As a result of the events recounted here the author has commuted between Boston and Asia ever since graduation.. Articlesmentioned in the text may be seen at <http://pws.prserv.net/studies/publ_01.htm> Copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey Race

Over the years my view has fluctuated as to the wisdom of involve-ment with imperfect human institutions, whether marriage, militaryservice, commercial enterprise or religious community. With the per-spective of four decades, I can now look back on my ROTC experi-ence to see how it changed me and how it changed America. I offerno conclusion for the general proposition, only for my own case�blazingly clear to me at least.

Let me explain how it all happened.

What role for officer training on the campuses of our elite universities?

Can the Vietnam-era controversy inform today�s student protests and fac-ulty debates?

Is the law wise to force ROTC on unwilling institutions under threat of lossof federal funds?

Most participants in the current debate argue from ideological principlesor moral propositions.

This article instead starts from the actual 1960s experience of one ROTCgraduate, with real historical consequences for America.

One Man�s Experience by JEFFREY RACE

ROTC at Harvard

Fairfield County�Where It StartedExcept for pastoral portraits in novels, a more

wholesome place to enjoy one�s youth is hardlyimaginable than this Connecticut county onehour from New York. Our creaky pre-revolution-ary home lacked right angles, but I walked to aschool with caring teachers, a sound curriculum,spacious classrooms and none of our present-daysocial pathologies. Adults aimed for their bestwhether in behavior, speech or dress, and I recallno one ever committing a dishonest public act oruttering a witting falsehood. (Thus was I ill-pre-pared for what lay ahead when I left at 18.) Ourcollege-bound gang hung out together doing funthings now seen as dated oddities in 1950s films.I vividly recall my first girlfriend (then a term ofinnocent affection) taking me to a rock con-cert�how shocked I was by the sounds from thestage, the behavior of the performers, and most ofall by the reaction of the youthful audience.

Oh, the politics: among my acquaintances Irecall but two Democrats, a Public Health Servicephysician and his nursing-trained wife. Their sonand I were best friends�we later came toHarvard together�and it was always such fun tovisit his home because of the parallel universe inwhich his family lived.

From Panglossia to CambridgeLike many of us arriving at the Harvard fresh-

man dorms in September of 1961, I grew alarmedwithin minutes of unpacking. My middle-classfamily drove a Volkswagen. While I felt secure inour economic ordinariness, I was an academicwhiz, having graduated valedictorian of a class of500. But my roommate came in a luxury car hav-ing excelled at one of American�s most illustriouspublic schools; his similarly-advantaged friendssocialized with graduates of New England pri-vate academies of awesome repute.

My fright rose several notches the next daywith our dean�s �welcome� in the beautiful oldSanders Theater, cautioning that many of us(�look to your left and look to your right�) wouldnot survive the four years ahead.

I decided to calibrate myself: do nothing butstudy, rabidly, until first term grades arrived.

Amidst this mental turmoil I faced the optionto add a half-course of ROTC.

My father had urged, and I had successfullyresisted, joining the Boy Scouts. Harvard in 1961however presented a comparable grown-upoption, which in the context of then-universalmale military service seemed a terrific choice, if Icould handle the work. I signed up�and waspuzzled why more did not.

ROTC offered three types of activities, somemore impressive to me than others.

First, academic studies of military science,mostly stressing military history and the psycho-logy of leadership. The former bored me, butleadership training instilled a vital and hardlyintuitive truth: leadership means inspiring will-ing cooperation, and becoming a leader meansbuilding the inner moral strength and personalcapacity to inspire others.

Second, parade drill. Never having been ateam sport enthusiast, only then did I begin to seewhat my life had lacked: precision, teamwork,instant response in anticipation of what in laterlife would be life-critical situations (like combatin Vietnam or personal safety emergencies in civillife).

Third, field trips. One still in mind was to theArmy Aviation School in Alabama. After a dayviewing the base we dined and danced with thelocal belles. That was different from FairfieldCounty, and even more from Cambridge!

