Just like tens of thousands college seniors across the country, Ruben Marinelarena ’02-’04 will scramble to prepare for the LSATs and apply to law school this fall.

But Marinelarena will face a unique challenge.

He will take his LSAT in Okinawa, Japan, where he will be undergoing jungle warfare training as a lance corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve.

Marinelarena, a reservist who was activated in January because of the war in Iraq, spent the spring semester at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina, learning the ins and outs of urban combat and crowd control.

He said he is unlikely to see combat, and if all goes well he will be home for next year’s spring semester and will graduate with the Class of 2004.

But there is much that he will miss before his homecoming.

His older sister Laura is getting married this July, and his younger sister Alex is graduating from junior high school in June, but he will be unable to attend either event.

And as his classmates march through their House courtyards bedecked in graduation caps and gowns next week, Marinelarena will not be among them.

In fact, Marinelarena only recently finished the first semester of his senior year when he took his last final exam from the fall semester at Camp LeJeune.

He said it is sometimes difficult to justify—both to himself and to those who are close to him—why he needs to miss these events if he isn’t going to see action.

“Sometimes it’s hard to see the bigger picture of why we’re activated if we’re not going to war,” said Marinelarena. “I imagined that if I would be pulled from my school and pulled from my life, that it would be for combat.”

“Families aren’t just like marines. They can’t just take orders as well as we do,” he added.

And Marinelarena has trained long and hard to learn how to follow orders.

His training involved three-day maneuvers and enduring military-strength pepper spray, said his girlfriend of a year and half, Kate S. Widland ’04, who said she traveled to North Carolina twice over the past few months.

“It’s amazingly different from Harvard,” said Widland, who said she hopes to visit him in Okinawa this summer.