By Elizabeth Levi, News Correspondent
The students who make up the Liberty Battalion are awake at 6 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for physical training. The cadets also attend field-training exercises; they go to leadership labs; they even spend the summer before their senior year being assessed on their leadership skills.
But the students who complete the ROTC program at Northeastern will gain much more than physically fit bodies and rankings. They will have camaraderie with their fellow cadets, they will have superior leadership skills and they will have the opportunity to become second lieutenants in the military.
The Liberty Battalion is made up of 14 schools in the Boston-area and about 130 cadets. It is based mostly out of Northeastern, which partners with Boston College, and serves as a commissioning source for all branches of the military.
“The program is based on leadership – it’s a building block program. It’s somewhat time consuming for a normal student, much like you would be in like a varsity sport,” Lieutenant Colonel Blaise Gallahue, a professor of military science of the Liberty Battalion, said. “It’s kind of like an extended basic training in some regards, because we start out freshman really building the relationships, building some camaraderie, learning how to do some very basic army, military type things.”
As cadets mature in the program, they assume more leadership positions. Senior Keith Hill, an international affairs major, is now the Battalion Operations Officer.
“Everyone is the same because we are all cadets – everyone helps each other and everyone works in tandem with each other,” Hill said. “Our battalion is exceptional at teamwork and communication, and that’s why we’re one of the best in the country.”
In fact, Northeastern’s ROTC received the MacArthur Award from the Gen. Douglas MacArthur Foundation and the U.S. Army Cadet Command in 2012.
Having enlisted in the army right after high school, senior Brian Wong, a biochemistry major, spent four years in the army before coming to Northeastern. He now serves as the Alpha Company commander for the Liberty Battalion, and said the ROTC has taught him how to be a valuable leader.
“When I was in the army, I learned a lot of basic team leadership – squad leadership at the very lowest levels, almost – and during my four years in the army, I learned to define myself as a leader, and learned the basic fundamentals and built upon those,” Wong said.
Also, the ROTC is actually a higher level of management, according to Wong. For the first time, Wong is in charge of 72 kids; before, he has never been in charge of more than nine to 10 people at a time, so this new responsibility requires organizational leadership and management at a higher level.
Both Wong and Hill demonstrated their leadership skills on Nov. 11, Veterans Day, during Northeastern’s Veterans Day Ceremony. While Wong led cadets in performing some of the honors such as raising and lowering the flag and placing wreaths on the Veterans Memorial Wall, Hill served as the narrator for the ceremony.
Along with the involvement of the current ROTC during Northeastern’s Veterans Day activities, Northeastern’s ROTC Alumni Society also participated in a remembrance ceremony at Egan Center, according to the society’s president, Dave Sawyer.
Sawyer was a member of Northeastern’s ROTC from 1958 until 1963 and served 21 years in active-duty service after he graduated. He retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel in 1985 and said that the ROTC program played a major part in getting him to the place he is now. For him, Veterans Day is a time to reminisce.
“Veterans Day, to me, is a day of remembering my camaraderie with all the veterans that are out there, and we are a band of brothers and sisters because of our service in one of the services in the army – the navy, the air force, the coast guard, the Marine Force – and it was just reminiscing with folks or in my own mind about the period of time that I served in active duty,” Sawyer said.
From Sawyer’s time to the present day, Northeastern’s ROTC program has remained strong according to Hill – contributing to military leaders and veterans alike.
“ROTC produces exceptional leaders and exceptional individuals that have an innate sense of purpose and a drive that is infectious and spreads to other people,” Hill said. “And then realize that it’s not just ROTC, that it’s the entire armed forces that has that calling and meets that willingness to serve.”