Even with a 4-1/2 course load, term one turnedout well: tops in everything. I became as confi-dent as my classmates from elite high schools andstuck with ROTC.

�You Will Have The Power of Life and Death�Summer camp at Fort Devens in 1964 differed

from anything before. I had never been isolatedfrom my family for so long. and having led a per-sonally tidy life, I had never been sleep-deprived.But we were the first night as we took apart ourbarracks heating system to remove every spot ofdust and reassembled it before daybreak . . . andagain sleep-deprived many eves again as welearned night navigation skills and map-reading.

But most memorably we were �welcomed� on

our first day with a message comparable inimpact to our dean�s welcome in 1961. Stillcadets, we ranked even below enlisted soldiers.The old drill sergeant over us told us that uponcommissioning in a year, we would out-rank himand could issue him legal orders. His words asbest I can recall:

�Today you are cadets. A year from now youwill be officers. You will have the authorityto issue orders which can mean life or deathfor your men. Issuing orders sounds easy, butit isn�t. The first skill you must learn, beforeyou can issue orders, is to take orders. That iswhy you are here.�

This got my full attention. I have never forgot-ten this simple talk as we stood in ranks beforeour barracks, and I see in looking back that itreally began the process of moving me from thesimplicities of youth to the responsibilities ofadulthood.

To All Who Shall See These Presents, GreetingOn a fine June morning in 1965 Harvard�s pres-

ident welcomed me to the company of educatedmen, and on that same afternoon my father (amajor during the Second World War) proudlypinned lieutenant�s bars on my shoulders, makingup to some extent for my missing the Boy Scoutsall those years. I was soon presented with myofficer�s commission, a physically large andimposing document in the name of the President,worded:

�Know Ye, that reposing special trust andconfidence in the patriotism, valor, fidelity,and abilities of Jeffrey Race, I do appoint him aReserve Commissioned Officer in the Army ofthe United States . . . . This officer will there-fore carefully and diligently discharge theduties of the office to which appointed . . . .�

It went on, just as the sergeant had declared:�And I do strictly charge and require thoseofficers and other personnel of lesser rank torender such obedience as is due an officer ofthis grade and position.�

My Harvard Degree Really Pays Off Majoring in government I had studied with

Henry Kissinger and other greats, but as an invet-erate electronics hobbyist I had selected theSignal Corps as my military branch. Having stud-ied German I expected posting to a communica-tions unit in that country for two years. Butwhen in early July I drove to the Signal School inGeorgia the order in my pocket directed me toproceed to a �classified destination� which tooklittle figuring to figure out: I was going toVietnam, in the 69th Signal Battalion, the largestcommunications unit in the Army, tasked (as Ilater learned) to install the communicationsinfrastructure for the enormous troop buildupthen in motion but not yet publicized.

These events little concerned me, seeminglynormal under the circumstances of Cold Warproxy conflict and proportionate to others under-taken for friendly nations. There was then a cam-paign at Harvard contesting the wisdom of a fur-ther U.S. troop commitment, but lacking person-al knowledge on which to base such an objectionI paid it no heed. With the trust-instilling expe-riences of Fairfield County, I fully confided in myleaders and recall being quite offended at the pre-sumption of another dean in telling us at a finalassembly that Vietnam was a �bum war�.

At this time Army policy barred anyone withless than six months of duty from assignment to awar zone. Since I would have served but twomonths by September when my unit sailed away,I received new orders transferring me from the69th. I was not going to Vietnam.

Until my commanding officer called me in tosay he had seen the order and immediatelyphoned the Pentagon to have it rescinded as anexception to policy. �Why?� I asked.

�I want a Harvard man in my battalion.�And so a single line in my personnel record

changed my life, my profession, my marriage, mycontinent of residence, and my path throughworld events. Here begin the implications of thatlife for the contentious issue of officer training atHarvard and other elite universities.

The Most Junior OfficerOn October 31, 1965, burdened with duffel bag

and weapon, I jumped into the water from a land-ing craft at Vungtau and waded ashore toVietnam. We were then flown to the newlycleared Long Binh base 35 miles north of Saigon.

