Though a shadow of its former size and prominence,
Reserve Officers' Training Corps soldiers on
By Allison Perkins
Photographs by Michael Warren
Early one morning in the winter of 1997: The tall lights lining Huntington
Avenue droop over the snow-covered street, casting shadows of a dozen students
trudging to Cabot Gym. Thick, gray sweatsuits protect them from the cold
and the darkness of the fading night that still hangs close to the ground.
Inside the gym, the students shuffle into suddenly perfectly straight
lines. One of their peers, standing in front, stifles a yawn while barking
commands.
David Robinson stands tall in the formation, his chest pushed out and
his shoulders back-but with little enthusiasm. The morning exercise drill
has become a routine he performs out of necessity. After three and a half
years as a cadet in N.U.'s Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps unit,
with a year and a half to go until graduation and commissioning, Robinson
has lost sight of his goal.
"The first couple of years we spent running around in the woods
playing G.I. Joe, and I thought, 'This is cool,' " he says. "Then,
it's wet, it sucks, and you want to go home. You lose perspective."
Today, however, Robinson's attitude is changed, as is his status. He
has a Northeastern diploma, a degree in criminal science, and bars on his
shoulder, signifying his rank as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
He leaves this month for duty in South Korea, having completed training
to become a military policeman.
"I'm excited to go. I busted my ass and I didn't slack. I turned
around a lot of things, I picked myself up and shined-and they could see
that. Everything's going for me," he says. "At graduation, I
was on top of everything. It was one of the best moments of my life."
Robinson's story is not atypical, says Major Steve Herring, who recently
completed a three-year stint at Northeastern's ROTC unit as an officer
and assistant professor of military science. The fourth year of ROTC is
often the toughest part, he says, as schoolwork, co-op jobs, and increased
military training bury cadets.
The fourth year "is where they find out who they are and what they
want to become," Herring says. "The amount of work, school, and
family responsibilities is, in my opinion, much more difficult than any
full-time military school. They are responsible for themselves, there's
no one there telling them they have to get up in the morning. That is the
best example of a citizen-soldier."
As one of the top cadets in his class, Robinson has become a model of
what the ROTC program was intended to create: "citizen-soldiers,"
officers drawn from colleges and universities to leaven the ranks of the
military. They bring the values born of a liberal arts education-and, it
is hoped, the perspective of the society at large-to armed forces historically
dominated by products of the military service academies.
"ROTC has brought civilians into the military and vice versa,"
says Major General Wayne Wagner, E'58, ME'67, now with the Massachusetts
National Guard. "The Army is a better army because each of the officers
brings a unique outlook on life. By working together, they get a broader
picture of the world."
Northeastern's forty-seven-year-old ROTC unit has been an important
force in creating that better army. Just under 4,000 alumni have graduated
from the unit to become U.S. Army officers. In military circles, Northeastern's
unit has long been known as one of the best and biggest ROTC programs anywhere.
The Liberty Battalion, as N.U.'s unit came to be called, is believed to
have had the largest enrollment in the country during the late '50s and
early '60s, peaking at 2,858 cadets in 196162.
But today, the program is a shadow of its former self. The Liberty Battalion
currently numbers 100 cadets, 47 of whom are N.U. students. Sixteen cadets
graduated last summer, five from Northeastern. Boston College now shares
the battalion with N.U., accounting for most of the remaining cadets, although
the unit remains headquartered at Northeastern. A few other cadets come
from neighboring schools such as UMassBoston and Simmons College because
their own campuses are without ROTC programs. Boston University and MIT
are the only other universities in the area to retain ROTC programs.
The Liberty Battalion, once the largest student group on campus, now
operates out of a two-floor office in the Parker Building, located on Parker
Street on the western edge of campus. Only eight officers and noncommissioned
soldiers are needed to oversee the cadets and teach courses in military
science.
The Liberty Battalion's decline reflects national trends. Where 73,963
cadets were enrolled in ROTC programs across the country during 197172,
the peak year, 32,453 graduated in 199697.
One element causing the lower enrollments is the Army's dwindling need
for officers since the boom years of the '60s and early '70s. "When
you take a pragmatic look, the Army does not need the number of officers
it needed in those days," says Brigadier General Richard Mallion,
LA'62, a retired one-star general. "The size of the program is reduced
to the measure of what the Army's needs are."
But another factor at play is the decline of a military tradition in
the United States. Twenty-five years after the end of the draft, and three
decades after the Vietnam conflict dramatically altered public attitudes
about the armed forces, American youths are less interested in military
service than were their forebears.
That trend alarms many observers. "Fewer people have military experience
and fewer people are leading the nation that understand the needs of the
military," says Mallion. "ROTC . . . is a superb source, but
it was intended to provide citizen-soldiers in the National Guard. Less
people are entering the program that way, and the nation is starting to
feel the effects, from the makeup of Congress to the people in our towns.
There's just not many folks who have had military service."
According to a 1987 article in the Atlantic Monthly, such lack of understanding
of the military is isolating the U.S. armed forces from the society they
serve-a dangerous schism in any nation. "The Widening Gap Between
the Military and Society" argues for a vast expansion of ROTC programs
as a primary means of bridging the divide.
The ideal of the citizen-soldier is what makes ROTC so important to
the military and, ultimately, the nation, its supporters say. "We
need to keep recruiting citizen-soldiers from the campus because they bring
those citizen values," says ROTC alum Brian Sullivan, LA'68, a former
lieutenant colonel in the Army. Sullivan cites retired General Colin Powell
as an example of a leader who served well because he graduated from ROTC
rather than a military academy: "Powell brings certain values with
him as a citizen-soldier that a professional soldier may have a different
view of."
Arguments in support of the military were unnecessary in the postWorld
War II era of 1951, when Army officer William Chestnut arrived on campus
to prepare the way for Northeastern's ROTC program. N.U.'s administration
had also applied to the Department of Defense for an Air Force ROTC unit,
but was told that schools were limited to one unit because so many wanted
them.
In the fall of 1951, N.U.'s ROTC unit opened under the direction of
Colonel Howard Price, the program's first professor of military science.
Only men who were full-time candidates for bachelor's degrees were eligible
to enroll.
The battalion quickly grew in numbers and vigor and soon dominated student
life. ROTC's campus presence was virtually ubiquitous. Boston police halted
rush-hour traffic on Huntington Avenue for thirty minutes each morning
to let the rows of cadets march across to the Fens for exercises. Pictures
of the unit decorated the front of the Northeastern News, then called the
Tech, when trainees took to the fields or donned their stiffly pressed,
olive-green, Class A uniforms. The battalion's annual spring ball marked
the height of the social season. The coed elected queen of the ball was
the focus of the newspaper's front page that week and the envy of her classmates.
In the early years, Northeastern supplied only the Army's Corps of Engineers
and Signal Corps, drawing mostly from its engineering graduates. "We
almost had a lock on the Signal Corps by pumping so many lieutenants out,"
Mallion says. "It was not unusual to get out of ROTC, into the Army,
and have four or five N.U. graduates out of fifteen officers."
Three members of the class of 1953 went on to earn the rank of general.
Five more grads from later classes would follow in their footsteps, Mallion
among them. "The number that made general is exceedingly high. The
only other school that paralleled us was North Dakota, for some reason,"
he says. "We were all proud of having come up through Northeastern.
We had a little internal fraternity of N.U. guys who made general. It was
always nice to find someone from N.U. who would take care of you."
In 1966, fully one-fourth of N.U.'s full-time undergraduate male students
were enrolled in ROTC. But as America's military involvement in Vietnam
grew, a wave of war protests washed over the nation, not sparing Northeastern.
Students and professors began to complain about ROTC's on-campus drills
and exercise sessions.
A series of student protests against the Vietnam conflict and ROTC took
place at N.U. At one point in 1968, a mock military unit called the American
Death Company, commanded by a Sergeant Pig, marched alongside ROTC cadets
drilling in the Fens. Shortly afterward, the faculty of the College of
Liberal Arts voted unanimously to abolish all credit for ROTC courses and
further recommended that the organization be expelled from campus.
