your dad's rotc?

Strange noises float up through the fields like whispers on the night air. Bullfrogs and crickets and swamp things buzz all around; the occasional bird chirp emanates from the trees. The branches crackle underfoot and toads kick up little puddles of black mud. All is here, and none are present--it is an eve of invisibility, of trouble lurking in the thickening woods on the horizon, over the roots, trouble in camo BDUs and swirling rumors and lost Humvee messages.

    

 Thwapthwapthwapthwpthwpthwapappappappthwapthwap--little balls of paint fly out of the stillness and on through the woods--breathless--popopopthwapthwapappa--Move left!--Did they see us? Did they see me? Cracklecracklecrackcrackle--Did you hit anyone? I haven't even fired! Are you alive?--freaky alien noises (tuweetuweetuuweetwee) and salamander silence splash brook murmurmurmur--thwapthwapthwap--louder now. Blue team ambush at 1930. Burstsburstsbursts go on for twelve minutes, shouts and echoes haunting the scene from time to time, unintelligible radio sizzle; a warning shot ("Leave me alone! Go away! I'll kill every one of you!") playing on the tension. Like rippling popcorn in the stillness, the fight goes on--thwappapappappapoppathwp--and on and on. Red team falls back; hollering, sprinting, spitting back. A field commander shouts--Blue team, get your rucks, come back to the Humvee--and the mission ends.

    

 The Reserve Officer Training Corps isn't all glory wars and firefights--not by a long shot. Duke's 135 cadets and midshipmen--27 in the Army's program, 54 in the Navy's and 54 in the Air Force's--are soldiers but scholars, waging battle in Teer and Perkins as often as in the field. The military workload is intentionally comprehensive, encompassing the physical, the computational and the psychological, says Col. Kenneth Menzie, commander of the AFROTC detachment at Duke. Cadets augment their full courseloads with once-a-week classes in military science, naval science or aerospace studies and twice-a-week "labs"--extended training exercises, leadership forums, or information on upcoming events. Every program has a fitness requirement; AROTC's is the harshest, requiring that men 17-21 run two miles in under 15:56, do 42 push-ups in one minute and 56 sit-ups in a second minute; women must run in under 18:56, do 19 push-ups and 56 sit-ups. Over the summer, cadets and midshipmen enroll in specialty programs--airborne training, air assault training, mountaineering and northern warfare. In AROTC, rising Level Four Military Science (MSIV) Cadets must go through Advanced Camp, the Army's make-it-or-break-it chance to prove one's mettle as a leading officer. Air Force cadets must head to a four-week leadership encampment program ("Imagine basic training--boot camp--only more professionally run," Menzie says); some have free-fallen at the Air Force Academy, flown single-engine Cessnas, soloed in sailplanes. The Navy sends its midshipmen across the world to spend a month on a carrier, a cruiser, a submarine, or, in the case of one unfortunate student, a dry-docked boat in Japan. "I wanted to claw my eyes out," first-class midhsipman Jordan Eccles says, laughing.

    

 Four years of active duty commence after graduation, and four years of reserve service continue after that. The rewards are generous--a full-tuition four-year scholarship, most notably. But anyone just in it for the money, cadets say, won't last long, and the greatest prizes are intangible. "It's helped me to become a better leader--we're sent to lead a platoon [after graduation], 20 to 40 people, and you're expected, once on the ground, to lead them in combat," says MSIV Dennis Williams, who's heading to armor officer training in Ft. Knox, Tenn., in the fall. "You're responsible for their lives."

    

 Matt Henriques joined to give it a trial run. Henriques, also fourth class, comes from a military family, his father having served in the National Guard for 20 years, and with the lure of the Navy's full-tuition scholarship, he had to see if he could make the cut.

    

 Allison Ward, down by center court, joined to make the best of a great opportunity. Now she's headed for the Pensacola Flight School, making her one of about 200 midshipmen chosen each year to earn the coveted Florida wings. A double-major in comparative area studies and cultural anthropology, Ward says she appreciates being a woman in the traditionally male-dominated NROTC. "Last semester, our battalion commander was female; this semester, it's happened again," Ward says. "I feel like if you put in the effort as a female you can get just as far as anyone else."

    

 But it's a sense of duty that, for many officers-to-be, sits even less easily than the 40 or 50 pounds of gear in the bush. "I'm starting on June 22," says MSIV Sunny Reid, motoring away in her best no-nonsense voice. "I'm going to possibly and probably be in Iraq. They're going to depend on me, and it's very sobering to know that I'm going to have that responsibility so soon."

    

 FRAGO: SIBERSK RECON, 1330

    

 Daylight. AROTC. We're at the MOUT (military operations on urbanized terrain) city five miles as the crow flies from the wooded swamps of last night's firefight. A bombed-out school bus, white paint peeling off its rusty frame, teeters behind three Port-a-Potties and a craggy sidewalk. This is Sibersk, the faux Russian village, with trucks and pavement and little stucco houses lying around. Plaintive, almost endearing, brick chimneys stick up from the houses; windows--five-by-five-foot holes with wooden boards on top--poke out from the white walls.

    

 "So, Scorpion, you're the head of an international organization known as Chornaya Kobra?" asks Reid, a biological anthropology and anatomy major from Woodbridge, Va., decked out in civvies, playing the turncoat civilian. "What are the goals your organization is attempting to go for?" Scorpion, a former Soviet Special Forces commander and leader of Chornaya Kobra--a fictional terrorist organization running drugs to finance an armed communist resurgence--abides in a long-sleeve black shirt and camo hat and pants. MSIV Charles Bies, a mechanical engineering major, plays the part with gusto, feigning a decent Russian accent. "It's quite simple, really. We just want to see Mother Russia being reborn in her former glory, instead of this disheveled state that she currently finds herself in, a slave to the capitalist west."

