She explained the drill: four years of math, four years of English, three years of science, two years of foreign language. I asked her if there was any way I could get credit for studying Latin instead of the Spanish, French, or German our school offered. Her eyebrows made that same ascent and she said she didn’t see how that would work, and besides, for a military officer who might be stationed overseas, French would be a much more useful language.
I spited her by enrolling in Spanish instead, and on my own time I studied Latin. By the time I was a junior, the principal was sufficiently impressed with my resolve that he signed off on the deal that let me out of study hall twice a week to bus over to the community college to take Latin classes there.
It’s hard for me to explain what Latin means to me. My guidance counselor had been right: It wasn’t at all useful to a military career. But to be fair, I think Latin got me into West Point, because studying it was how I learned I could do difficult things. Hard things had happened to me-my father’s death, most of all-but Latin was the first burden I picked up of my own choice.
It has to be said that I wasn’t squeaky clean in high school. I got in some fights, and I got in some backseats. I can’t say I don’t know what a meth high feels like. You have to grow up in a small town to understand. On Friday and Saturday nights, things go on in farmhouses that would shock the ghetto. But I was always in homeroom with my schoolwork done on Monday morning, so the adults around me never knew. That’s something that all smart kids figure out pretty early on: As long as your grades are good and you don’t smoke or wear heavy eyeliner, the authority figures around you generally don’t look any deeper than that.