A photo taken of the stands at a Texas AM home football game in October captured what the “Aggie Spirit” is all about, according to the school’s Commandant of the Corps of Cadets.
The photo, taken of the stands on Oct. 3 while the Aggies played against Mississippi State, shows a group of cadets cheering and watching the game. One cadet stands silently, holding his young son as he sleeps in his arms.
That cadet is 28-year-old Kevin Ivey, a student at the university who previously served for eight years in the Marine Corps. With a tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Ivey left the Marine Corps a single dad of a six-year-old boy, according to KAGS-TV. His commanding officer was an Aggie, and he decided he wanted to be one himself.
KHOU writes:
So Ivey and his son Calvin loaded up their pickup truck and headed to College Station, where Ivey had been accepted into Delta Company, a group of 25 veterans in the 2,500 member Corps of Cadets. But when he arrived, he couldn’t immediately find an apartment. A Marine on a limited budget, and with his schooling paid for by the GI Bill, couldn’t dig up the deposits each apartment complex was demanding for him and his son to move in.
“We had money for our bare necessities and that’s it,” Ivey said. “Hotel money just wasn’t in the budget.”
Watch the video for more of the touching story: