In a must-read in the Weekly Standard, Harvard law student and ROTC alum Kate Thornton Buzicky narrates what it’s like to be in the U.S. military when most of your profs and classmates hate the U.S. military (and Buzicky’s even a self-professed “tax and spend liberal” on civilian issues):
“One January morning last year, I was sitting outside a classroom with some classmates waiting for our Civil Procedure exam to begin. A male student stopped to greet us. He was wearing a puffy vest over what looked like an old version of the Army physical training sweatshirt–the oatmeal gray cotton zip-up. I asked him if it was an Army sweatshirt (the vest covered his chest where the ‘ARMY’ logo would be). ‘No way, he scoffed. ‘I would never wear that. I hate the Army.’
‘Oh,’ I replied, ‘I am in the Army.’ He looked at me as if I had announced I had three legs and was born on Neptune. ‘You? In the Army?’ He started to laugh, as if I were making a joke.”
It’s like that all year, says Buzicky, especially during Judge Advocate Generals’s Corps recruiting season. Buzicky concludes:
“I never ask that my fellow liberals agree with me, just that they respect my sense of obligation and professional duty. But at Harvard, that’s a tough sell. Here, the emphasis is on the individual–the ‘me’, the ‘I,’ and the ‘mine.’ It is difficult to explain a group obligation to people who idolize the first person singular.
But the most difficult part of the recruiting period has been learning the limits of liberal tolerance. It has been uncomfortable to see that the lessons I learned from the traditional liberal platform appear not to apply to me.”