by Steve Pfarrer

THE GOLDEN FLEECE: HIGH-RISK
ADVENTURE AT WEST POINT

By Tom Carhart

Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press

tomcarhart.net

Florence writer Tom Carhart has penned several books on U.S. military history, from the Civil War to the Vietnam War, and he has served as a civilian policy analyst and historian for the army. He also is a West Point graduate who was wounded twice in Vietnam while serving with the 101st Airborne Division.

But in his newest book, “The Golden Fleece,” Carhart tells a more light-hearted story: how he and five West Point classmates pulled off an outrageous stunt by stealing a billy goat, a mascot of the U.S. Naval Academy, right before the 1965 Army-Navy football game. To do that, Carhart and his fellow seniors had to penetrate tight naval security and distract Marine guards and get the animal back to West Point.

Carhart has also worked as a lawyer and taught military history at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. He explains that “The Golden Fleece” chronicles a sort of last hurrah for him and his classmates, as they knew they’d be heading into combat in Vietnam the following year.

Indeed, of 579 cadets from the West Point class of 1966, 30 died in Vietnam and nearly five times that number, including Carhart, were wounded.

“The Golden Fleece” is both a memoir of Carhart’s years at West Point and the story of stealing the navy’s goat, which other cadets had done 10 years earlier. Ever since then, Carhart writes, two weeks before the Army-Navy football game, the goat had been transferred to the navy’s highest security station, where it was guarded round the clock by Marines who had orders to “shoot trespassers on sight, and shoot to kill.”

“But we didn’t really believe that and were not deterred at all,” Carhart writes.

The description of the plan and execution of the mission to steal the goat a second time makes for entertaining reading — as does the aftermath, when Carhart and his fellow kidnappers were called before the brass at West Point, as they’d violated a slew of academy regulations with their action.

But the academy’s commander told Carhart he had to admit he admired the panache and skill with which the cadets had pulled off their prank, especially against a rival branch of service: “After a full appraisal, and as one West Pointer to another, I can only say to you as I have said to your classmates in this operation, those magical words from our alma mater: Well done.”

Carhart, whose brother Judd, of Amherst, was a longtime state judge, includes an introduction to his book by former U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, who was a classmate of Carhart’s at West Point. The two men also co-authored Clark’s 2007 autobiography, “A Time to Lead.”

 

WHILE I DANCED ALONE WITH
THE MOON ACROSS THE YARD

By Teri O’Brien

Designed and printed by James McDonald

Haydenville in the 1950s and 1960s was a busier place than it is today, though still pretty self-contained. As Teri O’Brien writes in her memoir of growing up there, the center of town had a bank, a post office, an apple storehouse, an American Legion hall, a grocery store and TV repair shop, and a building housing the fire department, a funeral parlor and the Grange Hall.

It was a “typical New England mill town” without any actual operating mills, writes O’Brien in “While I Danced Alone with the Moon Across the Yard.” There was only the ruined Brass Shop building, and, as she says: “Even I threw rocks at the windows.”

O’Brien, who works as a housekeeper at Smith College, describes what it was like to grow up with seven siblings: three brothers and four sisters. Her mother, she writes, had her hands full raising all these children but later got a job as a cook.

Her father, a tool and die maker and machinist, was something of a disciplinarian: If you ran up and down the stairs, for instance, “he would make you walk up and down the stairs around 20 times … The worst part of the deal was you had to keep count … [and] if he did not like your answer you would have to start back at number one.”

In the end, her story is one of growing up with very little money but “a love of family … [My parents] gave us strength and showed us love through small doses of courage … I do not believe I could have accomplished what I have done in my life without my parents’ guidance and patience.”

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.