Mat-Su Midshipmen port at home for Thanksgiving

WASILLA — Like many college kids, Natalie Lautrup and Kara Butler came home for Thanksgiving week.

But for these U.S. Naval Academy Midshipmen, from Colony and Wasilla high schools, respectively, it was by no means strictly vacation. As part of getting to depart from the Annapolis, Md. campus three days ahead of the holiday, they had to spend Monday through Wednesday visiting with schools throughout the Mat-Su, sharing their experiences and the wisdom a service academy education has provided them.

“Everyone is a big fish where they’re coming from, but it all gets rewritten. You might have been the best at your high school, but now you’re at the bottom at the academy. To be there, to be around it, to get comfortable with who you are, and that the best you might be able to do is not the best, is the challenge,” said Lautrup, a 2014 Colony grad on pace to graduate from the Academy in 2019. “I encourage (service academies), but I encourage them to work really hard in general because any college they want to go to will require that also.”

Lautrup visited her alma mater, Colony, Houston High, Su Valley, Wasilla High, Redington and Chugiak in her three days of visits, just to name a few.

Butler, a 2013 graduate of Wasilla High, and whose sister, Alexandra is a freshman at Annapolis, sped around to just as many classrooms in her final Thanksgiving as a Midshipmen, set to graduate in May with a degree in political science.

“My favorite responses are from the younger, middle-school age kids,” Butler said. “For them, it’s still pretty cool you’re in a uniform and they want to be just like you. In high school, they’re a little more reserved; scared that (in the Academy) they’ll lose a lot of their individuality, but it isn’t that way, necessarily.”

Every Midshipman is up by 7 a.m., Lautrup explained, but as a varsity cheerleader, she’s at practice by 5:45 a.m. three mornings a week. From there, the day consists of 6 classes, a sports period, a brief bit of downtime before dinner, and then exhaustedly back to the dorms for homework and an early hitting of the hay.

With such busy schedules, Lautrup and Butler usually wind up catching up as part of the same youth ministry.

“I’m not sure they fully understand it’s a regular college, but as full-time students there we just can’t go out every single night,” Lautrup said. “We can’t travel outside the country without a whole bunch of paperwork, we can’t skip classes and there’s many mandatory events. It’s very rigorous. It’s a pain, it’s tough, but it sucks for everybody — we all just embrace it together.”

As Butler has found, that togetherness winds up overtaking the competitiveness that hits a plebe upon arrival.

“I think I realized it would change me and challenge me, but I didn’t realize how much I would grow,” Butler said. “I went in knowing about the prestige and how well it all sets you up, but that wasn’t the reason I stayed. I stayed because of the friendships and camaraderie… My classmates there over the last three-and-a-half years, I’d do anything for, and they’d do the same for me.”

Both Lautrup and Butler come from military families. Butler’s father is the senior instructor at the JROTC program at Chugiak High and he and Butler’s mother were naval officers, though neither attended Annapolis. Lautrup’s mother was in the Marines, and her father, Joel, graduated from the Naval Academy in 1986. That background made him extra sensitive about not pushing his children to follow in his footsteps.

“This is a place you have to want to go,” Joel said. “It’s four years and at some point in there, you’re going to find a weakness, some reason to quit… We supported her taking hard classes and doing well in high school, but we’d seen too many kids who’d ‘had to,’ and then quit.”

Still, Joel couldn’t help but beam with pride when Natalie was accepted.

“I was happy, but also nervous,” he said, adding that the biggest change over the last 30 years has been an increase to a quarter of Midshipmen being women. “My wife was not real excited about her leaving the house. But it’s been fun; we’ve made it back for several football games.”

As a cheerleader, Natalie has made a tailgating family near campus with a handful of alums who were Midshipmen alongside her father.

“Some of them are now admirals and generals, and the biggest difference is there’s a lot more young ladies, but the rest is similar,” Joel said. “Some of the ‘pain for pain sake’ doesn’t happen anymore. Another friend of mine said, ‘it’s pressure with a purpose; not just for the sake of it.’”

Even when you graduate, the Navy isn’t through with you. A five-year commitment comes with it, and come January, Butler expects to learn her first stop as an officer. She’s hoping it’s San Diego.

Lautrup, who did a year of prep school outside of Philadelphia before starting at the Academy hopes her degree in Operations Research will aide her in getting into Naval aviation by the time she graduates.

“It’s a branch of applied math that’s more logistics based,” she said. “It’s a lot of problem solving and you optimize for best results. I was interested in mechanical engineering, but I saw the life and didn’t think I had enough of a passion to make the pain and stress of that worth it. But everyone graduates with a bachelor of science, there’s a heavy STEM program at the school, and it’s really neat because everyone is taking the same classes, with the same struggle and endless resources.”