by Becky Schwepler-Wojcik

Created on: February 28, 2009

In 2008, long-time friends, Clinton Meehan and Kevin Long, returned home from freshman year at college unaware the other would soon experience a major lifestyle change. The 20-year-olds both survived an environment so foreign; it seemed surreal at the time. They were stripped of their identities, decision making abilities and even their clothes. They were told when to speak, eat and when to sleep.

In Meehan's case, he had volunteered for the punishing treatment; a week of summer camp, but not the kind of nostalgic childhood memories.

"It was the hardest thing I ever did," Meehan said with a smile on a face strikingly similar to CNN's Anderson Cooper.

Meehan spent his week "at camp" in South Carolina. He took the U.S. Navy's Physical Screening Test to qualify for Navy SEAL training. Failure to meet just one of the requirements, meant ejection from the program. One night, candidates spent hours treading water in the cold Atlantic Ocean, then were ordered to dive to the dark, murky bottom to retrieve rocks. If the commander deemed one particular rock inappropriate, the candidate went down for another. They learned to sleep while standing and ate food called MREs, an entire ready-to-eat meal in a plastic pouch.

"One time, on a march, someone asked to stop to 'go to the bathroom,'" Meehan said. "He got reamed so bad by the commander that none of us ever asked again. We just went in our pants, seriously."

By the end of the week, however, Meehan was celebrating over beers with his fellow SEAL Challenge candidates and his commanders. No one cared he was only 20 years old. He had passed the rigorous test.

Likewise, Long's time away wasn't kiddie camp either. It was more like two weeks scared straight in an 8' x 10' in the Hendricks County Jail in Danville, Ind. Long, too, had been celebrating with a few friends over beers when police officers interrupted. They did care Long was only 20 years old. They arrested him and took him straight to jail.

"I passed the breathalyzer test," Long said. "But I was underage and had violated my probation from the same kind of arrest in high school. I had to wear the orange jumpsuit. For real. I never went outside the whole time."

Two underage drinkers, one condoned, one condemned. It's a complex issue. For many parents growing up in the different cultures of the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, before the legal drinking age in all states was 21, and before the influence of Mother's Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), it seems hypocritical not to understand

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