ROTC Teaches Patiotism

EACH night the television relays messages home from U.S. defense personel in Saudi Arabia. Their faces are shyly grinning, or blushing with embarassment as they talk to the camera. They are fearless--or courageous despite their fear. Perhaps most impressive is that these U.S. service men and women are exactly as old as we are.

Each one of the male faces is not an ephemeral number in a far away place; any of them could be thought of as a guy on any Thursday night out in the Square. That woman saying hello to mom and dad can easily be replaced by the one who kept dropping her pen waiting to sign up for aerobics. It is a matter of circumstance only.

For each of us, sitting safely in a dining hall or a common room, or cringing with boredom in a lecture while the barrage of undesired information spatters around the room, there is more than one counterpart military personel in the Middle East this morning.

He may be leaning back on a tank, going over the day's tactical manuever with his partner, or reviewing a defensive move to shield them from a barrage of Iraqi artillary or scrapnal.

These men and women are dedicated to the United States. They are physically demonstrating their patriotism and belief in this country. Their closest counterparts in the seclusion of Cambridge are our students in Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC)--students who, ironically, receive a lot of abuse on this campus for being involved in the program.

The soldiers in the Middle East generate our admiration, a vicarious sense of pride in their presence and certainly our support. Our colleagues in ROTC deserve as much.

PATRIOTISM is a political ideal, but also an emotion that seems a lost sensibility in our generation. (Interesting that we are the only generation in this country who is lucky enough never to have participated in a full scale war...)

ROTC, with its participants' willingness to risk their lives for the United States, is the closest thing to a demonstrative sense of patriotism that we have around us. They are the only group of students in these hallowed halls who even come close to the sort of sacrifice and dedication of the warriors in the Middle East.

The 3 percent of the Harvard undergraduate community enrolled in ROTC attracted an inordinate amount of abuse last year. The turmoil culminated in ROTC being excluded from the use of Harvard facilities. The Faculty even threatened to refuse to accept ROTC scholarship funds.

What are we saying about patriotism and responsibility? It is a bizarre message.

On one hand, we commend the valiance of the enlisted personel in Saudi Arabia. On the other, we tell members of our own community who are inspired, or simply willing enough to pledge the same sense of loyalty to the U.S., to hustle over to MIT, surreptitiously and without complaint.

"The opposition [to ROTC] is very loud," says Kat Pearson '93, a squad leader in ROTC, "though it has never been to my face. The rallies, the newspapers--you sense, and you know, how this campus feels."

Those in ROTC do not deserve any sort of put-down; it takes effort and dilligence to get up early in the mornings, sacrifice afternoons and weekends, and serve during part of the summer and years after college. ROTC students are perhaps the only students at Harvard who could both preach a sense of patriotism and act in its preservation.

ROTC deserves better than the bad image we have pompously doused on it. Beyond its ideals, it allows hundreds of high school seniors to attend colleges they would otherwise not have been able to afford.

THE people in ROTC are our friends, and they are serving our country. They can truly say they are living up to the call of John F. Kennedy. And the rest of us?

Even if we don't join, the least we can do is give them our support. It doesn't do anything to accuse them sophomorically of being in the wrong simply because they participate in the U.S. military.

Last year, the administration banned ROTC from using University facilities on account of its refusal to accept gay and lesbian students. But discarding the program from campus sends a hypocritical message. ROTC trains capable and intelligent human beings to be good officers in the US military. These college students made the decision to add the commitment of ROTC to an already challenging period of life.

We should commend them, and not discard a whole program because of something beyond its control; it is the military's inflexibility that prohibits ROTC from accepting gays and lesbians. We should voice our dissent and dissatisfaction with this policy--without damaging the rest of a valuable program and the patriotism of its participants.

If the crisis in the Gulf does not subside, it could be their faces we see on TV in a few years.