Bronco Battalion

“It was embarrassing to wear your uniform on campus,” Sequeira recalls. “There was a look of disdain.”

Events reached their nadir in May 1970. Sequeira and his fellow cadets were marching in the annual End-of-Year President’s Review of ROTC and were greeted by dozens of students and some professors, holding signs like “Off ROTC,” “Get out of SE Asia.” Some demonstrators lay in their way, a moment immortalized in a photograph of the lead cadet saluting as he stepped over the prone protestor. The image ran in papers around the world.

Four decades later, it’s a very different picture. Back for his 40th reunion in October 2011, Sequeira stopped by an event marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of Santa Clara ROTC and the 150th anniversary of Santa Clara cadet training during the Civil War. Instead of cadets conflicted by their commitment, he saw budding officers wearing their dress uniforms with dignity.

“You just never walked around wearing your uniform with pride like these guys do now,” said Sequeira, who is now a management consultant in Charlotte, N.C. “It was interesting to see.”

SISTER SOLDIERS

Indeed, these days, members of the Bronco Battalion are far more likely to get support from a student body that respects their volunteerism even as few consider it. Though numbers are relative; this fall, 92 cadets made up the Bronco Battalion, the highest enrollment in more than a decade. But that’s a fraction of the unit’s size during the 1950s and 1960s, when obligatory enrollment, fear of the draft, and a different tenor to the times spurred hundreds to participate—all of them men.

In 2012, junior Brigitte Clark, a liberal arts major, is a face of a new generation of cadets at Santa Clara. She came to SCU set on joining ROTC out of a sense of tradition and duty. Her grandparents served in the military, her parents met in ROTC at the University of Florida, and her sister, Brittany Clark ’09, led the battalion during her senior year. An aspiring elementary schoolteacher, Brigitte does not plan to make the Army a career beyond her four-year active service commitment. She gets a full scholarship from the Army. And she believes everyone has a duty to provide some sort of national service.

“I feel like everybody should do their part,” she says.

She balances the early morning training, military science classes, and weekend exercises of cadet life with a job as an IT manager at student services and an overload of other academic coursework. And she confesses the mornings can be tough. “But you think, ‘This is your scholarship and this is how you’re paying to go through school.’ You just have to suck it up.” She might get curious questions when she’s lugging a rucksack and Kevlar helmet through the dorms, she says, but the response from other students has always been positive.

“Everyone is really supportive of it here,” she says. “They think it’s really cool that I am doing something like this, especially being a female.”

THE VIETNAM EFFECT

Following the May 1970 protest against ROTC, two Santa Clara instructors who participated were censured for conduct unbecoming faculty—though their actions were probably supported by roughly a third of the faculty, according to George Giacomini ’56. Now professor of history emeritus, he served as battalion commander when he was a senior in college. Also in the wake of the protest, the Santa Clara faculty voted 117 to 36 to keep ROTC on campus but with reduced visibility, removing commissioning from commencement. The student body held the first referendum in the nation concerning dissolving ROTC academic courses. The result: 927 out of 1,352 votes cast were for keeping academic credit for military science intact.

In 1981, the program commissioned just nine officers. The recent bounce in enrollment comes as students barely old enough to remember life before Sept. 11, 2001, now fill the ranks. For senior Jason Catalano, the current battalion commander, the commitment to the Army comes with a sense of duty to country; if it requires deployment to Afghanistan, so be it, he says. But his attraction to the Army is also about investing in himself. The Army—and its opportunities and responsibilities—promises to bring out the best in him, he hopes.ROTC soon became a nonissue compared to debates about the actual war, which themselves faded in following years. Many students increasingly ignored the program. In 1970, Santa Clara ROTC commissioned 62 officers; in 1972, just 21. The inclusion of women to the program in 1973 did not reverse the trend. But it did lead to a Santa Clara first: During her senior year, Rita Tamayo ’76 served as battalion commander—the first woman in the nation to do so.

At Santa Clara the pendulum of attitude toward ROTC hasn’t swung nearly as wildly as at some other schools, which actually forced the Armed Forces off campus, beginning a decadeslong estrangement that’s just begun to ease. Reasons cited for revisiting ROTC include policy changes like the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and acknowledgment that a military that has fought two wars for the better part of a decade needs the best and brightest.

In fall 2011, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia decided to bring back ROTC. Brown University still withholds recognition of ROTC for a variety of reasons, including faculty opposition to military hierarchy. At Stanford—where the Naval ROTC building was burned down in protest in 1968—faculty also invited ROTC back last year. For the time being, though, Cardinal cadets still commute to the Mission Campus, as they have since the 1970s.

ETHICS AND LEADERSHIP

Within the nation’s Jesuit schools, the connection to the military has remained strong. More than three-quarters of the nation’s Jesuit colleges offer ROTC, including SCU, the University of San Francisco, Loyola Marymount University, Gonzaga University, and Georgetown University. But some in these broader Jesuit environs claim that the long relationship can’t be reconciled with a focus on forgiveness, nonviolence, and social justice. At College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, protests against the Naval ROTC program have become an annual ritual. Peace activist John Dear, S.J., wrote a scathing piece for the National Catholic Reporter in September 2011, after reading a glowing feature on ROTC in the alumni magazine of Loyola University Maryland. Dear’s column garnered plenty of reader support, but it also drew criticism from those who pointed out that the military has been the guarantor of the rights and freedoms that allow Dear to make his arguments. Moreover, so long as the country needs a military, shouldn’t it have the most capable, liberally educated leaders?

As a matter of course, a sovereign nation has a right to defend itself, says James Felt, S.J., professor emeritus of philosophy at SCU. Felt began teaching at Santa Clara in 1965, and he served briefly on a board that convened hearings for students trying to get out of ROTC in the 1960s. Indeed, military strength can be essential for good, he says. Had the British and French not let their militaries wane in exhaustion after the First World War, they may well have prevented Nazi aggression.

“I can’t think that there is any moral fault in the United States maintaining suitable armed forces,” he says matter-of-factly. “If so, then it’s okay for SCU to offer ROTC, just as we need to train local police. It would be fatuous to pretend that there’s no evil or evil-doers in the world, and countries, as well as individuals, have a right to self-defense. But this is not to condone a culture of killing.”

Thomas Buckley, S.J., agrees that the campus embrace of ROTC is a sensible one. Buckley, a professor of American religious history at SCU’s Jesuit School of Theology, has a unique historical and familial perspective on the matter: His father, Col. Michael Buckley Jr., was a West Point graduate who briefly led Santa Clara’s ROTC program in the 1950s, when all students had to take ROTC their first two years. Fr. Buckley, meanwhile, has studied and taught about pacifism, believing “the anti-war tradition is a long and honorable one in the United States.”

But at least in the United States, it’s politicians who decide to go to war, he says, not top officers, who are often averse to initiating conflicts of which they better know the price. “You want a professional Army. You want a trained officer corps,” Buckley observes. “But you also want them to have a background in ethics and philosophical training. That’s where a university like Santa Clara does a great service for the military and, therefore, for the country. It’s just as reasonable to have Army officers who graduated from Santa Clara as to have Leon Panetta ’60, J.D. ’63 sitting in the cabinet leading them.”