One day, Ulysses S. Eisenhower gets a notice in the mail saying that he has a scholarship to West Point. Happily, he applied a few months ago and got in. Only nine percent of people get accepted to the academy every year, so he is very proud. His parents, though, are too busy being federal lawyers — who make a ridiculous amount of money from the government for sitting around in their office all day — to care. Still, they agree to go with Ulysses to move in when he starts.
A bus comes by and Ulysses and his parents all get on and ride up to New York. When they arrive a few days later, tons of parents are weeping and saying goodbye to their sons and daughters. But the parents do know something good will be happening here.
When Ulysses sees the campus’s Norman buildings, he notices they are made of grey and black granite. Ulysses has a background in geology, because his grandfather is a geologist. Whenever Ulysses visits his grandfather, he goes on expeditions with him. Doing all of that hard work helped Ulysses get the good grades needed to get into West Point.
Part of the West Point Academy deal is that your parents stay with you for the first few weeks and see how things are working. His parents see how the students have to practice running across the field without getting hit by paintball guns. They also see how fast the students can disable a fake bomb that has the same wiring as a real one but doesn’t explode. After two weeks, Ulysses’s parents are satisfied he is learning good things at West Point. They give him their last hugs and kisses and the bus takes them back home. Ulysses is happy that his parents agree that he can stay there because he wouldn’t want to get into a fight with them.
In the first few months he’s there, Ulysses learns basic military training, such as learning how to hit a target with a sniper rifle from five hundred yards, and disarming a real bomb. He has to do sports such as rugby, sailing, football, soccer, baseball, be a jockey, learn how to fly a plane, hike, and push heavy wheels. Ulysses thinks that his parents should be working as hard as he is, because it isn’t fair they get paid to sit around while he’s so busy.
***
A few months later, Ulysses finally decides that his parents shouldn’t be able to sit around and do nothing all day, so he reports them to a government official by getting special permission to call them from West Point. His parents get in big doo-doo, and they get fired and they have to go to a regular lawyer’s job, which doesn’t give them as many hours work, they have to work harder, and they don’t get paid much. They still get to keep their luxurious mountain where they live, which has giant pools and a waterfall, but only under two conditions: they work hard and their boss has to be able to get pancakes from them every Sunday.
After his parents start working for their new boss, Ulysses begins to feel bad that he reported them and wants to say sorry. He calls them, his heart beating really quickly in his chest because he doesn’t know what his parents will say.
They finally answer and he says, “Hi, Mom and Dad, I’m sorry you got fired. I just didn’t think it was fair to have you guys be sitting around all day. This should be better for all of us.”
He’s lucky that his parents understand, and they say, “We’re sorry, too. We should have worked harder. Keep doing what you’re doing, and we’ll talk later.”
Ulysses hangs up, and is happy he can still stay at West Point and that his parents are happy and making progress.
***
The next day, he aces his bomb disabling, hits a target from five hundred feet, and sprints across a hundred-foot field without getting hit by a paintball. On his break he decides to see what there is at West Point now that he can take a break. He decides to take a boat ride on the Hudson and see a pasture on the river a mile down that has lush green grass and tons of sheep and goats.
After riding down the river, Ulysses goes to the Atomic Museum and sees a replica of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The very next week, he receives a uniform and becomes a private at West Point.
Now that he’s a private, Ulysses decides to do something fun, so he signs up for the parachuting squad. He learns how to jump out of an airplane and release a parachute at the right time. Parachuting gives him a sense of inspiration, for he enjoys slowly falling to the ground. He does well in parachuting and wants to run for parachute captain. He gets together a group of people that like him and get them to vote for him. He is running against ROBERT E. LEE. When the West Point electoral college comes back, he beat ROBERT E. LEE by five points: 247-242. ROBERT E. LEE wanted to be captain because he thinks he is the best at parachuting in the academy, but he lost because people think Ulysses is better than him because Ulysses does perfect releases and landings.
Since Ulysses is new at the academy, he becomes a rookie captain. He gets a medal, a trophy, and a picture. As the new parachuting captain, he decides to make a special Fourth of July celebration. He gets American flag parachutes and special smoke for the airplanes to release that is red, white, and blue.
On the Fourth of July’s grand final, everybody sees the Blue Angels release red, white, and blue smoke, then a chinook military helicopter drop fifty parachuters to the ground with American flags. Last but not least, an airplane drops “candy bombs,” which are tiny versions of fake bombs that have candy inside them. Everybody cheers and throws their hats in the air. After that people head inside to eat. They grill burgers and hotdogs and talk about how awesome Ulysses is the entire time, which makes ROBERT E. LEE upset. After everyone eats, they have an hour and thirty minute firework show, which leaves everybody laughing and cheering, even though ROBERT E. LEE tries to stop it by pouring water all over the fireworks. Ulysses catches him before the show could begin and saves the show.
The very next morning, after people slept in after going to bed at about midnight, everybody wakes up to pancakes cooked by Ulysses, to commemorate all of his hard work.
