the Chesapeake Bay, ripped north up the Susquehanna River valley, and died in western New York. Dad insisted we all drive up, and it took us eight hours to go north about 60 miles, give up, and turn around.

Now, to a Marylander, hurricanes are more of a nuisance than anything else. We don’t get all that many, being north of the expected tracks for the average hurricane. Further, the real damage from a hurricane will come from two sources. The high winds can throw a lot of debris around, and the storm surge can flood things. Still, unless you live near the water’s edge or in low lying areas, the water won’t get you, and as for debris, a sturdy house protects you and you stay away from the windows. Unless it’s a Category 4 or 5, you just wait it out. I remember when my parents retired, they took a trip out to Arizona, just in time for a very freaky Pacific hurricane that ran up the Gulf of California. The locals were going crazy, but my folks were just going, “So what?”

I didn’t remember the specific dates of Hurricane Agnes, but I did know the normal hurricane season runs from June through November, and the hurricanes are named alphabetically, so Agnes would have been in the beginning of the season. I made my visit at the end of July, about a month after Agnes blew through.

The visit was interesting. Troy is about 350 miles north of Baltimore, so I was going to drive up on Friday, do my interview Saturday morning, and then drive back in the late afternoon. Normally there are two routes, a coastal route, and an inland route. The coastal route takes I-95 up to New York, and then the New York Thruway up to Albany. The inland route takes you up the Harrisburg Expressway, I-83, to Harrisburg, and then I-81 up to Binghamton. From there you take I-88 up to Albany. From Albany you take I-787 to Troy. The only problem was that in the early Seventies, most of I-88 was still under construction, leaving partial rides on Route 7. I took the coastal route.

I stayed in a no-name motel in Watervliet Friday night. In the future, especially after 9-11, you couldn’t do that without credit cards, but I simply paid cash, and nobody cared. The next morning, dressed in a blue blazer and pressed khakis, I showed up at RPI and parked near the Student Union. Inside the Admissions office I was met by a student who gave me a fascinating tour, although it was fascinating as much for what the young man got wrong as what he got right. He was a sophomore and had probably learned where the bathrooms were just the previous week. I had forgotten more about the school than this kid had learned.

After a delicious lunch in the freshman dining hall, with food of a quality only seen during parent visits, I met with an assistant to an assistant for the interview. The biggest issue the interviewer had was where my parents were. My response, that ‘I was pretty independent.’, didn’t quite penetrate. He kept asking about how they were going to find out about financial aid, and what if they had questions about the school. He finally passed me along to another person higher up the food chain who was much more at ease with me and actually took the time to review my transcripts and SAT scores. He was most impressed with the two papers I had my name on and quizzed me closely about them.

A lot of colleges proclaim they want a varied and well-balanced student body. They really stress they want students who have diverse interests. Rensselaer had a slightly different perspective. They wanted really smart nerds. Diverse interests were limited to making sure they met the various minimum quotas of minorities the federal government was looking for. When my second interviewer asked about my hobbies, I pulled out my wallet and showed him a picture of Jeana in a short sundress and high heeled sandals. He just grinned and said he had had similar hobbies when he was in high school.

Now, with my acceptance to RPI in the bag, I just needed to apply to the Army by the end of the year. My grades would be more than sufficient, and I was sure I could pass any background check. I just needed four letters of reference. I asked Pastor Joe (himself an Air Force vet), Mr. Steiner (a Marine on Guadalcanal), Mrs. Rogers, my math tutor, and Professor Milhaus, the chemistry professor who had helped during the Science Fair. All agreed to write me letters of recommendation, although Mrs. Rogers and Professor Milhaus thought I was throwing away my talents. It was easy enough to ask, since these were the same people I got to write my letters of reference for admission to RPI. I would need to have an interview with an officer after they got my formal application and letters, and enough of a background check to make it worth their while to take me.