As the most junior lieutenant in the wholecountry I became the battalion�s SanitationOfficer under the policy of �rank has its privilege�:I was in charge of toilets. Much to the amuse-ment of my fellow lieutenants I showed duringmy first night�s inspection how much I hadlearned at Harvard by falling headlong into anopen-trench latrine. (A few days later I had myown laugh in return. My West Point tent-matehad carelessly placed us in a shallow depressionon the newly cleared soil. A heavy rain after mid-night filled our pup-tent with mud and we had tomove in the midst of the storm.)

Shortly I became a platoon leader at the Saigonairport responsible for communications betweenthe Military Assistance Command in Saigon andup-country military units.

In truth that was my day job. As my first stopin life outside the United States, Vietnam was soshockingly different from anything I had seenthat I became consumed with learning everythingpossible about the country, its people, and itswar. Already I had studied the language with aset of tapes bought before departing the U.S. (Itturned out that in 23 days aboard ship I hadlearned the northern rather than the southerndialect, but that was fine as it was comparable tolearning BBC rather than New York English.) Afriendly Vietnamese lieutenant coached me in histongue, and I gradually fell in with a circle ofVietnamese intellectuals, including courageousnewspaper editor Ton That Thien, rather thancarousing in the evenings with my service col-leagues. The more I studied (and I became quitefluent in Vietnamese) the more curiousity-filled Ibecame.

October of 1966 arrived and so my return tothe U.S. upon completion of the year�s obligatedwar-zone duty. However I was really just start-ing a fascinating adventure which I could hardlycontinue were I to leave, nor could I do well were

I to stay in the capital city. I sought infantry qual-ification to join a rural advisory team and volun-teered to remain for a second tour of duty if Icould in this way transfer out of Saigon, to benear our Vietnamese hosts and far fromAmericans forces.

Through a friendly general officer, having locallanguage skill and again with �Harvard� in myrecord, this unusual transfer was approved. Ibecame the last member of the last rural advisoryteam to be emplaced in Vietnam; we were postedto an area so remote and insecure that we couldenter only by helicopter. The five of us�my teamchief the major, myself, and three sergeants�lived with two hundred Vietnamese militiamenin a small compound enclosed by barbed wire. Atnight we could walk only to the barbed wire;during the day we could pass another hundredyards to the village market. Beyond that we couldtravel only with the local troops on civil affairs orcombat operations.

Our Vietnamese counterpart Captain Ducended in this hellhole for declining to bribe theprovince chief for a safe and remunerative postingelsewhere (something unimaginable to me com-ing from Fairfield County). Duc and I talked a lot,and here I met and interviewed my first commu-nists (prisoners and defectors), real ones I couldreach out to touch, not parlor revolutionaries asseen at Harvard. I learned much from them, andfrom the good Captain. I still cherish the hand-made wooden box he gave me on my departure.He was killed in action shortly after I left.

Something Wrong with This Picture!When I arrived in Vietnam in 1965 the con-

flict�s moral dimension had not yet acquired theclarity manifest by the 1970s. But after two yearsin country one thing was clear: little was happen-ing according to the military�s script, roughly�We treat nicely those who help us; the rest wesuppress. As time goes by opposition will lessen;our friends will triumph; we will go home.� Infact the opposite was occurring: the harder wetried, the worse the violence. For anyone with atidy mind, that was very troubling.

No one could tell me why this was so. People

were dying all around me, some of them myfriends. I began to suspect Fairfield County�swisdom of trust. Had our dean been right?

What Would Tolstoy Say?The burning issue�both human and intellec-

tual�was why our local allies were losing influ-ence daily despite hundreds of thousands of help-ful foreign troops and a blank check for militaryand economic aid, when their communist-ledopponents were going from weakness to strengthwith no foreign troops or air cover and pitiful mil-itary assistance. Our government gave reasonsplainly nonsense on their face (�the villagers areforced by the terrorists�) but no serious personcould offer a plausible explanation.

