Battle ready: boarding charter for desert duty Photo:Thomas Clapham

On a cold, clear March morning, eight Duke seniors file into a basement room in the West Duke Building. They are typical students, indulging in typical pre-class talk about weekend plans and weeknight sleeplessness--except that they're all dressed in military uniforms, and their seminar room is filled with wall displays detailing subjects like "Group Leading Procedures" and "Warrior Ethos." The students jump to attention and salute as their ROTC instructor, Lieutenant Colonel E. Todd Sherrill, walks in.

	Mission: Stabilize Baghdad
	Mercy Flights

Armed with PowerPoint technology, one of the student cadets, Jared Miranda, makes a presentation on the Battle of Kings Mountain, fought in South Carolina in 1780. In the battle, a force of colonial frontiersmen surrounded and defeated a loyalist detachment. At several points in the presentation, Sherrill interrupts to talk about enduring military principles--applying force with agility and depth, waging a fight on your own terms rather than your enemy's. One constant of democracy, he says, is that it will call upon a minority to defend the freedoms of the majority. "It's all about leadership and relationships," he tells his students. "Technology changes. Humans don't."

Some students hang around after class to talk with a visitor. Miranda says that joining ROTC seemed natural because he comes from a military family: "parents, uncles, grandparents, as far back as we go." He says he was drawn to the physical and mental challenges of life in the military. Emilie Lemke refers to "patriotic duty." The politicians she admires, from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, all emphasized national service, she says. "I just kind of took that to heart."

Most of this group joined ROTC after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and they have all stuck with it through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even as they were moved by patriotic sentiment, they knew they might eventually find themselves in harm's way. Says Lemke, "I'm prepared and I'm ready to do what I signed up to do." Another cadet, Abhay Singh, says, "With the war in Iraq, I think a lot of us look at it as an exciting opportunity to go and use all these skills that we've acquired. Of course, there are always other feelings that come into play"--namely, anxiety over facing combat. A third, Mel Baars, says that the war in Iraq has given her a greater sense of purpose. She mentions an early-morning workout routine associated with ROTC. "When I started having to wake up at 5:30, I hated it. And then, I would think to myself, I've got this friend who's in Iraq, and what the heck am I complaining about?

"You realize how blessed you really are. If someone's got to go to Iraq to preserve those blessings, I want it to be me."

Adds Miranda, "I really think no one joins a team to sit on the bench. Everyone in this room would tell you the same thing. They don't wish war upon anybody. But if it's happening, they want to be the ones who are fighting it."

In their own ways, these cadets, on the cusp of a commitment to military service, are rebels. They are refusing to fall in with a cultural trend described, and lamented, in a recent article by Josiah Bunting III, a Vietnam veteran and a former superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute. In his essay, "Class Warfare," published in the Winter 2005 issue of The American Scholar, Bunting discusses a time, World War II in particular, when civic duty and national sacrifice energized America's private schools and elite universities.

Now, he writes, the business of war is "remote increasingly from a particular segment of the American people," the privileged intellectual and professional classes. "But a citizen who sees and acknowledges the deepening chasm that is separating those who serve from those whom they serve (which no number of eyewitness news teams and Veterans Day editorials can usefully bridge) can only deplore a civic culture that removes the burdens of military service from those it has blessed most abundantly."

The themes that resonate through ROTC--patriotism, service, duty, leadership, the strong bonds formed within the unit--are echoed by Duke graduates and graduate students who have served in Iraq. From their time in the field, whether scouting for roadside explosive devices or trying to secure porous borders, they seem convinced of the need to persevere in the effort. One of them is Marine Major Ted Probert '84, a Navy ROTC cadet as an undergraduate and, since then, a Marine reservist. "I have always considered myself patriotic and feel strongly that all Americans should do something in service to our country," he says. A good friend, with whom he had served in the Marine Corps, was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. Serving his country in the midst of the "war on terror" is an honor, he says.

Probert returned to the States earlier this spring after seven months in Iraq. He was commander of an engineering company stationed at an airbase, and then officer-in-charge at a base near the Syrian border. He recalls one instance in which a rocket attack landed close by, and he could "feel the windows shaking and stuff hitting the sides of the building." Just two days before he started for home, insurgents hit a fuel storage tank. "That was about 150,000 gallons of fuel that exploded," he says. "It was a rather large boom."

This may be a war waged in some new ways, but it inspires the camaraderie long associated with forces in the field, a quality that Probert is quick to note. His worst day in Iraq, he says, was loading American casualties into helicopters. He says he was shaken, too, watching the video recording of the beheading of an American hostage. "It is something every American should see," he says, "because it shows the true character of these fanatics." On the other hand, he revels in the memories of being in western Iraq on November 10, 2004, the 229th birthday of the Marine Corps. At the time, he officially applauded his company for their "incredible accomplishments" and "professionalism." He wrote, "I am, indeed, a lucky officer to command such a fine group of Marines."

