Daniel G. Punt '99, a Navy midshipman, has listened to the Undergraduate Council debate to bring ROTC back to campus.

He thinks it's absurd.

"It wouldn't work. There aren't enough ROTC students to make it possible," Punt said. Even if ROTC returned, he said, there are so few students in the program right now--50 total--that they would continue to train at MIT.

Punt says he feels dictating change to an established organization such as the military is no business of the council.

"It's vaguely analogous to the U.C. drafting a bill to make the Opportunes into a 40 person choir," he said. "Is this in the U.C.'s purview? I really don't think so."

But others in ROTC, also speaking personally--not as representatives from their time-consuming extracurricular--see the current debate cut to the heart of their Harvard experience. It raises questions of whether they feel truly supported on campus--and forces them to consider how something they've devoted so much time to can elicit such strong feelings from their peers.

Far beyond simply bemoaning the commute across Cambridge, some cadets and midshipmen say they are being both glorified and vilified by various interests. Council members sponsoring the bill have presented the debate as a matter of respect for ROTC participants, suggesting that opponents are dishonoring those who serve their country.

Opponents of the legislation see the issue in terms of intolerance against gay students, claiming bill's supporters are implicitly turning a blind eye toward discrimination.

It is the cadets and midshipmen, rarely consulted on the issue, who see the gray area in the debate--implicated in the system as much as they question it.

An Officer and a Gentleman

Luis Angel P. Gonzalez Jr. '01 always knew he wanted a career in the armed forces. Like generations before him, Gonzalez plans to continue a family history of service in the military.

"My father served in Vietnam, my grandfather served under General MacArthur, and my great grandfather served in World War One," Gonzalez says.

Yet while his relatives were all enlisted, Gonzalez is the first to participate in officer training. He serves as both a drill officer and a squad leader, traveling to MIT each week for three hours of class and two hours of physical training with his squad.

Upon gradation from Harvard, Gonzalez will enter the Navy as a commissioned officer and is obligated to perform four years of service. Not a problem: the government concentrator is planning a lifelong career in the armed forces and hopes to work in aviation and eventually the intelligence field.

Despite his own impressions of ROTC, Gonzalez's classmates at Harvard have expressed a more negative view toward the program.

Returning to school in uniform, Gonzalez has encountered a number of jokes about ROTC.