Soldiering on: the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force provide scholarships and leaders through on-campus training photo:Jon Gardiner

hen John "J.W." Stigi visited Duke on a sunny spring day during his junior year of high school, he fell in love with the school and knew he had to figure out a way to attend. So he headed over to the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps offices in the North Building. Within thirty minutes, he knew the Navy was for him.

Stigi is now a senior majoring in political science. If all goes as he plans, around this time next year he'll be spending a good part of his day in the back seat of an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, learning to operate its weapons and radar systems as a Naval flight officer. It's the culmination of four years at Duke as a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps midshipman. He's finishing up his Duke education as battalion commander--the senior-most student. After he graduates in May, he'll be commissioned as an officer and then head to Pensacola, Florida, for, he hopes, fighter training.

"I've had a lot of leadership opportunities," says Stigi, who has also been president of his fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha. "What the Naval ROTC program is about is instilling the core values of the Navy--honor, courage, commitment."

It's the kind of sentiment you hear from ROTC students, instructors, and alumni when you ask them about it. Whether retirees or students who have only been at Duke a few months, they all talk about values, pride, esprit de corps, leadership, commitment, discipline. And though they come to the ROTC program from different paths--some looking for scholarship money, others seeking a career in the military, some stumbling onto it after arriving at Duke--they all seem to end up talking about those intangible, but vital, parts of the experience.

This year, there are more than a hundred students enrolled in the Naval, Army, and Air Force ROTC programs. Each year's class of seniors will send new officers into military service--some into the reserves, but most into active duty for four or more years. Many of them will follow in the footsteps of other Duke alumni and spend their careers in the military; others will serve out their commitment, and maybe a few extra years, and then move into the civilian world equipped with the kind of leadership and management experience the business world loves.

I had no intention of making the military my career," says Jack Calvert '58, a Naval ROTC graduate. Calvert spent thirty-four years in the Navy, retiring in 1992 as a rear admiral. He says what he discovered, as do many others, is that military service provides leadership training and experience to new college graduates at a younger age than they'd likely get outside the military. It provides a ready-made social environment and a work environment where the focus isn't on getting ahead, but on accomplishing the mission.

"There's a lot of subtle differences," Calvert says. For instance, officers of the same age get paid the same. There's competition to advance, but because the military is so large--and structured--behaviors that could harm the mission are less likely.

Calvert's perspective comes from age and experience. Students, who haven't yet seen active duty themselves, give more personal reasons. Air Force ROTC cadet Sara Seneschal, a junior majoring in psychology, grew up with it. "I'm an Air Force brat, so it's always been an important part of my life," she says. "It's something I've always wanted to do."

Around third or fourth grade, Seneschal says she realized that she didn't need to marry a military guy to live the military lifestyle she enjoyed with her family. She could sign up herself. "You live in foreign countries. Before I was nine, I had done all of Europe and half of Asia," she says. "I'm a lot more open to differences [in people] than some of the people I grew up with in high school."

Seneschal says she's drawn to the camaraderie, community, and values of service. "I chose the Air Force over any other branch because of the focus [on the family].... There's a sense of dedication and community that runs deeper than yourself." She wanted to be a pilot, but an injury disqualified her from that. Instead, she plans to become a physical therapist and work in an Air Force hospital after graduating and becoming an officer.

Colonel Dennis Porter, the Air Force officer who runs Duke's Air Force ROTC program, says military culture is a big draw for many students. "Being a part of that culture where you are focused on a mission, accomplishing something with a group of people. I think that has an effect on everybody that goes through the program--that is infectious, that is contagious."

The idea of educating military officers at civilian universities is as old as the Union--by some accounts, the first proposals for military training at universities date to the 1780s. But Reserve Officer Training Corps programs, first for the Army and later for other services, got their real start in formalized military training programs before the Civil War.

Time and again throughout its history, the United States has found that the service academies--such as West Point and the Naval Academy--can't produce enough college-educated officers. ROTC programs now take up the bulk of that task.

ROTC came to Duke in July 1941, when the nation was on the verge of entering World War II and needed to produce many more officers, in a hurry, for a fast-growing military. Naval ROTC came first; it's the youngest of the three ROTC programs nationally, but the oldest at Duke. Naval ROTC was first created at six universities in 1926. Duke was one of eight schools that began new NROTC programs in the early Forties in preparation for World War II. It started with a hundred students, but by July 1943, a continuous twelve-month training program was producing more than a thousand officers a year.

Soldiering on: the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force provide scholarships and leaders through on-campus training photo:Jon Gardiner

Though not as many new officers were needed once World War II ended, the birth of the Cold War meant that ROTC programs continued to receive resources from the Pentagon. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Air Force ROTC got its start at Duke. It wasn't until 1981 that the Army ROTC program arrived; at first an extension of the North Carolina State University program, it became an independent detachment by fall 1982.

None of the detachments at Duke is large. This year NROTC has fifty-seven midshipmen, AROTC has twenty-one cadets from Duke and another fourteen from North Carolina Central University, and AFROTC is home to thirty-one cadets.

Many students in ROTC participate for all four years of their undergraduate education on a full scholarship, but some participate for fewer years with less financial support. A full ROTC scholarship typically pays tuition, an allowance for textbooks, and a monthly stipend that increases as students get closer to graduation. The only thing it doesn't cover is room and board.

ROTC students typically take an extra class each semester that includes one or two weekly lectures and periodic lab sessions. The lecture sessions are much like typical academic classes, says Lieutenant Colonel Todd Sherrill, the Army ROTC detachment's commanding officer and Duke's top military science instructor. "Cadets write papers, take tests, present projects," he says. They are generally required to wear uniforms to class only once a week. They use military protocol to address instructors: "sir," "ma'am," or by rank.

During lecture sessions, students learn military history, culture, law, and traditions, as well as leadership theory and ethics. During lab sessions, they work on such skills as drilling and parade. Army ROTC students, for instance, learn land navigation and small-unit tactics as part of their undergraduate curriculum. As students progress from freshmen to seniors, the classes progress, so that by the time they graduate they have the basic theory and background they'll need as officers.

"I've told a lot of people that I went to a very good school and I learned a lot in my education," says James Morgan B.S.E. '01, who's starting Air Force flight training this spring. "But the things I learned in ROTC--the life skills, the discipline--have already benefited me, and will benefit me far more in life than anything else." Though Morgan has spent his first few months on active duty in a "casual status" assignment as he waited to go to flight school to begin his pilot training, he says he has already had a chance to learn the leadership principles he learned in ROTC as an awards officer at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

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