.It’s the Economy, Undergraduate
PRINCETON, N.J. — One day last summer, in the back of a bug-like armored truck in southern Afghanistan, an American infantryman my own age asked me a question, one I’ve heard countless times from countless soldiers when they learn that at home, I study at an Ivy League college: What do they think of all this back there, in your world?
I knew what answer he expected because of the surprise that registers on such soldiers’ faces when I offer a different one. He expected that in my world of left-leaning professors and privileged students, the war he and his unit were waging would be viewed with scorn or disgust, and maybe that he and his profession would be, too.
That wasn’t the case, I told him. From his expression, what I told him was worse: that in my world (if it really is my world, but that’s another question) most students — young people who are his peers, at least in terms of age and video games and music — rarely spare his war more than a passing thought.
Now back in college after spending much of a yearlong hiatus embedded with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is a reality I’m used to, one that I understand but still find disturbing: For me, it’s easy to forget that there’s a health care debate or an immigration one. But for almost everyone I know at school, even my closest friends, it’s easy to forget there’s a war — let alone two of them.
This semester, as part of my junior year, two of my five classes will be devoted to Afghanistan, one on its history and one on its present. Both classes will be taught by professors who have lived good chunks of their life in that country, and both will be filled with students who are deeply interested in the war there for one reason or another.
But with the exception of a handful of students who will probably wind up in Afghanistan in two or three years as aid workers or Army lieutenants, that war is an abstract topic, a subject of intellectual curiosity but not one with much emotional pull — and for kids who haven’t been there and don’t have family there, how could it have one?
Whether I like it or not — a question I don’t really think about — America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are a part of my daily life (albeit a much smaller part than for, say, a Marine in Helmand Province). For almost everyone around me, that’s not the case. Among student priorities, following the news often seems to fall behind just about everything else — papers, parties, TV, social positioning and so on. And when current events do come up, Afghanistan (let alone Iraq, now completely forgotten) rarely figures in, with health care and the latest ups and downs on Wall Street taking precedence.
It’s not hard to understand why — just ask some Ivy League students, particularly upperclassmen who are staring the civilian job market in the face, and they’ll tell you. Marguerite Colson, a college senior who is majoring in history at Princeton, put it in stark terms. “Unfortunately, with so many of us concerned about the economy and dim job prospects, questions of troop escalation, counterinsurgency, etc., are pushed to the back of our minds, if they were ever there to begin with,” she wrote in an e-mail message last week. “Galaxies separate us from the situation in Afghanistan.”
After the State of the Union Address, I asked some other friends how often they heard Afghanistan discussed in their dorms and dining halls. Daily? Weekly? “Well,” answered one girl, a chemical engineering senior, “I heard Obama mention it tonight — does that count?”
Maria Lacayo, a history major from Nicaragua who is applying to graduate school in England, put it this way: “The war in Afghanistan just doesn’t affect my life as a Princeton student in any immediate way. I go about my business as if it weren’t happening. And no, it isn’t a usual topic of conversation among my friends. If anything, I’ll occasionally hear about it from a professor, and a lot of the time from you.”
That’s me, the kid who takes all the Afghanistan classes and spends his free time planning next summer’s embeds.
Of course, there are exceptions. There is a small contingent of graduate students on campus who have not only been to Afghanistan or Iraq, but have also been there over and over again, as military officers. One of them commanded Army Rangers on the Pakistani border; another commanded a Navy Seal unit in Ramadi, in western Iraq. A little cadre of undergraduates — our cadets and officer candidates — plans to follow in their footsteps. For them, the news from Afghanistan is not just news.
Norm Bonnyman, a sophomore in Princeton’s Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (R.O.T.C.) detachment, explained to me the complicated Afghan calculus that he puzzles over: if the drawdown begins in mid-2011, and he doesn’t graduate until mid-2012 and probably would not deploy until mid-2013, will he get his chance to lead soldiers in combat? It’s hard to say, and that troubles him.
“I wouldn’t be joining the Army if, as a country, we weren’t in the middle of two wars,” he told me.
Raj Lalla, a senior at Columbia who plans to go straight to Marine officer candidate school after graduation, echoed Norm.