In fact Count Tolstoy had put it well a centu-ry before. In War and Peace he wrote �Napoleoncommanded an army to be raised, and to marchout to war . . . the question [is] why six hundredthousand men go out to fight when Napoleonutters certain words . . . .�

Determined to answer this question inVietnam, I elected to return on my own aftercompleting my two years of required active ser-vice. I retained my commission and planned tocontinue performing two weeks of reserve train-ing annually. This decision eventually producedunforeseen results.

In July of 1967 I arrived back in Saigon as afreelance journalist and spent the next yearresearching a case study of how this puzzlingprocess of government collapse and revolutionaryadvance had actually taken place over the previ-ous decade in Long An province just south ofSaigon. One province was a manageable area inwhich to uncover the answer, which turned outto be trivially simple and well known in the fieldof organization theory; it had simply never beenapplied before to the context of revolutionarywar. Early results appeared in a 1970 issue of thescholarly journal Asian Survey under the title�How They Won�. Provocative as the titleappeared (in fact defeat would not be officiallyconceded for five more years), its most unwel-come aspect to policy-makers and the reason forthe ensuing furore was that (in the midst of a

political debate highly charged with emotion inthe U.S.) the case was meticulously documentedand dispassionately presented by a former U.S.military advisor.

Some gentlemanly hate mail came my wayfrom American military officers and I silently suf-fered vilification from highly placed civilians likeRobert Komer (who seriously asked one generalwho had helped me on my research whether I hadin fact ever visited Long An province). Then backat Harvard pursuing a doctorate in political sci-ence, I published my final results in book form in1972 under the title War Comes to Long An; it wasthe lead book review in the New York Times the fol-lowing Sunday. A year later I submitted anexpanded version as my doctoral dissertation.

Hidden in My BasementIn September of 1970, invited to join a panel at

the American Political Science Association�sannual meeting, I offered a paper based on myfield research. Still a graduate student duly hum-bled by the eminence of fellow panelists (RogerHilsman, Ray Tanter, Alan Whiting, SamuelHuntington, Daniel Ellsberg) I yet made bold atan after-panel dinner to suggest the APSA itselfsponsor a serious study of the manifest pathologyof Vietnam policy-making. Ellsberg spoke up tosay �But the study has already been done. It�s in asafe in Washington. All you have to do is get it.�In fact this was the first public mention of whatlater became famous as the Pentagon Papers.(Years after I wrote about these events in the aca-demic journals Armed Forces and Society and theYale Review.)

Ellsberg and I grew better acquainted whenhe moved from the RAND Corporation in SantaMonica to MIT in Cambridge. One day as I ped-alled home from class, he pulled alongside in hisBMW and asked to store something in my base-ment while he travelled out of town. I pedalledon, met him on the porch, and helped carry adozen sealed boxes to my cellar. Some monthslater, while myself abroad, he came by to retrievethem from my parents and then disappeared. Ifigured out from the ensuing headlines that I hadbeen living atop these precious documents.

I was later scheduled to testify at Ellsberg�strial but this never came to pass due to the dis-missal of his case for governmental misconduct.

While the Times� enthusiastic praise of WarComes to Long An was a terrific emotional rush fora graduate student drone like myself, I wasproudest of the reviewin The Economist: �Aremarkably compas-sionate and honestbook.� Second for mewas the Marine CorpsGazette�s review: �Mr.Race does not appear toespouse views either foror against the Americaneffort in Southeast Asiaand is only concernedwith presenting thefacts from both sidesalong with detailedanalyses of key eventsand time periods.�While eventually com-ing to hold decidedviews, I had judged itunfair to impose on oth-ers so purposely hidthem with a particularaim in mind�an aimultimately successful.

Somewhat to my sur-prise leaders in the anti-war movement such asNoam Chomsky drew on my work in talks, arti-cles and books, and still do to this day.

