The following letter has been linked to our TN USNA Parent Club page with the permission of the author, Mr.Tony Browne.

On our flight to PPW from San Francisco, my wife and I wound up sitting
in a row with a young woman. I happened to pull something from my bag
that had USNA on it, and she politely asked if I knew someone there.
Proudly I told her my son had just finished Plebe Summer and was
entering the Class of 2004. She said, "I graduated Class of '99." We
talked nonstop the rest of the flight to Baltimore. She was
commissioned a 2nd Lt USMC, getting her master's degree in oceanography
from Stanford, then going on to Pensacola for flight school and
assignment to F/A 18s. She was incredibly bright, fit, articulate,
assured, pleasant, strong, and feminine, with an air of leadership about
her. When we got to BWI (at 5 a.m. Friday morning), she arranged for
her friend, classmate, and former teammate on the USNA women's soccer
team who was picking her up, to take us directly to our B&B. Her friend
was going to Harvard Medical School. After they had dropped us off at
our destination, my wife and I talked and talked about how we were just
blown away by the power of the two women we had just met. The most
impressive trait was their great poise and sense of self -- these were
not soft and frail "girls", or hard and cold "grrrls", but very
attractive, very present, very powerful young women ready to give and
take with anyone. The USNA experience had obviously put them into
direct competition and teambuilding with other powerful young people,
and they had held their own regardless of being male or being female.

Wow. We were already impressed with USNA and our son's appointment, and this just deepened our appreciation of what an opportunity the Academy
is for anyone who attends.

Tony Browne