“As an aspiring military officer, I’m pretty excited, even though I don’t hear people talking about the war,” he said.
Describing a recent visit to a recruiting station, he went on: “Honestly, it made me 10 times more excited to get over there. I was jealous of the kids that were going sooner. I know that war is terrible, but I’m hoping that by the time I’m ready to go, U.S. troops won’t be sitting on F.O.B.’s [forward operating bases] in the middle of nowhere like they are in Iraq right now.”
But Norm and Raj and others like them are the exception. One of my best friends, a senior from Virginia who studies environmental biology and health care policy, explained it like this.
“It’s hard to stay engaged about Afghanistan, partly because our president rarely brings it up,” he said. “If he were to have spent more than like fifteen seconds on it during his State of the Union Address, maybe I’d have an opinion, but he didn’t. So unlike with, say, Vietnam, I don’t think college students are pro-war or antiwar. I think it’s the worst-case situation — we’re genuinely apathetic or indifferent.”
As for why he cares deeply about health care but very little about the war, my friend continued: “Health care is much more immediately relevant to most people than the wars abroad are. Even as the child of an upper-middle-class family, we see our neighbors lose their coverage, but we don’t see G.I. Joe get blown up by an I.E.D.”
I haven’t seen a soldier struck by an improvised explosive device, either. But I have seen soldiers shot to death, and others bloodied and crippled — soldiers I was bantering and watching DVD’s with just the night before. Just as importantly, at least to me, I’ve heard soldiers of every rank, from privates to generals, tell their stories of the war that changed, and often defined, their lives, whether it was Afghanistan or Iraq or both.
One morning last week, for example, I woke up to an e-mail message from an Army colonel recounting his most vivid memory from Iraq: a description, in heartbreaking detail, of the carnage left after one of his soldiers died grappling with a suicide bomber to save his friends. I wasn’t there and I didn’t see it, and I’m thankful for that. But I still think about it, and about all the stories I’ve heard, just as I do about the things I have seen.
I’m not even a soldier, just a college student, and to me the war is everything, consuming my memories, daily thoughts and future plans. To many of my closest friends, though — people I love and admire — it is a fire so distant and dim that it might as well not be burning at all.
NYT
I knew what answer he expected because of the surprise that registers on such soldiers’ faces when I offer a different one. He expected that in my world of left-leaning professors and privileged students, the war he and his unit were waging would be viewed with scorn or disgust, and maybe that he and his profession would be, too.
That wasn’t the case, I told him. From his expression, what I told him was worse: that in my world (if it really is my world, but that’s another question) most students — young people who are his peers, at least in terms of age and video games and music — rarely spare his war more than a passing thought.
Now back in college after spending much of a yearlong hiatus embedded with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is a reality I’m used to, one that I understand but still find disturbing: For me, it’s easy to forget that there’s a health care debate or an immigration one. But for almost everyone I know at school, even my closest friends, it’s easy to forget there’s a war — let alone two of them.
This semester, as part of my junior year, two of my five classes will be devoted to Afghanistan, one on its history and one on its present. Both classes will be taught by professors who have lived good chunks of their life in that country, and both will be filled with students who are deeply interested in the war there for one reason or another.
But with the exception of a handful of students who will probably wind up in Afghanistan in two or three years as aid workers or Army lieutenants, that war is an abstract topic, a subject of intellectual curiosity but not one with much emotional pull — and for kids who haven’t been there and don’t have family there, how could it have one?
Whether I like it or not — a question I don’t really think about — America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are a part of my daily life (albeit a much smaller part than for, say, a Marine in Helmand Province). For almost everyone around me, that’s not the case. Among student priorities, following the news often seems to fall behind just about everything else — papers, parties, TV, social positioning and so on. And when current events do come up, Afghanistan (let alone Iraq, now completely forgotten) rarely figures in, with health care and the latest ups and downs on Wall Street taking precedence.