***
The next day, Ulysses decides to visit the older historical buildings that look like mini castles. Ulysses thinks the buildings are very interesting, and he decides to spend more time there. While there, Ulysses makes a friend named Henry. Henry really enjoys the buildings too. The next morning, Henry and Ulysses play tennis in the military school tennis court. Since Ulysses is having such a great time with Henry, he invites Henry to go parachuting with him. The two men go on a parachuting test over the New York Hudson River and land on a boat to go downstream. Downstream they visit a nice hill that has tons of flowers and a shepherd walking with a flock of sheep. Ulysses thinks that the flock of sheep is very nice, so he decides to go and try to buy one from the very nice shepherd. Of course, since the shepherd was as nice as he thought, the shepherd gives him three sheep.
With the sheep, Ulysses decides he and Henry should try to get into the Army Rangers and turn the sheep into K-9 officers. They go back to campus to try to join. To join the Army Rangers, they have to do forty-nine pushups, fifty-nine situps, and run five miles in under forty minutes. Ulysses and Henry both pass the tests easily.
The second stage is called “crawl.” They have to train for twenty hours and sleep for four hours and do that for about a month, go to survival training for twenty-four days, and then practice jumping out of a helicopter. By the end, Ulysses needed to do one more practice jump to be able to join the Army Rangers, but he is so good that the Army doesn’t want him to just jump out of helicopter. They tell him he should jump out of planes. As the captain of the parachuting squad, that is very easy for him. Ulysses took his three sheep, who are now K-9 officers, on the plane with him to make the jumps. The sheep are surprisingly good at parachuting themselves.
The army is so impressed they want Ulysses to train the sheep at Firebase Cobra with the green berets. Firebase Cobra is in the Oruzgan territory. The third special forces group, the Afghan Army, and the Afghan National Police work there to fight the Taliban.
Ulysses’s sheep sniff bombs for a year, and they all receive the Medal of Honor for searching for IEDs. IED stands for Improvised Explosive Device. The President later has lunch with the sheep and Ulysses. Ulysses is very happy since he was able to have lunch with the President! The president is very happy since Ulysses had saved the whole regiment and infantry from danger. Ulysses and the sheep become national heroes and are thrown a parade in New York that also airs on the big screen in Times Square. The sheep tour the country and have fun in various places with Ulysses. They go to the Empire State Building. They go to Vancouver and Montreal. They also happen to visit the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, live in Carson City, saw Las Vegas, go to the Strip, and they go to casinos all over the country.
Then one time they go to Mexico. They go see Alaska and then go on a resort boat in Hawaii. Henry thinks it’s a very stupid idea to go from a very cold place to a warm place, but Ulysses always gets his way, so they go to the cruise company in Hawaii. Sadly, the cruise they want to go on leaves in one month so they plan to go to California instead and go skiing in the mountains in Sacramento.
The next day they arrive at the ski shop and order their skis. There is a very shady man standing in the corner who is talking to another shady man in an alleyway. The shady guys rob the shop and all of a sudden there are police everywhere, and FBI and snowmobiles. The shady people are national criminals and Henry and Ulysses tackle them onto the ground. They get the Bronze Star for bravery, so they get to have lunch with the President once again. The president is so impressed, he invites them to his Christmas party. Henry is good enough to know how to play the violin by memory so he plays the violin at the party.
Then a magical lion and bird pop up and start to fight each other.They soon disappear into a glass mirror. Everyone is in a panic and the President is so scared that he is rocking back and forth in the corner, sucking his thumb and yelling, “I want my mommy!”
Henry and Ulysses try to snap the President out of it, but then an Iraqi platoon invades the White House. The Iraqi platoon has AK-47s and anti-aircraft guns. Henry’s cousin is in the SAS, so Henry calls him and the SAS invades and imprisons everyone other than a few who try to kidnap the President.
Henry and Ulysses bring the President into the Oval Office to escape. Of course the White House has some gadgets, so they press the president’s coffee mug, and a helicopter on a train — that goes underground — pops up after a metro car. They get into the helicopter and fly away, claiming every single anti-aircraft gun and regular gun left there for the US Army which saves the US four years of production for those weapons.
They continue down the tunnel, and the train stops suddenly. All the lights go black. Then they hear the crack of gunfire in their ears, and they know they are being ambushed. Henry and Ulysses do something they aren’t too proud of — jump into a sewer tunnel. The Iraqi invaders follow them. Henry’s and Ulysses’s noses crinkle up at the smell, and they decide they are going to have to swim to avoid both the invaders and the smell. The invaders shoot at them, but the bullets slow down by the nasty sewage around them. They end up at the sewage plant, and the workers there don’t have a very nice surprise when they see armed forces guys with machine guns.
Meanwhile, the President and the FBI make it to the President’s luxurious car and drive away like it is the end of a James Bond movie.
Henry and Ulysses decide that they should use the big crane that they have at the sewage plant to knock out the Iraqi invaders. Once the invaders are knocked out, Henry and Ulysses zip tie the invaders hands and make the US government pay the sewage company for all the time wasted and things destroyed. Of all the things that the President loves about Henry and Ulysses, he doesn’t love the fact that he has to pay several million dollars to the sewage company.
Two years later, Henry and Ulysses are both awarded another Medal of Honor and are brought into Delta Force. The two are very happy and agree to be friends for the rest of their lives.
The End