“I started off really enthusiastically sophomore year and really believing in the military and these goals—the remaking of the Middle East—and now I question what I’m going into. Is the organization that I’m going to be serving inherently different from [the colonialism] I’m studying in Hawaii and South Africa?” he says.

Trager, who concentrated in government, says that Sept. 11 pushed him to study Arabic and the Middle East but also to seek a job at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he will be a research assistant next year.

While some graduates will delve into Middle East research, some of their ROTC classmates will jump right into the Middle East.

Elliott N. Neal ’05, an army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) cadet, will grab his diploma on June 9 and then drive to Fort Benning, Ga. for training two days later.

He has been assigned to the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade in Italy, where he will serve as a lieutenant if he passes his training this summer. Neal expects to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan—a contingency that has “horrified” his mother.

“I definitely would have joined even if we didn’t have a war going on,” Neal says. “But it would have a much different feel if I didn’t think­—if I knew I wouldn’t be overseas having people shooting at me.”

Growing up in small-town Missouri, Neal thought throughout high school that he’d go to the Naval Academy, but senior year he decided to apply to Harvard and was surprised when he got in. He wanted to serve and ROTC was a good way to pay the College’s steep tuition.

When he got to Cambridge as a freshman, he signed up for the Army, only to be stunned a few days later by the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I thought of it almost like Pearl Harbor,” says Neal, whose mentor at church was a proud World War II veteran. “I remember walking around Harvard Square that afternoon and asking what do I do now? Do I drop out of college and join the military?”

Sept. 11 deepened Neal’s commitment to the military. But other ROTC seniors say their decision to serve was not influenced by the terrorist attacks.

“I joined ROTC before 11 Sep 2001,” Sean D. Wilson ’05 writes in an e-mail. “It was my intention...to pursue a military career prior to that date. The attacks of 11 Sep 2001 have had nothing to do with my decision to remain in the program.”

But for David W. Huebner ’05, who is considering taking a job in government, Sept. 11 did play an important role in weighing career options.

An American citizen who moved to France as an infant, Huebner says that he always saw himself as occupying a “middle ground” between European and American international affairs. Sept. 11 made that impossible.

Huebner says he was struck by the widening cultural divide exposed as the United States purported to defend its interests through military invasions while most of Europe watched idly. His social studies thesis examined the rise of a new political discourse in America, one which heightened binary representations of the world and religious themes.

While Huebner drew from examples other than Sept. 11, he says that his decision to examine American and European relations was motivated by the terrorist attacks. Sept. 11, Huebner says, “spearheaded my whole thesis.”

Senior theses provided a way for Huebner and others to deal with intellectual angst of Sept. 11, but for Neal, who will be serving abroad, the decision not to write one was not too difficult.

“The Iraqis probably won’t care if I wrote a thesis or not,” he said. “So I decided just to spend some time with my friends.”

—Staff writer Jonathan P. Abel can be reached at abel@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Jessica E. Vascellaro can be reached at vascell@fas.harvard.edu.