Rotc Quotes

ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country.

Does ROTC mean his family couldn’t afford tuition?

The Air Force was confused about what it wanted me to be when I grew up. I applied for an ROTC scholarship out of high school because I wanted to be an astronaut. None of my teachers had ever broken the news to me that I couldn’t fly into space, so the third-grade dream remained.

Hundreds more staff could join the ship in an emergency. (One young Navy ROTC officer, Bob Woodward, who went on to be a prizewinning investigative journalist behind Watergate, began his naval career aboard the Wright as one of the two officers necessary to move or handle the nuclear launch codes.)

R.O.TC. kept me away from sports while the other guys practiced every day. They made the school teams, won their letters and got the girls. My days were spent mostly marching around in the sun. All you ever saw were the backs of some guy's ears and his buttocks. I quickly became disenchanted with military proceedings. The others shined their shoes brightly and seemed to go through maneuvers with relish. I couldn't see any sense in it. They were just getting shaped up in order to get their balls blown off later. On the other hand, I couldn't see myself crouched down in a football helmet, shoulder pads laced on, decked out in Blue and White, #69, trying to move out some brute with tacos on his breath so that the son of the district attorney could slant off left tackle for six yards. The problem was you had to keep choosing between on evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25, most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms.

Half contemptuously, American military men spoke of “elusive” Lin Piao, and of the “poet” Mao Tse-tung. Mao Tse-tung, Premier of China, had already revealed to the world how his Communist armies operated—how they flowed from place to place, fighting when fighting was profitable, biding their time when it was not. What Mao Tse-tung had written was instructive, and intensely practical for a war in Asia—but because the Chinese wrote in poetic language, not in the military terminology popular in the West, no ambitious second-year ROTC cadet would have dared quote him seriously.

Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left! Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left! Yeah, yeah, yeah. I left. I left. I left-left-left that wack school and that even more wack ROTC drill team because it was Friday, which to me, and basically every other person on Earth, meant it was time to party. Okay, maybe not everybody on Earth. I’m sure there was a monk somewhere on a mountain who might’ve been thinking of something else. But I wasn’t no monk. Thank God. So for me and my friends, Friday was just another word for party. Monday, Tuesday, Hump Day (because who can resist the word “hump”?), Thursday, and Party.

Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion had good, solid, professional noncoms, and its troops had served together for a long time. It was a good rifle company and I was happy to get it. Captain Diduryk was twenty-seven years old, a native-born Ukrainian who had come to the United States with his family in 1950. He was an ROTC graduate of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was commissioned in July of 1960. He had completed paratrooper and Ranger training and had served tours in Germany and at Fort Benning. Diduryk was married and the father of two children. He was with his mortar platoon at Plei Me camp when he got the word by radio of his company’s new mission.

Just outside of Greater Los Angeles, in a town called Claremont, are five colleges—Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont Mckenna. At the start of the Great Panic, when everyone else was running, literally, for the hills, three hundred students chose to make a stand. They turned the Women’s College at Scripps into something resembling a medieval city. They got their supplies from the other campuses; their weapons were a mix of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles. They planted gardens, dug wells, fortified an already existing wall. While the mountains burned behind them, and the surrounding suburbs descended into violence, those three hundred kids held off ten thousand zombies! Ten thousand, over the course of four months, until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified.

Between September 1969 and May 1970, there were at least 250 bombings linked to white-dominated radical groups in the United States. This was an average of almost one per day. (The government placed the number at six times as high.) Favorite targets were ROTC buildings, draft boards, induction centers, and other federal offices. In February 1970 bombs exploded at the New York headquarters of Socony Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone and Electronics.

During my first week in Japan, when I reported in to my first commander, Major Johnson, I did all of the things my college ROTC instructors had taught me to do. ... "Jennings.... Get in here," I heard him call out from inside the office. ... "Sir, Lieutenant Jennings reports as ordered!" I was to hold my salute until it was returned, as I had been taught. "Sh*t," he said under his breath. "Lieutenant, the first time your time of the month gets in the way of doing your job, you're fired. Now get out of my office." He didn't return my salute. He just glanced back at his computer, ignoring me, not saying another word.

This letter provided peace of mind, for Harry’s schooling was predicated on service in the Japanese Imperial Army. “Unique” among nations, diplomat historian Ulrich Straus would write, Japan had instituted requisite military training in secondary school that was led by active-duty officers. Harry served under a lieutenant colonel, warrant officer, and master sergeant. Harry, an avowed American citizen, would undergo four years of Japanese-style ROTC training, but this was not the same as serving in the Japanese army.

