The Navy team charges the field almost as fast as they flocked to every venue on campus with a woman inside (Matt Rourke/AP)

Girls go wild for Fleet week in New York. Girls at Penn go crazy for Army/Navy weekend in Philadelphia.

This past weekend marked the 107th Army/Navy game in Philadelphia. In other words, midshipmen and cadets infiltrated our campus both the night before and after the legendary showdown.

While Penn men seemed relatively indifferent to the arrival of our nation’s finest, Penn women, or at least a prominent subset of them, highly anticipated the visit.

What is about these military men? “I love a man in uniform,” pronounced one of my track teammates on the way home from our meet at Bucknell on Saturday.

While at first, I thought she was referring to the mailman or the UPS man and his studly brown attire, she made sure to set me straight–it was the Army and Navy men that really got her going.

Even Rumsfeld was part of the action (Matt Rourke/AP)

That Saturday night after our return home from the meet, it was apparent that these “men in uniform” were truly everywhere. On the walk back from the bus, I saw more midshipmen and cadets than Penn students out. These boys stowed their curfews and disciplinary rules to let loose on Ben Franklin’s homeland. They crashed Smokes, sang karaoke at Blarney or simply perused the campus looking for random parties to crash.

Another Army/Navy weekend has come and gone, and these boys certainly made their mark on Philadelphia and Penn’s campus, acting like the craziest of college frat boys. While the primary purpose of their trek to our city was the historic football game, it was definitely apparent that these boys made the most of their weekend of freedom–basking in the limelight of their temporary celebrity status.

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