Military personnel crave live scores overseas

Super Bowl XLIII ended a bit before 10 p.m. on the eastern seaboard of the United States. In Baghdad, Iraq, it was before 6 a.m. The clock in Kabul, Afghanistan had to read 7:30 a.m.

All of which illustrates a minor but very real inconvenience for U.S. troops serving in those areas: Even in this age of blogs and bytes, real-time scores are not always easy to obtain.

"A lot of guys wanted the most up-to-date scores," said Army Lieutenant David Bhatta, an alumnus of Midlothian High School and Virginia Military Institute. "I often heard guys calling their wives to get scores, or saw them checking ESPN.com, even at 2 or 3 in the morning after a mission. I know of a few instances where some scores got called over the radio to units out on missions."

Here a dilemma arises. Some individuals want scores immediately. Some -- particularly those who hope to later watch the contest in question via tape-delay -- do not. Said Army Captain William Angle, a graduate of Goochland High School and VMI: "It's bad etiquette to mention scores" to an individual who has an emotional stake in the game. "Some guys would get really upset. You could ruin their week -- or maybe their month -- if you said something about a game they were interested in."

Warriors in the 21st century are far more likely than their predecessors to see events as they occur. Navy Lieutenant JG Abi Campbell Dryden, a graduate of Douglas Freeman High School and a former basketball captain at the U.S. Naval Academy, recalled a deployment to west Africa during which her captain "made it mandatory for all Academy graduates to gather in the wardroom to watch the Army-Navy football game. The picture wasn't the clearest and it was quite spotty, but Navy won -- which was all that mattered."

Army Captain Paul Belmont stayed up very late to watch Super Bowl XXXVIII in Iraq.

"That was the year Janet Jackson exposed herself" during the halftime show, he said. "It was funny because there were only a few of us watching and nobody believed us until the papers all reported it the next day."

Belmont, an alumnus of Benedictine High School and VMI, cherishes his memory of the Boise State's 43-42 victory over Oklahoma in the epic 2007 Fiesta Bowl.

"We had a National Guard Apache helicopter unit assigned to our battalion" in Afghanistan. "It was actually made up of two different Guard units -- one from Oklahoma and one from Idaho. Watching that game with a bunch of guys from those two states was insane. I thought the building was going to fall down."