Despite these strains, N.U. ROTC alumni recall greater support for the
program at Northeastern than was the case at some other campuses, where
ROTC was shut down or even burned down. Peter Franks, LA'71, MEd'74, who
entered N.U. and joined ROTC in 1966, remembers wearing his uniform to
class once a week during the late '60s, a move that might have drawn jeers
or worse at other schools at the time but went largely unchallenged at
Northeastern.
"There wasn't a lot of teasing when we wore our uniforms. I think
the maturity level of N.U. students, versus students at institutions that
are more isolated, accounted for some of that," says Franks, who is
now head of the World Association for Cooperative Education, which is housed
at Northeastern. "Part of it was the administration-supported right
to be on campus. Part of it was the student body's sense of responsibility.
Part of it was the sense of some students' duty to country to serve. In
part, it was also some sense that if you're healthy, you're going to be
drafted and serve anyway. There was a feeling that if you're going to serve,
it should be in a leadership position. Students here have always had a
very realistic view of the world."
Brian Sullivan agrees that cadets suffered less physical violence at
N.U. than at some other schools. But he recalls protests in other forms
that were no less stinging. In the 1968 yearbook, the aptly named Cauldron,
the caption next to a picture of an ROTC training facility reads, "A
Vietnam village set up so our boys could practice escape and torture maneuvers
for future use." Sullivan still recalls the slur vividly, adding,
"For them to put 'torture' was demeaning, especially when a certain
number of our fellow graduates died in Vietnam. Then that kind of childish
commentary really hurts."
In 1969, President Asa Knowles yielded to campus pressure and appointed
a university committee to consider the fate of the ROTC brigade. The committee
received letters from faculty members recommending that the unit be banished,
while student groups made presentations demanding the same.
But the battalion had an influential ally: Knowles himself. In a letter
to the committee, he wrote, "The war in Vietnam, the compulsory draft,
the enormous military budget, and the influence of the Pentagon . . . cause
some faculty and students to hold very definite anti-ROTC views . . . We
feel we must be careful not to let ROTC become the scapegoat for a situation
which ought to be challenged in other ways. The large number of students
who voluntarily join the ROTC is a strong argument for its retention at
N.U." Knowles asked the committee to recommend changes that would
make ROTC's existence on campus more acceptable to all students, rather
than banning the unit outright.
The committee complied. Its report, released early in 1970, asked that
no weapons or drills be allowed on the N.U. campus. A new Department of
Defense policy issued at the same time allowed for more flexibility in
ROTC operations, giving college administrations the right to decide where
and when their campus units trained. The N.U. cadets took their field maneuvers
to military camps and ranges off campus. Civilian students tacitly agreed
to the concessions, by and large. ROTC at Northeastern would survive.
Professor Richard Katula, chair of the communication studies department,
was drafted and sent to boot camp during the 1968 Tet offensive. Three
summers ago, he relived those days when he attended advanced camp with
the Liberty Battalion cadets as a faculty representative from N.U.
"It was a wonderful trip back in time for me," he says. Among
other activities, he crawled through mud-filled obstacle courses with cadets
and slid down a rope attached to a forty-foot tower known as the Slide
for Life. "The students I have met are extremely motivated. It was
different in 1968. We were scared to death. Our drill instructors basically
said, 'You guys are dead,' " he recalls. "These students are
extremely focused and motivated."
Despite the shrinking interest in ROTC among students, those who join
the Liberty Battalion do so with pride and enthusiasm. They speak of a
desire to serve their country and are grateful for what they gain in return.
"ROTC changed me a lot," says David Robinson. "I could
never look people in the eye and I always walked slouching, with my head
down. Now I'm completely confident. They gave me a job doing what I want
to do, I get to travel, I get to shoot big guns, I get paid big money,
and I have a good time doing it."
