Extra Points: Military Time

By Lee Pace

Planning, execution and debriefing. Order, structure and punctuality. Teamwork and chain of command. Persevering through pain, discomfort and difficult circumstances. The parallels are significant between a military operation and a football team.

"We had a saying in the Seals, 'Seal training is easy, all you do is never quit,'" says Mike Argo, a Tar Heel defensive lineman who lettered in 1978-79 before moving on to a three-decade career as a U.S. Navy Seal. "We had another one that said, 'The only easy day was yesterday.'

"It's the same kind of environment in football, particularly training camp and spring practice. There's a level of mental torture and discipline that you get from football that sets you up well for Seal training. It's the same kind of environment."

Saturday is Military Appreciation Day in Kenan Stadium when the Tar Heels meet Georgia Tech at 5:30 p.m. Flags of the various service branches will be flown around the stadium. A joint color guard will convene for the national anthem, and more than 50 ROTC members and Rams Club members who are veterans will hold taut a giant American flag across the playing field. Spectators who are veterans or on active duty will be asked to stand and be recognized after the first quarter.

The game itself is high stakes—the Tar Heels fighting to continue a six-game winning streak and protect their No. 13 ranking in the College Football Playoff and set themselves up for a regular-season-ending showdown with N.C. State; quarterback Drake Maye with his burgeoning Heisman Trophy candidacy; and Yellow Jacket interim coach Brent Key cobbling a resume together that he hopes will help him land the permanent job.

Yet three individuals on the Carolina sidelines on Saturday have a unique perspective on the Military Day theme. The pomp and ceremony coursing throughout Kenan Stadium was real life to them in their 20s.

Defensive backs coach and co-defensive coordinator Charlton Warren graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1999 and spent six years stationed at bases in Georgia and Florida before entering the coaching profession at Air Force in 2005. He rose to the rank of major and saw his work in avionics and drone technology put to use in the early stages of the post 9/11 War on Terror.

"Football is really important and I want to win and be competitive like the next man, but I also have a sense there are things out there in the world that are bigger than football," Warren says. "There are so many guys from my 10 years active duty or coaching at Air Force who are serving today, and for them it's life or death. You never lose track of the big picture."

Strength and conditioning assistant coach Dean Moege joined the Army out of high school in Kansas in 2005, did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and left the service in 2010 to pursue his education in exercise and sports science. He received his degree from Carolina in 2013 has been on the Tar Heel staff since 2014, working first under Lou Hernandez and now under Brian Hess.

"In the military you have to pay attention to the details," Moege says. "There are dire consequences if you don't. Here with football, it's a lot of the same principles. The small things turn into big things. You take care of the small things and you handle your business, and everything goes smooth. If they go bad, they get exponentially worse very quickly. The thing I convey to the guys is constant attention to details, get better every day, don't take a day off."

And Drake Fontenot, a performance nutrition fellow, joined the Marine Corps two years out of high school in Louisiana and was stationed at Camp LeJeune for four years beginning in July 2012. He spent eight months deployed overseas in 2014 when the United States launched a campaign of targeted airstrikes against ISIS. He came to Chapel Hill in June 2022 and works on the nutrition staff to ensure the Tar Heels are fueling themselves properly at the training table and beyond.

"I didn't play college football or high school football. I thought I was too skinny, and my mom thought if I got hit, I would break," Fontenot says. "I eventually signed up because I wanted to figure out what I was made of as a man. The Marine Corps has a rep for being the hardest and toughest, so I just picked the hardest and toughest thing I could find. It was quite an experience. You're away from family and friends and home, you're in a foreign country around people who want to hurt you. You appreciate things a little differently, you see the world from a different point of view."

Military Head Shots — L-R: Charlton Warren, Dean Moege, Drake Fontenot

Military Appreciation Day has been celebrated at Carolina and other institutions nationwide for about a decade now. The Atlantic Coast Conference endorsed the idea in the early 2010s of its institutions devoting one home game a year to honoring their students and alumni with military connections as well as the entire universe of service men and women. For their inaugural Military Appreciation game in 2012 against the University of Idaho, the Tar Heels wore helmets with custom decals of the interlocking NC logo comprised of the red, white and blue Stars and Stripes. One year Warren Green, a former Tar Heel deep snapper who served two tours of duty in Iraq with the Army, piloted an Apache helicopter over the stadium during pre-game ceremonies.

Charlton Warren will be laser-focused on his cornerbacks and safeties as kick-off approaches on Saturday, but he'll give pause at some point to remember the trigger from his boyhood days in Atlanta that altered the course of his life.

Warren grew up in Conley, Ga., a suburb in south Atlanta, and was about to enter Forest Park High School in the early 1990s when he came across the high school ROTC unit drilling one day. He stopped to watch and was fascinated by the fast pace and precision, and the group leader, Major Bill White, asked if he'd like to join and give it a try.

"I knew nothing about the military, no one in my family had been in the military, but I was enamored by the discipline and the accountability I saw that day," Warren remembers. "These 15- and 16-year-olds were leading one another and seemed so confident in what they were doing. I joined ROTC, and Major White became a mentor to me. For four years, I started every football game and wore a uniform to school every Tuesday and was commander of my detachment.

"You never know where that spark is going to come from. All you have to do is inspire one person. If one person thinks of joining the military because of what they see or hear on game day, then it's worth it."

For Moege, that spark was an uncle he admired who had served in the military and his own desire to leave home "and do something different." He joined the Army, became a paratrooper, was stationed in Alaska and from there was deployed twice to the Middle East. After Lou Hernandez lost his job when Larry Fedora was dismissed in 2018, Moege's future lay in the hands of Mack Brown's new strength and conditioning coach. With Brian Hess coming to Chapel Hill after four years at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Moege's bona fides to stay on were bulls-eye perfect.

"In the Army, you're going to do a job, it's very simple," Moege says. "Some people make it more complicated. Coach Hess has a great quote from West Point, 'It's so hard, it's easy. What you're trained for is what you do. So when the time comes, you just do your job.' That's very much like a football team."

Fontenot remembers getting off the bus at Parris Island and stepping onto the famous yellow footprints. "Heads down, do not speak," implores the drill instructor. This is the official bridge between life as a civilian and entering 13 weeks of being broken down and rebuilt into a member, as the Marines like to say, "of the world's finest fighting force."

"It's two or three in the morning and the bus drives away," Fontenot says. "It kind of hits you, 'Okay, there's no turning back now.'"

No turning back, indeed. Which is why for some, their nightly news feed includes not just Top 25 results but scores from the Ukraine and other hot spots around the globe as well.

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace is in his 33rd year writing features on the Carolina football program under the "Extra Points" banner. He is the author of "Football in a Forest" and reports from the sidelines of Tar Heel Sports Network broadcasts. Follow him at @LeePaceTweet and write him at leepace7@gmail.com

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