It’s not hard to understand why — just ask some Ivy League students, particularly upperclassmen who are staring the civilian job market in the face, and they’ll tell you. Marguerite Colson, a college senior who is majoring in history at Princeton, put it in stark terms. “Unfortunately, with so many of us concerned about the economy and dim job prospects, questions of troop escalation, counterinsurgency, etc., are pushed to the back of our minds, if they were ever there to begin with,” she wrote in an e-mail message last week. “Galaxies separate us from the situation in Afghanistan.”
After the State of the Union Address, I asked some other friends how often they heard Afghanistan discussed in their dorms and dining halls. Daily? Weekly? “Well,” answered one girl, a chemical engineering senior, “I heard Obama mention it tonight — does that count?”
Maria Lacayo, a history major from Nicaragua who is applying to graduate school in England, put it this way: “The war in Afghanistan just doesn’t affect my life as a Princeton student in any immediate way. I go about my business as if it weren’t happening. And no, it isn’t a usual topic of conversation among my friends. If anything, I’ll occasionally hear about it from a professor, and a lot of the time from you.”
That’s me, the kid who takes all the Afghanistan classes and spends his free time planning next summer’s embeds.
Of course, there are exceptions. There is a small contingent of graduate students on campus who have not only been to Afghanistan or Iraq, but have also been there over and over again, as military officers. One of them commanded Army Rangers on the Pakistani border; another commanded a Navy Seal unit in Ramadi, in western Iraq. A little cadre of undergraduates — our cadets and officer candidates — plans to follow in their footsteps. For them, the news from Afghanistan is not just news.
Norm Bonnyman, a sophomore in Princeton’s Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (R.O.T.C.) detachment, explained to me the complicated Afghan calculus that he puzzles over: if the drawdown begins in mid-2011, and he doesn’t graduate until mid-2012 and probably would not deploy until mid-2013, will he get his chance to lead soldiers in combat? It’s hard to say, and that troubles him.
“I wouldn’t be joining the Army if, as a country, we weren’t in the middle of two wars,” he told me.
Raj Lalla, a senior at Columbia who plans to go straight to Marine officer candidate school after graduation, echoed Norm.
“As an aspiring military officer, I’m pretty excited, even though I don’t hear people talking about the war,” he said.
Describing a recent visit to a recruiting station, he went on: “Honestly, it made me 10 times more excited to get over there. I was jealous of the kids that were going sooner. I know that war is terrible, but I’m hoping that by the time I’m ready to go, U.S. troops won’t be sitting on F.O.B.’s [forward operating bases] in the middle of nowhere like they are in Iraq right now.”
But Norm and Raj and others like them are the exception. One of my best friends, a senior from Virginia who studies environmental biology and health care policy, explained it like this.
“It’s hard to stay engaged about Afghanistan, partly because our president rarely brings it up,” he said. “If he were to have spent more than like fifteen seconds on it during his State of the Union Address, maybe I’d have an opinion, but he didn’t. So unlike with, say, Vietnam, I don’t think college students are pro-war or antiwar. I think it’s the worst-case situation — we’re genuinely apathetic or indifferent.”
As for why he cares deeply about health care but very little about the war, my friend continued: “Health care is much more immediately relevant to most people than the wars abroad are. Even as the child of an upper-middle-class family, we see our neighbors lose their coverage, but we don’t see G.I. Joe get blown up by an I.E.D.”
I haven’t seen a soldier struck by an improvised explosive device, either. But I have seen soldiers shot to death, and others bloodied and crippled — soldiers I was bantering and watching DVD’s with just the night before. Just as importantly, at least to me, I’ve heard soldiers of every rank, from privates to generals, tell their stories of the war that changed, and often defined, their lives, whether it was Afghanistan or Iraq or both.
One morning last week, for example, I woke up to an e-mail message from an Army colonel recounting his most vivid memory from Iraq: a description, in heartbreaking detail, of the carnage left after one of his soldiers died grappling with a suicide bomber to save his friends. I wasn’t there and I didn’t see it, and I’m thankful for that. But I still think about it, and about all the stories I’ve heard, just as I do about the things I have seen.
I’m not even a soldier, just a college student, and to me the war is everything, consuming my memories, daily thoughts and future plans. To many of my closest friends, though — people I love and admire — it is a fire so distant and dim that it might as well not be burning at all.
NYT
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