Another graduate commissioned this year, Silas Calhoun,
became converted to the ROTC cause well into his college tenure. After
having played N.U. football on scholarship, Calhoun left school when his
allotted playing time, three years, ran out and he could no longer make
tuition payments. But his brother, a graduate of Howard University and
the ROTC program there, persuaded him to return to Northeastern and apply
for ROTC's two-year short program. Calhoun was convinced once he attended
basic camp in the summer of 1996.
"My drill instructor focused on me because she thought I was important.
I want to give some of that back," he says. "Now I have a better
understanding of what the Army is all about-that it's important to be a
team player, and that the mission is 'people first,' always. Sometimes
you have to take a gamble-it's the only way you progress in life. The risk
I took was to be commissioned, and I gave my word that I will defend the
Constitution, no matter what."
Some students find themselves drawn to ROTC despite an initial reluctance.
In 1997, during his middler year, John Quinn walked into the ROTC office
sporting a long brown ponytail, an untucked T-shirt, baggy jeans, and about
fifty pounds of extra weight. He intended to write an article on the battalion's
field exercises for the Northeastern News. Within a year, however, he was
exercising with the unit and participating as a cadet.
"I hated sitting back and watching other people do this,"
he says. "I wanted to do this myself and I figured I could start as
a news reporter going to watch. They gave me encouragement. They never
questioned why I had done this or if I could do it. They gave me support."
Last summer, Quinn attended basic camp in Fort Knox, Kentucky. He returned
to N.U. this fall fifty pounds lighter with a buzz cut and a tough decision
to make: to become a cadet or remain a reporter. "I saw the potential
of what I can do. I can serve my country, have a lot of fun, and better
myself in such a short time. Even if I stop right now, I won't regret it,"
he says.
If Quinn continues, he will receive an annual scholarship of up to $16,000,
plus spending money. In return, he will be required to take one to three
military science courses a year, with titles like "Introduction to
the Army," "Basic Leadership," and "Advanced Tactics."
On top of that is the physical regimen.
Two mornings a week, cadets gather in Cabot Gym to work out, or they
cross Huntington Avenue single file under the crosswalk signal to jog inconspicuously
around the Fens. Once a quarter they go to nearby military reservations,
such as Camp Edwards on Cape Cod, for rigorous, weekend-long training exercises.
One-day sessions for rappelling or field maneuvers take place about six
times a year.
This school-year training program (which excludes a six-week summer
training session) is considerably lighter than the schedule required up
until 1995. As freshmen, the current senior cadets were subjected to exercises
every weekday morning. Those who did not show would receive a phone call
strongly urging them to get out of bed and into the gym. Intensive training
exercises took place several weekends a quarter, with frequent one-day
trips on top of that.
The reduced exercise schedule was the result of a change in command
in 1995. ROTC officers typically move on every three years, and with a
new rotation that year, the Liberty Battalion was matched with officers
who were less demanding and slightly more gentle.
Surprisingly, perhaps, many of the cadets were unhappy with the changes.
"Cadets were leaving rifles on the ground, orders weren't being followed,"
complains Robinson, who fears that the Army may be lightening cadets' loads
to increase the number of recruits. Robinson, who served as first sergeant
to the battalion last year, led a cadets-only gripe session in which they
voted to return to the more stringent training schedule. (Poor weather
and a lack of time prevented many of the changes from being implemented.)
Katie Grogan, a 1995 Simmons College graduate and alumna of the Liberty
Battalion, says stricter officers make for better cadets. "Right now
the best officers are not necessarily politically correct and they probably
pissed a lot of people off. I feel like in this Army you have to kick a
whole lot of ass," she says.
According to Sergeant Gloria Cooper, the softened regimen reflects an
Army-wide trend. "We saw a 'laxing of style after Vietnam. Officers
from the early 1970s tend to be more disciplined, more strict on regimentation,"
says Cooper, who served at Northeastern from 1993 to 1996. "In the
1980s, there was a 'laxing of standards that in a way produced the officer
we see now."