And Now the Funny PartAs the leaders of our Vietnam effort retired,

died off or gained promotions from the brillianceof their work, something funny happened: WarComes to Long An became the official canonicalexplanation of how America had lost the war. Itappears in the curriculum of all the senior U.S.military schools; after 30 years I continue toreceive royalties for reproduction rights fromuniversities around the world, from the U.S. mil-

itary and from the Central Intelligence Agency.Nor is it just read as a course requirement and

forgotten. Some years back a friend on the WhiteHouse staff confided that he had circulatedextracts to colleagues planning something (he did-n�t say what) somewhere (I guessed Latin America

from headlines at thetime). He went on tosay �A lot of people arealive today who wouldbe dead if you had notwritten that book.�

Not Just VietnamAlthough on paper I

was still a signal officer,in fact my militaryadvisory backgroundand experience in polit-ical, economic andstrategic analysis hadled to a series of unusu-al assignments duringmy two weeks of annu-al reserve duty. Livingin Asia I should haveserved there to cuttravel costs, and in factone year I did at theBangkok headquartersof the South East AsiaTreaty Organization(SEATO). But as Ibecame better known I

came to be requested by name to serve on high-level Army or Defense Department staffs inWashington, in fact being flown back for twoweeks as an exception to budget guidelinesdespite my junior rank.

In 1984 I was living in Thailand, self-employed advising multinational firms withoperations in Southeast Asia, particularly on thePhilippines where both communist-led andIslamic insurgencies were combining with thecorrupt misrule of President Ferdinand Marcos,and his friends and family, to tear the countryapart. At risk were our most important military

bases in Asia, Subic Bay and Clark Field. If thisgame proceeded further along the same path, atragedy must occur with incalculable strategic,political and human costs. This was no secret, soa debate raged in Washington between thoseattached to Marcos and those who felt he mustgo.

From my Vietnam research I had becomeknown to a group of Young Turks in thePhilippine military and to some high-rankingestablishment figures in Marcos� government aswell.

And so it happened that in September of 1984orders came to fly to Washington to join a multi-agency team tasked with devising a plan to han-dle President Marcos and to avert the catastrophemany saw coming. Working intensely togetherwe composed what a few months later PresidentReagan signed as National Security DecisionDirective 163, �U.S. Policy Towards thePhilippines�. Our team had considered the rag-ing policy debate and decided to word the draft ina clever way to gain agreement from both sides(roughly, to sink with Marcos, or to risk a leader-ship change) but which would in fact work inonly one way�a mouse trap, let us call it�wereour draft to be adopted as policy.

The entire document was quite comprehen-sive so we divided up our tasks. I had principalresponsibility for devising the mouse trap. On mylast duty day my supervisor called me in to say �Ifthis plan works it will be wonderful, but if it failsI cannot tell the President that a reserve major

drafted this.� I flew back to Bangkok in good spir-its, confident my education and experience hadbeen well used and that momentous events mustsoon unfold.

As expected the Philippine political and secu-rity situation continued to deteriorate, exacer-bating a Washington policy debate paralyzedover the risk of moving for regime change inManila, a reasonable concern after doing so in1963 Vietnam had led to the murder of PresidentDiem, a downward spiral of coups and counter-coups, and ultimate ejection of American influ-ence.

The foreign policy establishment (State,Congress, the military, intelligence agencies)busily circulated papers on what action to take, ifany. In this maelstrom Ambassador StephenBosworth, on the hot seat in Manila, judged heneeded more ammunition for the fight that wasabout to engulf the Oval Office. He decided to gooutside �the system�.

And so mid-way through 1985 an old Vietnamhand then posted to our embassy in Bangkokcalled to ask me to fly to Manila, receive a briefingfrom Ambassador Bosworth and then spend amonth diagnosing the dynamics of the situationand forecasting what lay ahead. I asked why Ihad been selected when so many skilled officialanalysts were at hand. His reply: �You areknown for not telling the boss what he wants tohear. That is why we want you.�

I accepted the project because it would be easyfor me and I was sure I could diagnose the situa-

tion lucidly and persuasively, helping at thevery least to avert a tragedy from misunder-standing of the possibilities or of the struc-ture of the situation.

