The Golden Fleece: High-Risk Adventure at West Point

In the fall of 1965 West Point cadet Tom Carhart and five of his classmates from the U.S. Military Academy pulled off a feat of extraordinary ingenuity, precision, and raw guts: the theft of the billy goat mascot from their rival, the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, just before the biggest football game of the year.

The U.S. forces in Vietnam were then at two hundred thousand and growing, with casualties spiking, and the men in West Point’s class of 1966 were well aware that they would ser...