For Captain Dan Lutz '01, it's been all about the Army since earning ROTC distinguished-graduate honors. His undergraduate coursework included military history and Arabic. "I had some very good instructors at Duke in ROTC," he says. "And their focus was on creating a method of thinking as an officer--adapting to change, being able to operate in chaos, being innovative."

Early in his ROTC days, he recalls, "The colonel who was in charge of the unit said, 'Look, probably most of you are here for the money.' But during that first year, I really got into the program." He says that he's come to enjoy the idea of working with "a group of people who are all volunteers and all share, I think, common ideals."

In Iraq for four months at the beginning of the war, Lutz was a rifle platoon leader. His company infiltrated a western province, then worked to control the main border-crossing points with Syria and Jordan. "Western Iraq is the moon, in terms of landscape," he says. "I mean, nothing is there. I actually have a map of nothing. God bless the Army, they gave me this map, and it is entirely white. The only things on it are the gridlines to determine north, south, east, and west. There's not a single feature on it." One of his strongest memories is watching Iraqis on the border with Syria pelting a mosaic of Saddam Hussein with rocks, and then hitting it with their shoes, a profound insult in their culture.

When Lutz was in Iraq, the military was just putting in place a feature that has been a hallmark of this war--speedy communications technology made available to the troops. He says he didn't get to use a phone for the first six weeks of the conflict. Then, during a treasured week in June 2003, he could place a call every night for almost an hour. With a new posting, a satellite phone was provided once every ten days for ten minutes.

That July, his unit received two computers with satellite Internet connections. "We were able to use them 24/7, which seems like a lot, but doesn't divide well, what with forty soldiers competing and the power going out about ten times a day," he says. He used the Internet to send his wife flowers on their wedding anniversary. Still, he indulged in e-mail only sporadically, in part out of a "desire to keep my family and friends at arm's length" from the war. "You would think that you would e-mail ten times a day from a combat zone, if you could. But the truth is, there isn't that much to say. I didn't want to give too many details, both for security reasons and their mental well-being. And one can only type 'I love you' so many times."

Old-fashioned letters appealed to him more. He first got mail in the border town of Trebil, in the western desert. After that, he could get or send mail once every seven to ten days. In those four months, he estimates he received close to 200 letters. "Getting an e-mail is nice, but nothing puts you in touch with the outside world like a letter, something in my wife's handwriting, that I know has touched her hands. And, I swear, I could smell her."

Lutz says he never thought about a need to censor letters or e-mail messages. "I trusted that everyone's sense of self-preservation was high enough not to send the grid coordinates to our compound." There were times, however, when e-mail and snail mail were off-limits. That was called officially a "communication blackout," and it always occurred when they had suffered a casualty. "My commanders never wanted the unofficial notification to get home before the official one."

For the family of First Lieutenant Matt Lynch '01, official notification brought the most painful news out of Iraq. At Duke, Lynch thought about joining Navy ROTC, only to decide that he wanted to keep open the option of a professional baseball career. But it was the Marines, not baseball, that ultimately attracted him. On September 11, 2001, already committed to the Marines, he was having his wisdom teeth pulled; in the course of a single dental procedure, the hijacked planes would strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the nation would move from peace to war. His father, William Lynch, a former Marine, says that Matt was drawn to the idea of serving his country and the adventure promised by a stint in the Marines. According to his father, he compared his experience at Officer Candidates School with his early childhood, when he and his older brother, Tim, would crawl through the mud and play with toy guns.

Matt Lynch's unit was among the first U.S. troops deployed to Iraq in February 2003. (Tim, also in Iraq with the Marines, had been among the first sent to Afghanistan.) After about six months, he completed his tour. He returned for a second tour, for three months beginning the following April, with a different unit; he had been picked to relieve another officer, who had been injured by a roadside bomb. When his original battalion was redeployed in August, he was determined to be with them, and he worked the Marine bureaucracy to make it happen. "He wanted to be back with his guys," family and friends recall, and so he embarked on a third tour. William Lynch recalls a family wedding last August 21, and a photo taken there of Matt in "that beautiful dress-blue uniform." He dropped off his son at the airport the next day. "I remember saying to him, 'We want you back, kid.' And he said, 'Don't worry about a thing, Dad.' That's the last time I ever saw him."

Two months later, Matt was killed in Iraq. A citation posthumously awarding him the Bronze Star praised his "zealous initiative, courageous actions, and exceptional dedication to duty." According to the citation, "Coming under enemy fire and leading his platoon from the front to move in and close with the enemy was commonplace for him."