Lacrosse teammates, friends felt same call to military service

Francisco Cortes ’26 and Owen Guest ’26 were standing shoulder-to-shoulder before the American Flag when they saw the door open.

Suddenly, the entire men’s lacrosse team streamed into the room. Teammates, coaches, and friends had arrived at the Murr Center to show their support as the two senior midfielders signed four-year contracts with the U.S. Army. Guest is due to ship out July 20, Cortes on July 21.

“That was a really amazing moment I’ll remember the rest of my life,” Guest recalled. “It just perfectly encapsulates our team and our coaches.”

Cortes and Guest, who forged a strong friendship at Harvard, had much in common long before college. They grew up on opposite sides of the Long Island Sound, with Guest in Harrison, N.Y., and Cortes in Shoreham, N.Y. — playing on rival high school lacrosse teams. What’s more, both had planned to play for the United States Military Academy at West Point, but that was before Harvard recruiters helped change their minds.

When they met, shortly after arriving on campus in August 2022, things instantly clicked. Both credited the lacrosse team with providing an immediate sense of community.

“The second I stepped on campus, I had 50 new best friends to spend so much time with,” Guest said. “The level of camaraderie you get from being together all the time is just incomparable. It’s been actually just everything I would have hoped for.”

Cortes and Guest ended up taking many of the same courses, including Professor of History Alison Frank Johnson’s formative “Germany, 1848–1949” and “Austrian History in Literature.” Guest decided to concentrate in history with the ultimate goal of writing a thesis. Cortes, an Environmental Science & Public Policy concentrator, declared history as a secondary.

“I’ve always liked learning about past wars and conflicts and how it shaped our current society,” Cortes said. “We owe a lot to that, and to better understand the present or the future, you’ve got to learn from the past.”

Both students rose to the challenge of balancing coursework with a rigorous athletic routine. According to Guest, he even derived an “edge” from spending four hours every morning attending practice, weightlifting, and reviewing film footage with the team — all before attending the day’s first class.

“When I came in, I felt the classic ‘outsider syndrome,’ where you don’t feel like you belong because you feel like you got to the school through athletics,” Guest said. “Then you notice that everybody has their own opinions and values stemming from their own life experiences and what they do presently. Being a student-athlete adds to your ability to contribute and make points in classes.”

Even when visiting a foreign country, Cortes and Guest kept up the lacrosse team’s rigorous workout regimen, including weight training and cardio. In summer 2025, both spent months pursuing research in Munich under the mentorship of Frank Johnson.

Guest’s senior thesis project, supported by the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, looked at the attack by Palestinian militants at the Munich 1972 Olympics as well as the resulting U.S. policy implications and the evolution of U.S. counterterrorism. He conducted primary source research at the University of Munich library and visited the memorial site at the former Olympic Village, where 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage.

Cortes’s independent study research, funded by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, focused on environmental and political factors that affected memorialization of former Nazi concentration camps in the early years after World War II. Cortes studied and visited Flossenbürg, located 135 miles north of Munich, where prisoners had been forced to mine granite. The site was reopened as a private quarry, remaining active until 2022. Cortes compared it to the nearby Dachau site, a memorial for more than 60 years now.

“Being there, in the actual site where things occurred, is so important,” Cortes said. “You can read about all these events and camps online, but actually being at Flossenbürg and Dachau, you understand a little bit differently.”

The friends shared an apartment close to the University of Munich and its library, where the White Rose resistance group distributed anti-Nazi leaflets during WWII.

“The area by the library was always filled with students, in cafés and restaurants doing work. Being in that environment, I got a real feel for German academic culture,” Guest said.

With Frank Johnson, the students visited famous sites like the Munich Residenz palace and the Alte Pinakothek art museum. They also attended university events and ate copious amounts of German sausage.

“Owen and Francisco are courageous and intellectually curious,” Frank Johnson said. “They had an ‘academic warrior’ mindset that reflects their commitment to getting the most out of every opportunity at Harvard, whether on the lacrosse field or in the classroom or during independent research and study abroad.”

“They balanced rigorous study, research, and theses while being starting players on a top five program competing for national championships,” said Gerry Byrne, Frisbie Family Head Coach for Men’s Lacrosse. “They embraced and experienced all that Harvard had to offer.”

Military service has been an interest since Cortes and Guest were high schoolers considering the possibility of West Point. In eleventh grade, the nine-year commitment (four years at military school followed by five years of service) felt too weighty. But now they feel ready.

“My thought process was, if I still want to do it by the time I’m an upperclassman in college at Harvard, I’ll do it,” Guest explained. “I thought about it really hard for the past three years and decided to do it.”

Cortes, in particular, is eager to follow in the footsteps of two older sisters, both West Point graduates he watched grow into “mature leaders.”

“That’s the best part of the military; it makes you look at yourself in the mirror and really dive into who you are and what you want to be,” Cortes said. “It puts you in difficult situations that put you and others at risk, and I think that makes you learn more about yourself — more than other career paths.”

With Commencement on the horizon, Cortes and Guest are more confident than ever in their plans.

“I feel honestly just incredibly proud of my growth these past four years,” Guest said. “I would not trade this experience here at Harvard for anything.”