Today at lunch the First Captain announced the death of a 2000 grad. He said he died in an Apache helicopter accident in Korea. I'm sure some of the firsties knew him when he was here because he was the company commander of H1 and the Brigade Information Security Officer. We had a moment of silence for him during the meal. During the Vietnam War there used to be a lot of announcements like that one because of all of the recent grads going off straight into the war. A 2nd LT lasted an average of 2 weeks in the jungle. What courage those young men must have had back then as cadets listening to those announcements knowing that in only a few months that could be their name being announced and yet they still choose to stay. The class of '01 and now the class of '02 are being shipped off to Afghanistan and every so often a report comes back of someone's heroic deed. It's an honor to say that I following in their footsteps and possibly even know some of them personally.

This afternoon the Supe gave my class his usual beginning of academic year briefing. It began with the whole "your class did great this summer, congratulations. Look at some of these exciting changes that we're making around campus, but they won't be finished untill after your class has graduated." It was the same thing last year. He did mention something new, however, and that was that they're thinking about drastically shortening intersession this year. In past years it's been the 2 weeks right after Christmas break, but this year they're thinkng about moving the majority of the classes that we recieve during that time and intergrating them into the normal academic year scheduale during Deans of Comm's hours. Someone asked him what the plans were for all the extra days if that did happend and he had two answers. The first was adding more days onto the academic year and that recieved a lot of boo'ing. The other answer got him a long standing ovation because he jokingly suggested a 3 week spring break. That would be awesome, but would never happen. Getting more vacation time here is like pulling a hippo's teeth. This year they actually cut down the number of passes and made it a lot harder to earn an extra pass. I only have 2 this semester and am using one of them this weekend.