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Photography by Reed Hutchinson UCLA Photographic Services

Navy ROTC Midshipman Jennie Barba strolls the campus after class.

THey're Fulfulling their goals in Uniform

Student soldiers

BY Anne Burke
UCLA Today Staff

Lt. Ryan Turonek, clad in green camouflage and combat boots, stands feet slightly apart, hands clasped behind his back. Turonek is supervising about three dozen members of UCLA’s Air Force ROTC detachment in a grueling series of physical tests at Drake Stadium. The cadets are doing sit-ups, their faces red from the exertion as they tap elbows to knees for the 40th, then the 50th, time. The lieutenant’s eyes dart from one cadet to another. “Smith, come up a little more! Go higher, Wilkins!”

Photography by Reed Hutchinson UCLA Photographic Services

Horsing around after a Navy commissioning ceremony are (standing from the left) Ensigns Jose Rangel, Prashant Patel, Matthew Stender and Bradley Silldorff and instructor Major Matthew Parker with former instructor Lt. Robert Wong in their arms.

Wilkins is Cadet Jonathan Wilkins, a 6-foot-2 sophomore. It’s nearly 6 p.m. and, by all rights, Wilkins should be nearly dead from exhaustion. He rose at 3:30 a.m. to catch a 5 a.m. vanpool to UCLA from the Antelope Valley, where he lives with his wife and 7-year-old son. In between, he’s had seven hours of classes.

But the young officer-in-training is not complaining. In two years, he expects to be commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, fulfilling a dream he’s had since he was a boy in Lancaster watching jets from nearby Edwards Air Force Base crisscross the sky.

Wilkins, who has already served seven years in the Air Force as an enlistee, is among more than 200 undergraduates enrolled in Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) programs at UCLA. These soldier-scholars will leave UCLA not only as newly minted Bruins but also as newly commissioned military officers headed for leadership positions in the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps.

ROTC students, called cadets in the Air Force and Army and midshipmen in the Navy and Marine Corps, are for the most part indistinguishable from their civilian classmates, save for the men’s telltale tapered haircuts. But at least one day a week, ROTC students come to campus clad in crisp military uniforms, from Navy khaki to Army camouflage.

“I had a chemistry professor last quarter, and he asked me, ‘Is that a fashion statement or are you in the military?’ ” laughed Jennie Barba, 22, a midshipman who cuts a trim figure in the khaki twill uniform that she wears for naval science and leadership courses each Tuesday.

While some ROTC programs struggle to fill seats — the Army reports a 16% slip in nationwide enrollment during the past two years — UCLA programs are holding their own, according to senior officers.

Courtesy of UCLA Army ROTC

Army ROTC Cadet Adolfo Valderin in camouflage at a training exercise.

Army enrollment remains steady at about 70 total students. The same goes for the Air Force, with about 90, and the Navy, with about 50. Many of these cadets and midshipmen are, in fact, not Bruins at all. Army and Air Force programs host students from colleges and universities as far away as Santa Barbara that lack on-site programs of their own.

Despite continued interest in ROTC programs, “meeting mission” at a time of bloody conflict overseas can be difficult. The challenge is especially tough for the Army, whose fighting forces comprise the bulk of casualties in Iraq.

During an interview with a reporter at the Student Activities Center, where all three ROTC detachments are housed, Army recruiter Major Michael C. Berry’s phone rings with a call from a troubled young man, a potential recruit who badly wants to join the UCLA program and has the grades and test scores to get in. The problem is that his family is pressuring him to stay out of the military.

Berry listens empathetically, shares some of his own thoughts and hangs up. “I wanted him to understand that it will be three years from now before he goes into active duty,” said Berry, a combat logistics officer who has served in South Korea and Germany. “In that three years, the world is going to be different from the way it is now. It could be worse, it could be better, we don’t know.”

Women, who make up about a quarter of UCLA Army cadets, are legally barred from assignments in direct land combat. But because of the nature of contemporary conflicts, women who occupy support positions are increasingly coming in harm’s way. Barba, who will be commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, said her mother is proud of her accomplishments but deathly afraid for her safety. “She told me she’d break my legs so I couldn’t go” to Iraq, said Barba, who grew up in Cypress, Calif.

Last month, the grim reality of military service hit close to home for the Bruin ROTC detachments. A 2001 alumnus of the Air Force program, Capt. Gil C. Williamson, was killed along with eight other Americans when the military aircraft they were in crashed in mountainous southern Albania.

Photography by Reed Hutchinson UCLA Photographic Services

Air Force ROTC cadets perform a timed run at Drake Stadium.

Lt. Col. Shawn Buck, a West Point grad and Gulf War veteran who runs the Army program at UCLA, keeps CNN’s Iraq casualties page bookmarked on his PC. He checks the page each day, fearful of what he’ll find. So far, he hasn’t come across anyone from the UCLA Army program. But if he does, he knows he’ll second-guess himself. “Could I have done more? Did I screw up?

“But you just have to comfort yourself that you’re doing the best you can. People die. That’s the business we’re in,” Buck said.

Despite the risks, ROTC remains appealing. ROTC scholarships generally pay for tuition, fees and books. Cadets and midshipmen also earn monthly stipends ranging from about $250 to $400.

Winning a scholarship from the military is just one hurdle to joining a UCLA ROTC detachment. Enrollees must meet regular UCLA admission requirements. Of 26 high school seniors who won Navy scholarships to attend ROTC at UCLA, only 14 have so far qualified for admission, said Marine Corps Col. Stephen P. Hubble, chair of the Naval Science program at UCLA.

The combination of UCLA’s tough admission requirements and top-rated academic programs, especially in math and the sciences, makes Bruin ROTC grads highly regarded in the halls of the Department of Defense, Hubble added.

After four years at UCLA, Army Cadet Billy Geiger, 19, an aspiring physician from Claremont, will attend medical school on the Army’s dime. Geiger has no idea where he’ll be assigned, but he knows he may very well be mending bodies broken and bloodied in war. “I really like the idea of everybody doing their own part to help out the troops, and this will be mine,” said Geiger.

Courtesy of UCLA Army ROTC

An Army ROTC cadet holds aloft a replica M16 rifle during a swim test in the Sunset Recreation Center pool.

After graduation, newly commissioned officers are obliged to fulfill a military commitment that generally starts at about four years and runs up to eight years for pilots.

Although ROTC programs are not always welcome on university campuses, cadets and midshipmen report little friction on campus.

“Occasionally we’ll be running around campus for our physical fitness, and there will be anti-war people who will give you dirty looks,” Wilkins said. “But it doesn’t bother me at all. There’s a job to be done, and I don’t mind doing it.”