How do you even pronounce it? At Yale, I’ve only heard ROTC kids say “rot-see.” It seems like everyone else spells out the acronym. 

For the uninitiated: these are the undergrads, mostly dudes, you see walking around campus in military uniforms once a week. The few who seem embarrassed by this ritual are the first years who haven’t yet figured out how to wear the badge of honor.

This semester, I’m taking an ROTC course for sophomores on “Seapower and Maritime Affairs” — a great class made significantly worse by its 8:30 morning attendance and twice-a-week reading quizzes. Class ends in time for a leisurely Silliman breakfast, which I’ve enjoyed with my classmates. 

In the ROTC world, people like me are called “civilians,” the technical term for non-ROTC students that no one takes too seriously, probably because it implies a distinction in status that feels more existential than practical. But the difference becomes difficult to overlook when your teacher is not “Professor” but “Captain,” who calls on “midshipmen” to answer questions about boot camps over October break at the Norfolk Naval Station — all articulated in “yes sir” and military acronyms. It becomes immediately apparent that the ROTC world possesses a language and shared experiences that the “civilian” is not automatically privy to. 

Oct. 13 was the U.S. Navy’s 249th birthday. In 1775, the Continental Congress first organized an impromptu navy to raid British commerce; many years since, the U.S. Navy has become the world’s leading naval force. 

My classmates invited me to the 2024 Navy & Marine Corps Birthday Ball to celebrate this history. The event, held at the Omni, was a merry blast: charcuterie boards and cupcakes, elderly veterans and JROTC high schoolers, sword bearers and a guest of honor, speeches filled with pomp, dance circles like prom. And while I remain unconvinced that Commodore Esek Hopkins imagined his successors Russian squat kicking to “September,” he would have surely appreciated the solemnity of the four midshipmen who slow-marched a birthday cake down the aisle to soft orchestral trumpets. It was a sight beyond civilian comprehension. 

The message of the main ceremony was more sober. As soon as a video advertisement from the Naval headquarters described its prowess to “win decisively in war,” we were reminded of the absent war dead in the form of a furnished metaphor: a short table and a single chair facing opposite to the platform of the ceremony, representing the isolation of death in combat and the presence of lost soldiers in spirit alone. The gesture was perhaps intentionally performative, but it did not fail to touch the elderly few who closed their eyes in appreciation.

Death in combat remained a motif of the night. The guest of honor, a captain serving as an interim dean at the Naval War College, described his deployment in Iraq during the Gulf War and the loss of a close friend in action soon after. The pauses and pitched fluctuations of his cadence were heart-wrenching, and sympathy gripped us as we realized that the photographed soldier on screen was not the speaker in his youth but a long-lost comrade.

It was then that I began to notice the anticipation of death following us into casual conversation. It appeared in a spouse’s lament at her husband’s redeployment abroad — a sort of concern that might fall flat at the neighborhood barbeque but which echoes with empathetic reciprocation at an ROTC ball. I heard its drone in the low giggles of midshipmen who joked that they would rather bleed on the beaches of Taiwan than die for Israel. It portended one truth: war soon. 

2027, to be exact, and against China. That’s what the Chief of Naval Operations expects and what, allegedly, Xi Jinping had implied to his military planners. But geopolitical escalation cares little for the truth of what the Chairman did or didn’t say: as of 2024, the Navy’s strategic guidance document, the NAVPLAN, urges “readiness for a potential conflict with the People’s Republic of China by 2027.” Even if we’re not convinced that China plans to invade Taiwan in two years, I think we fear, upon constant reminders of that number, that our collective mythology may doom 2027 to tragedy.

It is the same year my class of sophomore ROTC kids will graduate. I find it strange to imagine these students carrying rifles and climbing the shores of a Pacific island — and even stranger, if gruesome and morbid, to imagine their deaths in action. The image is deeply conflicting, both saddening and easily dismissible. It is as vulnerable and ridiculous as shedding tears over a textbook on U.S. history — for the same faculties that distance our empathy from historical tragedies also separate our present conscience from fears of a distant future. 

Last Tuesday, our lecture slides showed a propagandistic photograph of Xi Jinping looking over a battleship. At that moment, I had none of these thoughts about the anticipation of death in action, and I imagine the same was true for most of my classmates. But as soon as a midshipman responded, “Yes sir!” to the Captain’s call, I was reminded that the ROTC world would forever remain strange. And I felt that estrangement widen the moat between my world and theirs.