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http://www.harvardmagazine.com

Congratulations on your new website and providing timely information to the Harvard community. I specially enjoyed your on-line tips and the "Surfing the Yard" section linking to other Harvard-related websites.

Cynthia Schuster, M.B.A. '89 Newport Beach, Cal.

Nice job, folks-very impressive, easy to read, and a pleasant site. How is the traffic?

Jeffrey S. Behrens '89 Newton, Mass.

Editor's note: During its first month of operation, Harvard Magazine's World Wide Web site received almost 1,000 visitors, including Web-surfing Harvardians from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, the former USSR, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and many points across the United States.

Soldiers and Scholars

Pat C. Hoy II's "Soldiers and Scholars" (May-June, page 64) on the difference between Harvard and West Point makes a good and useful case, but neither Harvard, nor I think West Point, need be the extremes portrayed. After my first summer cruise in the Holloway NROTC program, I returned for sophomore year a different Harvard student for having spent the summer in the close company of Naval Academy midshipmen and the officers and men of the regular navy. We had learned something about duty, obedience, and loyalty-cooperation, if you will-that we would have missed in Cambridge.

I also remember that my academy colleagues had taken courses in literature and history comparable to those of a Harvard liberal arts education and with the same intellectual results. They were by no means prisoners of the "plug and chug" routine Hoy described.

So it doesn't have to be the way Hoy described it. Harvard used to have the best of both worlds, and the loss of ROTC at the end of 1970 was Harvard's loss.

W. D. Howells '54 Washington, D.C.

At a time when civilian casualties are routinely referred to as collateral damage, when Tailhook's fallout refuses to settle, when college campuses across the country are severing ties with ROTC, and when "don't ask, don't tell" has resulted in so many discharges that the Department of Defense has launched a probe into an alleged witch-hunt of gay service members, I find it curious that Harvard Magazine would choose to publish an article that offers such a romantic, if not anachronistic, view of war, women, and the military.

There are other forms of sacrifice, of service, perhaps not as glorious as Hoy's soldiers at work, but to me, and many others, infinitely more appealing. There are those who seek to educate, who work to provide real care to the sick and suffering, who fight the type of discrimination the military practices every day. Hoy speaks of students he believes would have made excellent officers. I wonder if he asked them, before making his determination, if they were gay. It is, after all, the West Point way.

Louise Marie Wills, Ph.D. '93 Somerville, Mass.

As an Air Force ROTC graduate who served six years in the military, including service in Vietnam, I was deeply moved by Hoy's article. He has captured the agony and the dilemma faced by those who choose to serve their country in military service.

A (very) few Harvard graduates voluntarily served in Vietnam and some, like my classmate Jim Dunton, died in that service. As Hoy so eloquently states, "We as a nation should never forget that those two and a half million soldiers who went to Vietnam went for want of a better political idea." The names of graduates who died there are not carved in stone on the walls of Memorial Church (as are the names of those who died in previous conflicts) but have been placed on a wooden plaque that conveys a temporary and conditional sense to its recognition.

A community or nation that disowns those who bear arms in its defense because the nation doesn't have a better "political idea" will soon find that few accept the call to defend that nation, and, more important, that the nation has less that is worth defending.

Peter F. Carpenter '62 Atherton, Cal.

Editor's note: the names of Harvard's Korean War and Vietnam War dead are listed on burnished metal plaques mounted on gilded wood in the Memorial Church.

As the brits say, Hoy's comparison of Harvard and West Point is "spot on." More than 40 years ago, Harvard opened to me intellectual doors that have never closed.

But Harvard didn't turn me from boy to man, or build leadership that has developed over a lifetime. The U.S. Navy did that. Like Hoy's young naval officer, before I had reached my twenty-third birthday I was the officer of the deck in charge of a 14,000-ton warship at two in the morning, steaming in a wintry North Atlantic 1,500 yards from other warships ahead, behind, and on both sides, and with more than a thousand sleeping men aboard.

Since those early days I have held other posts of responsibility. But nothing compares to a young officer's nondelegable responsibility for the safety of a warship and her sleeping crew, at night, in bad weather, and at sea. At Harvard, I took W. Jackson Bate's famous course on "Johnson and His Circle." As usual, Dr. Johnson said it best: "A man thinks meanly of himself who has never been a soldier or has never been to sea."

Finally, Hoy almost mentioned the unmentionable. He wrote that the soldiers fought in Vietnam "for want of a better political idea." But it is Harvard's "dirty little secret" that many of the truly catastrophic ideas behind the Vietnam War were developed in and around Harvard Square-by dean of arts and sciences McGeorge Bundy (then at the White House) and others. Those ideas were applied in turn by a great many individuals, including numerous Harvard professors and Harvard-educated politicians and opinion-leaders. The soldiers fought a losing war. But they fought in the service of the just-plain-dumbest strategic and political ideas that this nation or any other modern nation, save Germany and Japan in World War II, has produced.

If Hoy thinks Harvard may one day learn from experience, as the U.S. Army did in the years between Vietnam and the Gulf War, he should think again.

Terence Murphy '59 Washington, D.C

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