What’s wrong, Mom?” Anna asked. Mom looked like she’d been crying, but she said, “Nothing, sweetie.” “Who is Dad talking to?” I asked. I knew she’d protect us from whatever was happening, so I went straight for facts. If I gathered enough facts I could figure it out on my own. “Some friends of his from work.” “Uncle Jack?” I asked. Jack wasn’t an uncle but we called him that. He was my dad’s foreman in the roofing business. “No, honey. From the Army. His old work.” It was September 11, 2001, and the call he’d made was to his commanding officer in the Reserve. I’d figure that out later. And I’d learn that he’d done ROTC through college, then served with the Fifth Special Forces Group in Desert Storm. I’d learn that his shoulder injury had come from shrapnel embedded in his rotator cuff. I’d learn, just from watching him, from listening to him talk to his buddies, about Ranger School. Jump school. The Ranger Battalions. The Scroll. The Creed. That Rangers lead the way. But I didn’t know any of that then. I knew my dad as a roofer. A fisherman. A lover of Pearl Jam and Giants baseball. He was the guy who launched me over the waves on the beach, and who bench-pressed Anna because it made her giggle in a way that nothing else did. He was my mom’s best friend, with some additional elements like kissing that seemed pretty gross because, you know, I was six. But I learned something new about him that morning. I learned that when bad things happened, my dad stepped forward first. I learned he was a hero. A real one. And that I wanted to be like him

Adam Walinsky was a big-ideas guy with a special interest in the criminal-justice system. A young New York lawyer and Marine Corps reservist who worked as an aide to Robert F. Kennedy, he’d grown convinced that America’s police departments needed to be dragged into the modern age. A big part of the problem, he decided, was that the undereducated civil servants were too suspicious of new ideas. Early on, it was Irish immigrants who gravitated toward police work because they could already speak English. The ethnic makeup had broadened over the years, but the closed-minded attitudes hadn’t. Or so Walinsky believed. He wanted to convince bright young college students to consider police work as a professional career. From the work of Walinsky and others grew something called the Police Cadet Corps, a program like ROTC for policing.

Cassidy readily understood that most dreamy high school thespians would not become international movie stars; most tots prancing across stages wearing rhinestone tiaras would not become Miss America; most ROTC standouts would not become heroes or astronauts. But at the same time he was pretty sure that a few would. He had to believe in his heart that some of them would do these things. He understood that, even if Gary Castleton did not.

Don't just stand there! Do something even it's wrong.

I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn't let me. So there I was, at Chelsey High, still in the R.O.T.C., still with my boils. That always reminded me of how fucked up I was.

To summarize, a great business will show the following characteristics in its financial statements: Earnings show a smooth upward trend Consistent return on equity (ROE) greater than 20% Consistent return on total capital (ROTC) greater than 15% Long-term debt less than 4 times earnings

To summarize, a great business will show the following characteristics in its financial statements: Earnings show a smooth upward trend Consistent return on equity (ROE) greater than 20% Consistent return on total capital (ROTC) greater than 15% Long-term debt less than 4 times earnings Pays a dividend and/or buys back stock

Jackson expressed her frustration with magazine work, politics, the impending war, and all other annoyances of their life in New York in a single immortal couplet, verbosely titled "song for all editors, writers, theorists, political economists, idealists, communists, liberals, reactionaries, bruce bliven, marxist critics, reasoners, and postulators, any and all splinter groups, my father, religious fanatics, political fanatics, men on the street, fascists, ernest hemingway, all army members and advocates of military training, not excepting those too old to fight, the r.o.t.c. and the boy scouts, walter winchell, the terror organizations, vigilantes, all senate committees, and my husband": i would not drop dead from the lack of you— my cat has more brains than the pack of you.

Minoru “Min” Yasui, the son of two fruit pickers, was born in Oregon in 1916, and at the age of twenty-three had graduated from law school. At the time of Pearl Harbor, Yasui, who had been in ROTC, was a lieutenant in the army reserves. He tried to enlist in the regular army nine times, but his application was rejected. Yasui, the only attorney of Japanese heritage in Oregon, then opened a law practice to help with the Japanese community’s legal needs.

Investment in officer training has recently played out exactly backward: OCS trainees stay the longest, followed by ROTC trainees who did not receive any college scholarship, followed by ROTC trainees who received two-year scholarships, followed by ROTC trainees with three-year scholarships, followed finally by West Point graduates and full-scholarship ROTC trainees.