The ROTC Freakout

The Army’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, a century-old military leadership program, has overhauled its weapons training procedures on the nation’s college campuses after cadet drills—including one at George Mason University—were mistaken for possible active-shooter attacks.</ blockquote> It seems that students at George Mason, the University of Texas, Michigan State, the University of North Dakota, and other institutions of higher learning with ROTC programs have reported seeing large numbers of people in uniform carrying weapons or marching in unison on campus, panicked, and promptly called the police. According to the Post, the recent incident at George Mason “resulted in police sweeping the campus in search of two armed men with rifles.” As it turned out, the “suspicious armed men lurking in the woods .  .  . were ROTC cadets participating in a field exercise. Police who arrived at the wooded area .  .  . found more than 100 cadets carrying black M-16s as part of the training drill; though the guns look realistic, they are nonfunctional and made mostly of rubber.” Today’s Army, of course, responded to this comic embarrassment in suitable Pentagonese: “Our training,” said Major General Christopher P. Hughes in a statement, “requires increased coordination, on and off campus, with appropriate authorities to enhance our safety and minimize misperception by civilian populace or local authorities.” Which, roughly translated, means that, since undergraduates seem not to know what members of the armed forces do, or what they look like, or why they bother to wear uniforms and carry fake rifles—even the Post reporter defines ROTC as a “military leadership program”—every effort must be made to insulate students from the sight of their future guardians in the process of learning how to protect their country and freedom. The Scrapbook fully acknowledges that there have been tragic incidents of mass shooting on campuses—notably at Virginia Tech, 250 miles from George Mason—but the idea that students cannot distinguish between a lone gunman and future officers on training drill merely emphasizes the estrangement between civil and military life in America. And, for that matter, the estrangement between contemporary campus culture and reality: Last spring, panicked undergraduates at Indiana University mistook a hooded Dominican monk for a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Now, at George Mason and elsewhere, those rubber M-16 replicas will be bordered in strips of orange duct tape to reassure frightened students (or so the Army hopes) and help them distinguish toys from the real thing. This is as close as we’ve come in modern times to the pre-World War II era when a cash-starved peacetime army drilled with broomsticks and wagons disguised as tanks.