Inside the Dartmouth ROTC of the 1960s

By John Bruce | Thursday, September 27, 2007

Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Those who want to read previous installments will find them on this newspaper’s web site. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.

There are, as far as I can discover, two points of interest in Massena, New York. One is a set of locks on the St. Lawrence Seaway. The other is an aluminum plant, which we didn’t visit. We concentrated on the Seaway locks. We learned roughly what you’d learn on a high school geography field trip, assuming your high school was close enough to Massena, New York to justify the bus ride. Lots of ships went through the St. Lawrence Seaway, which was then relatively new, on their way to and from the Great Lakes. That was what we learned.

Now, I could understand it if our tour involved Major Frigment (that was one of our officers; besides Colonel Ditherspoon, there were also Major Tickworth. Sergeant Major Fludge did the typing) giving us a lecture roughly as follows: “Our war plans, in the event of Canadian invasion, involve blowing this bridge, because we expect the whole Canadian Third Armored Division to come sweeping in here, just like the Russkies through the Fulda Gap. Not only will they have tanks, but Mounties will be screening their flanks on motorcycles. Meanwhile, we expect the Canadian Eighth Army Corps to be executing a pincer maneuver at St. Albans, Vermont. . .”

But nothing of the sort took place. We dutifully listened to the lock director tell us what we needed to know about the locks and the Seaway, and that was that. We went to dinner. I wound up—I don’t know how—sitting at the same table with Majors Frigment and Tickworth and their wives, who were dressed in frilly pink prom dresses. This was apparently a social, as well as educational, event. We may as well have been talking to each other through the phones you use when you visit prison inmates. The majors bantered to each other about how long you had to be in a particular rank before you were promoted, which they regarded as an automatic event.

It sounded like, with Colonel Ditherspoon filling out their evaluations and Sergeant Major Fludge doing the typing, their careers were set. There was absolutely nothing I could discuss with them. It would have been completely out of place for me to ask, “How do you feel about Robert Graves’s portrayal of career military officers in Goodbye to All That? How do you feel about Norman Mailer’s estimate of military competence in The Naked and the Dead? How do you feel about Joseph Heller’s. . .”

If you think about it, we would expect a rabbi or priest on a college campus to be able to give a thoughtful response to equivalent questions on, say, Portnoy’s Complaint, Elmer Gantry, or Brideshead Revisited. Not these Army officers. On the other hand, they’d say, “Time in grade has gone from five years eight months to six years two months before you make Lieutenant Colonel. . .” or something like that, and expect me to be impressed. I don’t know how that table assignment came about. I’m sure they’d have preferred some of the other guys, who’d just kiss their asses and be done with it.

Dartmouth ROTC must have been one of the cushiest billets in the Army. A full colonel, two majors, and a sergeant major to supervise a bunch of cadets marching around on Wednesday afternoons, making sure they knew how to clean an obsolete M1 rifle, double checking that they’d polished their boots. No need to deal with the guys who wind up in jail on leave, no need to deal with all the hassles on base, and certainly not the hassles over in Nam, no, no way. For variety, there were field trips to places like Massena, New York. What was the fuss about ROTC on campus? If the Canadians ever made their pincer move on St. Albans, Vermont, these guys would be the ones who’d be taken prisoner by Mounties on motorcycles before they got out of bed.

Since this whole story leads up to the Parkhurst Hall takeover by the SDS in May 1969, I should mention here that the whole reason for that takeover was that the Dartmouth faculty, which had already voted to phase out ROTC, would not vote to throw ROTC off campus immediately, as the SDS wanted. As far as I can see, the ROTC of the late 1960s was (as the faculty decided) not compatible with the objectives of a private liberal-arts school, though the military part of it was the least of the problem, and the connection with the Viet Nam War was simply irrelevant. The issue, as I saw it, was that the ROTC made major time demands on its participants for trivial tasks that didn’t serve an educational purpose. That was reason enough to send it packing. (I can certainly envision a ROTC program that is compatible with elite-school educational objectives, but it would be nothing like the one I was in.)

