What I Learned from ROTC

My military career was part-time, uneventful, and inglorious. I leveled out as a captain in the Army (a courtesy, really, because I got the promotion as I went on inactive status), and other than training stints, my only duty was as a reservist, first in a technical-intelligence company and then in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. I first visited an active war zone 20 years after being commissioned, and then only as a middle-aged civilian Pentagon adviser. My highest decoration was the Army Commendation Medal, which was merely a formal acknowledgment that the military had not detected any criminal behavior on my part.And yet military training, beginning with participating in the Army’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, was a pivotal experience. I joined up as a graduate student at Harvard, believing that it would be good for me to have some modicum of military time under my belt if I wanted to write about such matters going forward. This was, in 1980, somewhat unorthodox, but the colonel who ran the MIT ROTC detachment was expert at finagling unusual appointments. I slipped through, despite having a dislocated shoulder.Harvard did not have ROTC back then, supposedly because of discrimination against gays in the military—which was real—although that was also something of an excuse for a still-liberal university haunted by the Vietnam War to keep uniforms off of its campus. Half a dozen or so oddball undergraduates trekked every week to MIT, there to be instructed chiefly by two sergeants. Sergeant Ross and Sergeant Mac taught me a lot, beginning with how to read a map and issue a patrol order, but much more about valuing people with practical skills. When we were commissioned, they would call us sir or ma’am, but with a twinkle in the eye. We and they knew who was learning from whom.Service in the Army quickly teaches one to respect people who can shoot straight, get rations on time, repair busted equipment, and, even more important, instruct and motivate other