Brotherhood drives Army

er, mere hours after the team improved to 2-0 on the season for the first time since 1996, meant little when compared to the loss of Jackson, 20, as a person.

“It was the worst day of my life,” Bateman said. “Brandon Jackson was a great kid — my daughter’s favorite player, a competitor, a guy who showed up every day, a really talented kid, and a guy that every player on this team thought of as a friend.”

“I’m not sure I’m really past it,” said sophomore receiver Christian Poe, one of Jackson’s closest friends on the team. “I think about him every day and still catch myself tearing up sometimes. But I know if Brandon were still here, he’d want me to keep doing what I’m doing, so I’ve just got to keep grinding and embrace my friends and my brothers.”

Army players reference the team’s brotherhood often, when discussing what appealed to them about the academy’s football program as recruits and in describing the support system they’ve relied on since Jackson’s death. And in the days and weeks after the loss, Monken knew better than to try to turn his players’ grief into a rallying point. He said their sense of kinship — perhaps more than any resource made available to them after the tragedy — helped them persevere.

“When Brandon was here with us, we were playing for each other; we were playing for the brotherhood,” Monken said. “That’s all we’ve ever played for. That’s never going to change. Brandon will always be part of the brotherhood.”

“Football players, they come and go,” senior linebacker Andrew King said. “But Brandon as a person and as an individual is harder to replace — his charisma, his energy. ... We just try to push through it each day.”

Attending a service academy prepares Army football players for challenges entirely unlike those that will be faced by their counterparts at other schools — “Our kids are the toughest kids in the country,” Bateman said — but no amount of training could prepare a bunch of 18- to 22-yearolds for the shock and sadness associated with the unexpected loss of a friend. And to suggest the players, the defense and the program have triumphed over the adversity experienced in Jackson’s death would do a disservice to the player’s legacy and his teammates’ humanity. The pain remains; the football team merely has succeeded alongside it.

“We just continue to talk to the guys about it and about what it means to honor somebody, how to honor him,” Monken said. “You honor him by doing your best, just like you were trying to do the week before, when he was still here. I think that helped the guys just kind of move through any feelings that they had to do something different or do something else to try to. ... I don’t know. We just cope with it.”