f someone sponsored a Most Stereotypical Duke Student contest at Shooter's, senior Patrick Nevins would have a good shot at going home with the title.
The six-foot-something public policy major spent one summer interning with the Re-Elect Bush/Cheney campaign and the next with the Republican National Committee. He was vice president of his off-campus fraternity, where he is known to some as "Fratrick." He sports brightly colored polos with slightly wrinkled khakis.
But his answer to the final question, "What will you do after graduation?" puts the crown beyond his reach.
He will not be moving to New York, DC or Boston. He will not be attending law or med or grad school. He will not be working as a banker, consultant or teacher who will be a banker-slash-consultant in two years.
Instead, Nevins will graduate as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps and complete a year of training before possibly being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
"I supported the war when it started so part of my decision was if this is what I believe in and these are my political values, I have to actually go do something about it. I can't just sit back here in my cushy lifestyle and talk on my soapbox and say 'Yeah, this is good' and not do anything about it," he says of his decision to enlist as an officer. "I don't think it really sinks in to kids around here-kids who support the war, kids who don't support the war-I don't think they grasp the seriousness of it."
Nevins has not been a part of the ROTC program at Duke and hasn't gotten any financial support from the Marines for his education, but last summer he spent ten weeks at officer candidacy school-a place his father dubbed "as close as you can get to Hell on Earth"-in the first step toward becoming a commissioned officer. He was inspired, he says, by the sense of duty he felt after 9/11, and partly by the death of Marine First Lieutenant Matthew Lynch, Trinity '01, in November 2004. Lynch was the first Duke graduate to die in Iraq and a member of Nevins' fraternity.
But his parents and friends say joining the Marines is something Nevins has wanted to do for a long time.
"He's been saying he wanted to do something like this for a number of years and I had hoped that he would get involved in college and get passionate about something else and it would go away," says Wendy Nevins, his mother. "I pretty much have done everything I could to support him, yet at the same time let him know that's not where I'd like him to end up. But he's going to be commissioned graduation weekend. It's going to happen."
Wendy, who grew up as a self-dubbed military brat, has been against the war in Iraq from the start. She even encouraged her son to go abroad his junior year, hoping that exposure to a European view of American foreign policy would change his military aspirations.
"It's particularly hard for me because I'm very opposed to the fact that we were ever in Iraq to begin with and that all kinds of young people are dying for something that we never should have been there to do," she says.
For all their concerns about the decision their son has made, Nevins' parents say they are both very proud of Patrick.
"There's a sense of pride that somebody in a position like that, that's graduating from a place like Duke, who could have a variety of other options, has chosen on his own-with nobody twisting his arm-to do this. It's a sense of admiration for a young person that has the sense of purpose and sense of responsibility to take this on," says Joe Nevins, Patrick's father.
Nevins took his mother's advice and went to Seville, Spain. He heard the criticism, but he held his tongue and stuck to his beliefs. When he returned to Duke, he signed the papers to enroll in OCS. But before he could do that, he needed to get in shape to pass the physical exam.
His recruitment officer enlisted the help of Ryan Crosswell, a third-year Duke Law student who was also planning on attending OCS.
"My [Officer Selection Officer] called and said, 'Hey there's an undergrad that wants to go. There's a problem-he can only do two pull-ups. Can you help him get in shape?' I said, 'Sure' so he and I started working at the gym. He'd been an athlete in high school and I think he just had one too many Budweisers and wings with the frat guys," Crosswell remembers.
Nevins and Crosswell are not only in the minority at Duke, but they were also among the few students from a top-tier private university at OCS last summer.
"People would ask me this summer 'What the Hell are you doing here?' I kind of find that a bit depressing, for people to be shocked," Crosswell says. "I just have this sort of ideal that there are actually some people who want to be there, who aren't there for financial reasons."
As grueling as the physical training was, Nevins said the most difficult-and most crucial-part of OCS last summer was the leadership component.
"The importance of leading 40 20-year-olds into battle and to be able to do it correctly is a tremendous responsibility," he says. "You have to know how to lead on different levels, know how to work with certain people and then make the hard decisions when they need to be made. It just comes down to leading by example, you always have to be the one in front, always have to be the one working hardest, working the latest, it all comes down to leadership."
Upon finding out about his plans for graduation, people have asked him why the hell he would join the military with a Duke degree. They've told him he's wasting his life-that he's going to die for nothing.
"It's a different perspective from what 98 to 99 percent of Duke students have to deal with. I wake up every morning and think about it, it's always in the back of my head," Nevins says of the possibility that he will be fighting a war. "At the same time, everyone who's joining now or enlisting as officers, we're all joining because we want to go. It's different than maybe 10 years ago where you joined and maybe just kind of sat back. I mean, I want to go to Iraq, I want to go fight."
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