The Aviation Officer Candidate School – designed for those who found wearing the uniform once a week for four years during ROTC too, you know: restrictive - is upping sticks for parts north, taking with it the hopes and dreams of countless Pensacola debutants:

The college graduates who are soon to complete training at the nation’s oldest naval air station will be the final class to graduate from the base’s officer candidate school, ending a military tradition that lasted about seven decades.

After graduation ceremonies on Friday, the school will close and consolidate with a training center in Newport, R.I.

“Hundreds of classes have suffered out there” on the exercise field and parade deck at Pensacola Naval Air Station, said Allen Hamby, a 21-year-old admiral’s son and University of Central Florida graduate who plans to be a supply officer. “And we are going to be the last class doing it.”

Back in the day, recent Naval Academy graduates often arrived in P-Cola for flight school jaded by four years of more or less constant cops-and-robbers style harassment. Many of them spent their first few months in the “cradle of naval aviation” assiduously trying to catch up on all those experiences they had missed at the Severn River Monastery, not having had the opportunity to go to Columbia Barnard. Along the way, many of them laid the foundations for a future case of liver cirrhosis.

Many NROTC graduates meanwhile arrived in Pensacola in a high state of alcoholic training and possessed an elevated degree of aptitude on the playing fields of Seville Quarter. They realized through hard-won experience that the race went not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong: Slow and steady often gets it done.

The AOCS kids by comparison had all the zealotry of recent converts, having drunk the cool-aid rather late in life. Their stoic displays of earnest professionalism required the dedicated application of the best combined efforts of the Academy and ROTC types. Moving them north, in closer proximity to the great white up will not prevent this marriage of convenience.

The struggle continues.