I belonged to the first batch of college seminarians that had to submit to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps regimen when the government decided that seminarians would no longer be exempted. Seminary formation has never been luxurious, at least not in the Philippines. In fact, it is almost always Spartan living—but ROTC was our rude awakening to the brutality of which the military was capable. I am aghast at the very proposal to make ROTC compulsory once more and to revive the intrusion of academe by the agents of the military and defense establishments!
Aside from wasting an entire Sunday marching aimlessly with the glaring sun beating down mercilessly on us, we had to endure lectures delivered by semi-literate cadet officers who, aside from drawling and mumbling through completely forgettable material, harangued us into learning utterly inane maneuvers like defending the goldfish in the university pond from imagined intruders! I have absolutely no pleasant memories of ROTC, and I do not think myself idiosyncratic in this respect. Cadet officership was often the chance for academic retardates to bully brighter students by yelling at them and subjecting them to every form of humiliation and torture, avenging themselves for the humiliation they in turn received from professors whose patience these drill bullies most surely wore thin by their silly classroom recitation!
To instill patriotism, love of country and a preparedness to defend the nation? Were the proponents of the revival of this best-forgotten chapter of collegiate life decades ago even awake— or serious—when they attempted this pathetic defense of their absurd proposal? Ask any ordinary cadet who went through the ordeals of ROTC whether all the drills, and the yells and the rudeness of the cadet officer training program left him burning with patriotism and zealously on the ready to defend the country. If anything, it was the exasperating days in military habiliment and the ceaseless rudeness by cadet officers and commandants alike that left youngsters with a loathing for anything military, with an irreparable antipathy for men and officers in uniform and with an abiding cynicism towards the defense establishment.
We are really engaged in double-talk just once more, for while, on the one hand, we protest until we are hoarse that as a nation, we reject war as an instrument of national policy and have made a fundamental option for the ways of peace, comity and friendship between nations, we want our youngsters prepared—or so it is claimed—for war, even if, we insist, only in defense of the country. But should we not be devising programs rather to set our youngsters’ feet on the paths of peace through the ways of interracial, inter-ethnic, regional and international dialogue and exchange? That takes more time—and more intelligence—than does barking orders to an entire platoon of intimidated and harassed cadets!
The argument is likewise specious that claims for ROTC the mystic ability to instill discipline in the young. By the provisions of the Constitution, that is first of all the province of the family, and the prime duty of parents. And then it belongs to the school and to the members of the community to discipline—in that sense of “discipline” that acknowledges its origins in the Latin infinitive “discere”—to learn! Something terrible must have happened to us as a nation if we now admit that we need the military to discipline and to educate our youth! No, there is absolutely no sound argument in favor of the revival of that dreadful memory called ROTC within the sacred grooves of academe.
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@yahoo.com