Not Everyone a Spectator

Some Harvard affiliates actually rode into battle, and others had their lives interrupted by the war.

There was Keller, the lieutenant who helped the Seals to capture the two Persian Gulf oil rigs. He was president of the A.D. final club before graduating in 1999.

Ruben Marinelarena ’02-’04 was the only Harvard undergraduate to be called into service. The Lowell House resident and lance corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve left Cambridge in January. He spent the duration of the war training in North Carolina, and is shipping off to Okinawa for training in jungle warfare this week.

Molly C. Bingham ’90, a freelance photojournalist, was taken into Iraqi custody from her hotel in Baghdad on March 24.

A week later, Bingham was released from Iraqi custody at the Jordan-Iraq border. She had been held at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

Bingham is currently back in Baghdad, where she is working as a photographer covering the reconstruction for The New York Times. The Harvard Business School (HBS) interviewed and accepted First Lieutenant Joe Finnigan while he was still deployed in Iraq. The interview was conducted during a sandstorm with a satellite phone belonging to an embedded reporter.

Army Captain James F. “Jimmy” Adamouski, 29, was planning to attend HBS in the fall. However, Adamouski was the first West Point graduate to die in Iraq, after the Black Hawk helicopter he was piloting crashed. Five other American soldiers died with him.

“Jimmy made such a difference in his life and his future was looking so great with the opportunity to attend Harvard,” his father, retired Army Lt. Col. Frank Adamouski, said in April. “There is no limit to the contributions he could have made to the future of this country.”

Reconstruction and Recrimination

Despite the military victory, many of the goals of the war remain unresolved. No solid evidence of chemical or biological weapons has been found in Iraq, and Saddam’s ties to international terrorism have not been proven.

The Iraqi people have been liberated, but lawlessness and radical Shiite clerics threaten to overwhelm progress toward the development of a stable government.

Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs Ashton B. Carter, who has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security policy, said in March that the United States would be “vindicated when we are able to hold up and show the chemical and biological arsenal that is the cause of this war.”

Now, Carter says he thinks his analysis of the war has been borne out by events.

“I think eventually we will find ample evidence that Saddam Hussein remained interested and active in chemical and biological warfare,” Carter says. “I said the weapons of mass destruction aspect was real, but we were likely to bollix the aftermath. And that’s what it appears we’re doing.”

A week after the fall of Baghdad, the American death toll stood at 125, with 36 of those deaths listed as accidental. Thousands of Iraqis died in the American and British assault, although their exact number will probably never be known. With the American occupation soon to enter its third month, Iraq is no longer making daily headlines. And at Harvard, the disagreements over the use of American power continue to divide students and professors.

—Staff writer Ben A. Black can reached at bblack@fas.harvard.edu.