    

 The interrogation goes on for three minutes. "So, what's your problem with Americans?" "They smell ba--what the fuck?" Suddenly, from a building behind Scorpion, five soldiers charge out, yelling and leaping ahead. They're on top of him in a matter of seconds, pinning his arms behind his head, knocking his paintball gun to the ground, binding his hands together with hundred-mile-an-hour tape, gagging him. Something metal is clanging in the background, and Bluefor secures the area.

    

 Today marks the second in a three-day training operation just outside the city of Blackstone. Army ROTC cadets endeavor in an FTX--field training exercise--about once a semester, but this month's is a special treat: the North Carolina Air National Guard has provided two UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, lending door-to-door transportation from the Duke rugby fields to a grassland somewhere inside Ft. Pickett. The North Carolina National Guard, meanwhile, has offered two Humvees for the gig. There have been a few snafus--an F/A-18 Hornet crashed at 1500 yesterday, shutting down the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, BLUEFOR's primary point of departure; the Humvees lack the radio amplifiers needed for communications between MOUT and the northern fields--but the officers in charge, planning with the MSIVs, have straightened things out, scratching some missions and pushing up others.

    

 Field training really feels like a war zone tonight, with the paintball bullets raining down throughout the shrouded forest and shouts coming from the netherworld beyond. But on the whole, ROTC isn't about learning to kill, says senior Dennis Williams, MSIV. It's about defending the Constitution, the United States, democracy, freedom. "I might have to kill someone some time," he says over the phone, chilling out in his apartment with some ROTC buddies. His voice is calm, confident. "But it'll be for a greater good." It's not about breaking you down and building you back up again, Williams says. Not about carving out a separate niche, either. "We go through the same stuff at Duke as everyone else," he says. "I don't think there's any sort of alienation; we don't really isolate ourselves."

    

 As any post-Vietnam college kid knows, ROTC and top-tier higher education--for the past thirty years, at least--have dug separate trenches in the moral battlefield of the American culture wars. Platonic reverence for the philosopher-warrior went out the window in the late 1960s, as anti-war angst pushed the officers off campus. Today, the battle has shifted to one for gay rights, with students protesting don't-ask-don't-tell policy and professors penning amicus curae briefs against the Solomon Amendment keeping recruiters on campus. Princeton and Cornell are the only Ivy League institutions who offer a real home for ROTC programs. Since 1971, Harvard has directed its cadets to MIT to fill their ROTC requirements; Yale dishes its military men and women off to the University of Connecticut at Storrs and Sacred Heart University; Brown, to Providence College. Penn, Dartmouth and Columbia, meanwhile, don't seem to accommodate the program at all.

    

 Among top-tier schools, Duke stands an exception. Shadows of protest pop up from time to time--witness the "ROTC OUT OF DUKE" tags on some of the buses and Campus Drive benches--but they seem little more than echoes of an ancient era. The chants of "ROT-C Nazi," all too common during the height of anti-Vietnam fever, would seem entirely out of place today. Indeed, Jack Bowman, a retired three-star admiral and one of the highest ranking officers in the Navy, calls Duke his alma mater. And the United States Army's official ROTC web site boasts a cadet clad in, of all things, a Duke sweatshirt.

    

 ROTC badly needs a return to the Ivy League, says political science professor Peter Feaver, a prospect which may become more likely if--or, as Feaver sees it, when--the military abandons its don't-ask-don't-tell policy. "There has been a pretty significant shift in the underlying cultural politics around that issue," Feaver says. "I would be surprised if the don't-ask-don't-tell policy of 2009 is the same one it is in 2004. It's got to evolve." Opening the doors for openly gay soldiers and midshipmen would make it much harder for elite institutions to maintain their opposition, which in turn would help bring the possibility of friendships to bridge the barracks gap. "These are people who might otherwise have no connections to the military," Feaver explains of the Ivy League cadre. "It makes it that much harder for them to make reasoned and informed opinions.... The questions of war no longer become theoretical but personal."

    

 Feaver, also a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves, says he always felt a patriotic need for serving his country. But he didn't seek out the armed forces--by the end of graduate school at Harvard, they had come to him, in the form of a close friend. "He persuaded me that it was a useful thing," Feaver says of the Navy pal. "A number of people I respected had served in the military, and they said it was an important, shaping experience."

    

 It's the kind of civilian-military friendship that students on ROTC-deficient campuses will never experience--and it's that lack of interaction, Feaver says, that makes for the ignorance and intolerance plaguing those same schools today. "It's partly due to the prejudice of those elites, at Harvard and elsewhere," Feaver says. "They don't know anyone who's served in the military, none of their friends are in the military--'Why should we have people like this?' 'They can't be as smart as we are.'--It's reinforcing bigotry, and it makes it harder and harder to overcome."

    

 With the death toll rising every week in Iraq, uncertain times lie ahead for the ROTC students; certainly the four-year service requirement carries much more weight today than it might have a mere four years ago. But for the most part, they're optimistic; not myopic, but upbeat. "[Dying in combat] is not something we're thinking about--it's something we can't change," Bies says.

    

 The cadets pack up their rucks, they come back to the Humvee, they extract via helicopter. It's been tough today, for sure, bushwhacking through the forest, ducking in the ferns, shooting up the darkness. But that's nothing--for some cadet, somewhere in that weary batallion, there's an English paper due tomorrow.

    

 Ben Yaffe contributed to this story.