Lieutenant Colonel Richard LaCroix, commanding officer of the Liberty
Battalion from 1995 to 1997, characterizes the relaxed training requirements
as, in part, a means of requiring cadets to take charge of their physical
exercise themselves. "My focus during the first couple of years with
cadets is to concentrate on academics. In my view, there is plenty of time
during the junior year to train for camp," he says. "It was not
necessarily a conscious decision on my part to change, but more a function
of my trying to balance their whole existence in college. Forcing cadets
to be at an organized PT [physical training] session five days a week presumed
they were not able to exercise any personal responsibility and do PT on
their own."
Major Paul Cancelliere, currently an assistant professor of military
science, notes that the training needs of cadets have changed along with
the Army's objectives. The Army's potential enemies are no longer clear-cut
and fixed on a map, as they were during the Cold War. Dealing with the
more diffuse, multiheaded threats of terrorism and unstable rogue nations
requires a whole range of skills-not simply knowing how to fire a weapon.
Cadets must focus on their studies and leadership skills to a greater degree
than ever before, he says.
Major Herring echoes this outlook: "Leadership does not just include
field work. Education and earning their degree are the highest priority,"
he says.
Indeed, ROTC's focus on education and leadership skills is exactly what
drew Adam Ledwell to Northeastern. Ledwell, a '98 graduate, dropped out
of the United States Military Academy, the Army's elite breeding ground
for officers, after only a few weeks there. He was disgusted by the hazing
and hellish environment that cadets there have to endure. "I went
to West Point and they beat the crap out of me and I walked out,"
he says. "I came here because I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't
incapable. Here, they treat you like a person. This isn't an environment
where harassment could come up that much. You show up in the morning, do
your thing, and leave. I'd like to believe it's the same attitude you'd
find in any office where people expect the highest moral fiber of each
other."
The Army's kinder, gentler approach has even spread to the elite Rangers
unit, whose members have long prided themselves on toughness. Two years
ago, the training standards of the Liberty Battalion's Rangers unit were
overhauled to shift the group's focus. The Rangers' methods had devolved
into "almost ritualistic hazing," says Herring. "They saw
themselves as better than the others. Our mission was to mainstream the
organization to train smart, not tough. We wanted to change the pace to
teach that ROTC is not blood, guts, and glory."
The new Rangers now undertake more community service missions, such
as visiting veterans' hospitals. Last fall, the Northeastern Rangers earned
third place-their highest finish ever-at Ranger Challenge, a regional contest
designed to test units' physical fitness and teamwork skills.
Amy Fitzgibbons joined the Liberty Battalion Rangers before the squad
was reorganized. The first female cadet to meet its standards, she viewed
her passage as a mark of worth. "At that time, people who were in
[the Rangers] were the most professional cadets and the best at what they
did," says Fitzgibbons, a 1995 BC graduate who is now a member of
the Army's Judge Advocate Corps. "I didn't do it to prove [anything]
to anyone else; I did it to prove to myself I could do it. I think they
went out of their way not to treat me differently."
After completing a year of training more rigorous than that required
of the rest of the cadets, Fitzgibbons and the other Ranger candidates
spent a final weekend completing a series of tasks at the mercy of older
Ranger cadets. One such activity was a twelve-kilometer morning run with
thirty-five-pound backpacks after having been kept up all night in platoon
operations.
Once she earned the coveted Rangers tab, Fitzgibbons realized the effect
it had on her peers. "It earns you a little bit more respect in their
eyes," she says. "If they see a woman can do the same things
and compete, next time they see a woman give a command, they'll think back
that a woman is just as competent."
Women have had equal status with men in ROTC since 1973, the year the
draft ended. Nationally, women have made up twenty percent of ROTC forces
for the last decade (and constitute fourteen percent of active Army forces
today). In 1997, 8,816 women graduated from ROTC programs nationwide-four
from the Liberty Battalion.
Women in ROTC, even those readying themselves for the Army Nurse Corps,
are required to undergo the same training regimen as their male counterparts.
They learn to order troops in the field, fire and clean rifles, and shine
boots. Physical fitness requirements, such as numbers of sit-ups and push-ups,
are less rigorous for women.
