My military career was part-time, uneventful, and inglorious. I leveled out as a captain in the Army (a courtesy, really, because I got the promotion as I went on inactive status), and other than training stints, my only duty was as a reservist, first in a technical-intelligence company and then in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. I first visited an active war zone 20 years after being commissioned, and then only as a middle-aged civilian Pentagon adviser. My highest decoration was the Army Commendation Medal, which was merely a formal acknowledgment that the military had not detected any criminal behavior on my part.
And yet military training, beginning with participating in the Army’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, was a pivotal experience. I joined up as a graduate student at Harvard, believing that it would be good for me to have some modicum of military time under my belt if I wanted to write about such matters going forward. This was, in 1980, somewhat unorthodox, but the colonel who ran the MIT ROTC detachment was expert at finagling unusual appointments. I slipped through, despite having a dislocated shoulder.
Harvard did not have ROTC back then, supposedly because of discrimination against gays in the military—which was real—although that was also something of an excuse for a still-liberal university haunted by the Vietnam War to keep uniforms off of its campus. Half a dozen or so oddball undergraduates trekked every week to MIT, there to be instructed chiefly by two sergeants. Sergeant Ross and Sergeant Mac taught me a lot, beginning with how to read a map and issue a patrol order, but much more about valuing people with practical skills. When we were commissioned, they would call us sir or ma’am, but with a twinkle in the eye. We and they knew who was learning from whom.
Service in the Army quickly teaches one to respect people who can shoot straight, get rations on time, repair busted equipment, and, even more important, instruct and motivate other people to do so. Leading a patrol on an exercise one night in a cold and rainy Fort Devens training area, when all of us were short on sleep, cranky, wet, lost, and feeling sorry for ourselves, made me realize that how well we had done on our SATs and final exams really did not matter. Grit and discipline were the ticket, and when I found myself gripping the lapels of a brilliant future physicist and saying, “No, goddamn it, you’re going to keep on!,” I realized that sweet reason occasionally gives way to other motivations.
[From the July 2026 issue: Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s military]
Military experience is, sooner or later, humbling. One night, for example, I walked smack into a tree, scratching a cornea, after a flash-bang went off near me. It was a very stupid injury. Military experience teaches stoicism too. During summer camp, I had to shimmy out on a rope, hang from it, and ask permission to drop 20 feet into a muddy stream. Favoring my bum shoulder, I put my weight on the other, which promptly also dislocated. “Cadet,” the sergeant growled, “you didn’t ask permission to drop.” “I know sergeant. My shoulder just dislocated.” “Oh. Jones, take the cadet to the docs.” No sympathy expressed, and, I realized, none needed.
There were the inspiring moments too—I have a tingle at memories of marching to the mess hall at the break of day, the sun rising over snow-covered central Massachusetts hills, a more senior cadet calling cadences—macabre, humorous, occasionally a bit solemn. “Move out with a purpose” was the phrase, and so we did. Or the time when on a very long run in the Arizona sun, one of my comrades nearly collapsed, and the rest of us took turns to carry him across the finish line.
Most organizations are rife with awful leaders, sometimes at the very top. The military, and perhaps the Army above all, understands the importance of teaching the leadership basics. “The person in charge eats last.” “Your priorities are always—always—your mission, your people, and only then yourself.” “Set the example.” “Lead from the front.” “You are accountable for your people and their gear.” Simple maxims all, learned almost entirely by the experience of living them. It amounted to Leadership 101, and it has stood me in good stead. I have often wished that everyone in a position to lead had to internalize those basic ideas.
I do not know what kind of wartime soldier I would have made; I do know I would have been a terrible peacetime soldier. I have always worn my hair short but hated the idea of being told I have to. I was terrible at polishing my rank insignia and spit-shining my boots. Marching in step was a challenge. But I am glad I had to do those things.
[Listen: Has Trump corrupted the military?]
The Army, being composed of human beings, has not only an unusually high percentage of straight arrows and even heroes but also its share of fools, dullards, bullies, and liars. Firsthand experience of those things, too, was invaluable. Because military service is now so far from the norm, particularly among American elites, we tend to either idolize soldiers or treat them as a different species. Even a modicum of military service is an antidote to either failing.
In many ways, military experience of this kind is common to any good army. But it was also distinctively American. Baron von Steuben, the Prussian drill master who helped train the Army at Valley Forge, is supposed to have said, “In Europe, you say to your soldier, ‘Do this’ and he does it. But I am obliged to say to the American, ‘This is why you ought to do this,’ and then he does it.” I can believe it. The ideal in the Prussian army of his time was kadavergehorsam, literally “corpse-like obedience.” America’s war of independence was won with a different breed of soldier.
Military humor in those days, and now, retained more than a bit of the flavor of Bill Mauldin’s wonderfully seditious Willie-and-Joe cartoons from Stars and Stripes during World War II. The jaundiced view of officers, the not-so-subtle mockery of stuffed shirts and blowhards, the poking fun at the absurdities of military life reduced the various military castes to a common and realistic human scale.
As an academic and public servant, I have had the great good fortune of living in the company of soldiers, including some of the finest of this generation. I saw many of them doing infinitely harder things than I ever had to do or could have done. But my experiences as a graduate-student cadet and second lieutenant were even more powerful. And as the 250th anniversary of this country’s birth comes around, I think of the American soldiers without whom this country would not be as free, as prosperous, and as promising as it remains today, even in a dreadful political season. There are many individuals, groups, and institutions to thank on July 4 for what we have today. The U.S. Army, to my mind, should be in the front rank.
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