A month�s close study in the Philippinesshowed there was no risk at all in continu-ing to support Marcos: catastrophe wasguaranteed. I submitted my report toAmbassador Bosworth. A short time later

he was called to Washington for an unusual pri-vate meeting directly with President Reagan. Hetold me afterward he had discussed my conclu-sions in this meeting. And so we were able tocrystallize the options realistically before us,advancing yet another step in the process begunwith NSDD 163.

By February of 1986, the NSDD plan clearlyunfolding, I decided I could not miss the greatdrama I had helped to script, so flew to join twoconsulting colleagues in Manila. Because of earli-er contacts with both the Young Turks andDefense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, and my col-leagues� varied high-level contacts, we were ableto contribute bridges of trust between actorswho now suddenly had to cooperate in the rushof events, never having worked together or insome cases even having known each other before.As the drama ended we were pleased and relievedat Marcos� departure, perhaps like a doctor upona successful live birth.

I had been present at two previous turningpoints in Asian politics: the 1968 Tet attacks inVietnam and the 1973 collapse of the military dic-tatorship in Thailand. Now I was favored toview a third from a distance of a few feet: themoment on February 23rd on Epifanio de losSantos Avenue (EDSA) when Philippine Marinearmored personnel carriers momentarily haltedbefore a dozen Catholic nuns lying across theroadway (in the very front of a crowd of tens ofthousands who had come into the streets). Aftera brief standoff and shouted threats and warn-ings, the lead vehicle roared its engine, leapt for-ward to crush the nuns�and stopped. In theinstant a moment later when Butz Aquino, broth-er of the assassinated Senator Benigno Aquino,leapt atop the vehicle, it became apparent thatPresident Marcos was finished. Which was ofcourse the plan.

The Manila airport had been closed for sometime, but it reopened quickly after Marcos left forHawaii two days later. I returned to Boston onthe first plane out.

What Does It All Mean?The preceeding are but some of the adventures

ROTC opened up for me, but they sufficed toallow me in my quiet way to bring clarity to trou-bling public issues, applying skills honed atHarvard to the opportunities for closeness to his-tory provided by my choice to join the ReserveOfficer Training Corps. Lives have been saved,and tragedies averted, because of what I made ofthose opportunities. I believe the world would bea better place were more graduates of elite uni-versities to take up opportunities comparable tomine. In three decades of active and reserve mili-tary service I was never pressed to violate myideals. At the same time my fellow officers werehighly trained, highly motivated, and filled withintegrity fully up to the standard I had beentaught in Fairfield County�and which is so lack-ing in many areas of public life today.

Despite tales alleging the blood-thirsty natureof the officer corps and the belligerence lent toforeign policy by the military, in fact I found thatno one is more cautious of risking lives than hewho has personally experienced weapons fired inanger. Today I wear with pride in my lapel aminiature Combat Infantryman�s Badge.

I look back on my military service as an unusu-al opportunity for personal and professionalgrowth in challenging circumstances differinggreatly from what I experienced in my other workas academic, management consultant and busi-ness entrepreneur. Such experience lends notjust maturity but also a gravitas, a seriousness, acredibility, hard to obtain otherwise. On what-ever side of an issue, men like John Kerry, RichardArmitage and Daniel Ellsberg speak with anauthority gained from intimacy with the chal-lenges great and small of military service.

And so I look forward to the day when I maypin my carefully saved lieutenant�s bars on theshoulders of someone for whom I care.

Excerpt published in the March 2007 issue of Military Officer (monthly magazine of theMilitary Officers Association of America) as part of the "One Percent" feature article;archived at

<http://www.moaa.org/pubs_mom_070301_percent.htm >

and available for public download at

<http://purotc.org/index.asp?section=organization&file=newsarticle&id=51>

The full text from which the excerpt is drawn may be downloaded from

<http://www.camblab.com/nugget/rotc_07.pdf >.