If you have never been to an Army-Navy football game, I wish you could have been standing next to me Saturday at the Linc during the national anthem. It was as spectacular as the amazing December blue sky above. It was so beautiful that it made me squint. I was all eyebrows and pupils. An observer might think I was fighting the glare of the winter sun. But I knew my squint was caused by something more like love and hurt, and yes, pride.

You cannot witness the Army-Navy football game without sensing a pride beyond time, beyond Carthage, let alone the Constitution. In a house full of warriors, I almost cried. Just a little. But in such company I didn't want to go moist in public. Looking around, I noticed a lot of men my age squinting during the national anthem for the same reason. It wasn't the sun. It was the sons. And the daughters. And the grandfathers of America being transfixed at the same moment by the song we've heard a million times, but never quite get.

The national anthem is a civic ceremony as familiar as saying grace without feeling it. But in the windswept chill of South Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon, the men and women of the combined choruses of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis sang the Star Spangled Banner with voices that sounded like their lungs were filled with pure oxygen.

Every word from "Oh, say can you see" was as clear as as a bell, each familiar word swelling with new meaning carried by more than a hundred voices singing with military harmonic precision and personal conviction. The power of those voices could have lifted that stadium off the ground.

And hearing them sing with America still at war, you couldn't help but feel the struggle of pride wrestling with sadness. These magnificent young people are the tip of the spear, the next generation of Americans who will gladly step into harm's way upon orders from their commander and chief. President Bush did not attend this year's Army-Navy game. Instead, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (yes, he's still on the clock) was his proxy, watching half the game with the Midshipmen of Navy and half the game with the Cadets of Army.

When Rumsfeld was introduced he was greeted enthusiastically, which makes sense in a stadium filled with people who honor the chain of command. But all I could think of was the mess in Iraq, and who got us into it, and how it was allowed to become such a mess. And there for the first time it struck me. In all these years how could I have not noticed before? How could we expect anything but a military misadventure when its chief architect has the nickname "Rummy."

The New York Times reported yesterday that two days before he resigned, Rumsfeld sent a memo to the White House saying it was time for a "major readjustment" in Iraq. "Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough," Rumsfeld wrote. Imagine millions of Americans reading those words and responding with the same three-word expression stating the obvious (ends with "Sherlock").

The memo has the sound of a drunken driver who winds up in a ditch on the wrong side of the road who asks responding police officers, "What am I doing over here?" Rumsfeld's memo continued. "Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) - go minimalist," he wrote. Go minimalist. He actually talks that way. And I tried to imagine him saying those words Saturday afternoon at the Linc. Tell that to those strong, shining, heroic faces I saw everywhere, on the field, in the stands, walking all around me with their parents and proud uncles. Go Army. Go Navy. Go minimalist.