Although in recent years the Army has been rocked by sexual harassment
charges and battles over female recruits' rights, female cadets in the
Liberty Battalion say they have seen none of those problems in their unit
or in summer training camps. Instead, they have had to deal with more subtle
obstacles.
Monique Williams, a Liberty Battalion alumna and 1998 BC graduate, trained
two summers ago at the Army's Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia,
learning to parachute. "There was resentment that women were there.
A female NCO [noncommissioned officer] took us aside to make sure we were
being treated fair," she says. "ROTC has a different training
style. There's more education as to why women are in the Army."
Even within ROTC, stereotyping persists, says cadet Katie Grogan. In
physical exercises, "if you could perform to standard and you were
a woman, you would get more credit than a guy who could perform to standard.
I think [the officers] pushed the guys harder because they were used to
dealing with guys," she says. "I think as time goes on, that
perception will start to disappear, as more women can keep up with the
guys. Having to meet the standards doesn't weed women out. If they didn't
make it, they didn't have the desire to."
The military's adjustment to the presence of women in the ranks isn't
finished, says Lieutenant Colonel LaCroix. "It remains to be seen
how advanced camp changes. There have been some fairly significant concerns
about coed training," he says, adding that there has been talk at
high levels of segregating men and women into different training camps.
The armed forces continue to change in other ways, too, reflecting and
reacting to social trends and controversies. In the early 1990s, when President
Clinton created his "don't ask, don't tell" compromise policy
toward homosexuals in the military, ROTC officers and cadets spent a lot
of time explaining the rule.
"We did have people say, 'I'm gay, can I get in?' and we would
tell them the law: Clinton said if we don't ask and you don't tell, then
yes. Then we'd have gay people say, 'If I don't tell you, can I come in?'
" recalls Sergeant Cooper. "It was a touchy-feely time and people
wanted to push the limit. That's what it was, a matter of pushing the limit.
Every kid does that, it doesn't matter whether they're gay or straight.
If you tell a kid he can't do something, it's like putting up a red flag."
Strains over the military's proscription of openly gay people persist.
Letters to the editor printed in Northeastern University Alumni Magazine last
year, bashing ROTC for not allowing gays to participate, angered some ROTC
alumni. "They [letter writers] jump on those issues without looking
at the fact that the federal law enforces them, not the campus," says
Brian Sullivan.
In truth, though, ROTC's presence on campus these days is so small these
days that the program attracts little reaction, negative or positive. Most
of the student body has seen only four members of the battalion, the color
guard, during the occasional university ceremony such as graduation. No
training takes place on campus outside of the very early morning exercises
in the gym twice a week.
Yet the Liberty Battalion is showing signs of vitality, for all its
decline in prominence. An alumni club was formed earlier this year. Stephen
Danckert, AS'84, first came up with the idea of an alumni group while serving
in the Army during the Desert Storm operation in 1991. He and another N.U.
ROTC grad fell to discussing how great it would be to have regular alumni
get-togethers. Danckert shelved the idea for several years, but it was
realized with the first alumni luncheon ever, held in September in honor
of the university's centennial.
The club has begun work on two other projects: an award to the outstanding
cadet each year, which will be presented for the first time next spring;
and a plaque memorializing Liberty Battalion alumni killed in the line
of duty.
The alumni club activities are a means of giving back to ROTC, Danckert
says. "A lot of us owe a debt of gratitude to what we learned in ROTC,"
he says. "We're all very proud to have served."
N.U.'s recently graduated cadets speak in similar notes. They agree
unanimously that the hardships of the soldier-student-five years of morning
PT, field exercises in mud and rain, and intensive summer training camp
while their peers are partying on weekends and sleeping in-are worth the
reward: commissioning.
"The thrill of getting your bars pinned on," says Adam Ledwell,
grinning, "there's nothing like it."
Allison Perkins, AS'98, is the bureau chief in Taegu, South Korea,
for Pacific Stars and Stripes, an unofficial publication of the U.S. military.
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