The only reason ROTC wasn’t immediately booted off campus in 1969 was that the members in their junior and senior years received a stipend, which many relied on for a big part of their financial aid. If nothing else, the College might have been in breach of contract if it denied that aid before those students graduated. Its objection to the procedural delay required by such niceties was the entire reason—or at least, the entire stated reason —the SDS staged the Parkhurst takeover.

When you think about it, somebody did the Army a favor when they threw the ROTC off Ivy League campuses. My view from inside the ROTC was that it was a soft, corrupt organization that kept underachievers preoccupied with mindless busywork for a dozen or more hours a week, time that should have been going to productive educational activity. It presented the US military to the country’s future leadership (the Clintons, for instance) in the worst possible light. It kept potentially promising officers who were serving as instructors out of more useful billets, and by keeping them on elite college campuses it probably either softened or embittered a great many.

In short, if the SDS seriously wanted to weaken the military, it should have been doing everything it could to get ROTC programs on campus expanded. If you really wanted to hurt the Army, you’d be agitating for them to send a few lieutenants and captains —heck, why not a general?—up to Hanover, and more typists to support them. That way you’d waste the time and energy of more officers and soak up even more money on useless field trips. Instead, the SDS worked unintentionally to strengthen the military, the way an inoculation strengthens a body by injecting it with harmless versions of a virus. The campus antiwar movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s served as a wakeup call to the Army that its relationship with society needed fixing and moved it toward needed reform. I assume this wasn’t the movement’s intent. In other words, we have a conundrum.

With the ROTC on top of all my other dissatisfactions, with myself and with Dartmouth, I was a very unhappy guy by the end of my freshman year. And the judgments of the lemon sessions in Bill McMann’s room didn’t relent: I wasn’t dealing with my father, they said, though nobody there actually knew my father, and none understood the real-world problems he presented. For that matter—though they were surely different people and had different reasons—neither Bill McMann’s nor Larry Burlingame’s father even showed up at Freshman Father’s Weekend. Larry’s father, as far as I could tell, was the ideal, laissez faire type: he sent lots of money, but otherwise left Larry alone. With a father like that, you stay out of trouble in lemon sessions.

For a time, I was hoping I could get Bill to be my roommate for the following year, but even before I had a chance to ask him, he and Larry announced that they’d be rooming together. They were, in fact, thick, much thicker than I was with either. But then the heads-up Dean Dickerson had given me (and whose meaning I’d dodged) came to pass, and Bill told me that he’d been thinking everything over and looking at his finances, and he’d decided Dartmouth wasn’t for him after all. He wouldn’t be back for sophomore year at all. He didn’t mention Inskip.

It was only later that I began to realize the lemon sessions were a rigged game. They were set up so that I was always It, but the hard questions never quite came around to Bill or Larry. I wanted to be honest with myself; the two of them kept insisting that I be so, and that was enough for me at the time. If they could get away with not mentioning key things—was Larry a happy-go-lucky rich kid who’d never had a problem in his life? Was Bill flunking out?—that was secondary. In fact, in withholding important insights and information about themselves in an environment where everyone was supposed to be open, they were hypocritical. But they were confidants, when I had no others, and I still thought they had the answers to some important questions.

For instance, granting—for the sake of argument —that one could have unresolved Freudian conflicts (the conventional model of the psyche at the time) which could cause a person to be, if not unhappy, then at least inauthentic, what was the remedy? Even then, conventional analysis was thought to be too long, expensive, and unreliable. If you followed the media, all sorts of therapies presented themselves. A popular one, with several variants, appeared to be that you got yourself into a state where you screamed, and the effect of the scream was to dissipate all your prior inhibitions. You would presumably come out of any future lemon session with flying colors.

I posed this question to Bill and Larry at the end of spring term, just before Bill left Hanover for good. The answer—they swore me to secrecy—was that Larry had been taking LSD. Worked like a champ, he pretty much said. n

Inside the Dartmouth ROTC of the 1960s

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