Taps [noun]

A call blown at military funerals and memorial services

TO those running for the Senate: here is a sure way to win the youth vote. Promise them that you will work for the abolition of the ROTC.

The ROTC has outlived its usefulness. As its name suggests, it is a course for "reserve officers". But it now resembles an obedience school for the canine species. Every Sunday, young students laze, sit, or march under the sun for hours. Like Pavlovs conditioning their dogs, ROTC officers endlessly yell at them, often accompanied with a threat of punishment, like push-ups, squats, or squatthrusts. What young men learn after their two-year ordeal is not patriotism, but fear and canine obedience. Besides these, they also learn the tricks and trade of bribery, graft and corruption, and a foretaste of military brutality.

Contrary to popular thinking, the ROTC is not a department or unit of a school. The school merely provides the venue and facilities for the Sunday training, collects the enrolment fee that it eventually turns over to the ROTC, and registers the grades on the official records of the students. The school is never consulted regarding the assignments of commandants or officers manning the DMST (Department of Military Science and Tactics) that serves as the local headquarters of the ROTC. The school's permission is never sought for other fees that the ROTC imposes on the students. When complaints about abuses and misconduct are brought to the school, it finds itself helpless in addressing these because jurisdiction over such matters are normally reserved to the Community Defense Group in every region.

Every time I see the ROTC cadets wearily marching like robots, I often wish I were Charlie Chaplin in the film "The Great Dictator" telling them: "ROTC cadets! Don't give yourselves to men who treat you like brutes! Men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your life, tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel! Men who treat you like cattle, use you for cannon fire. Don't give yourself to these unnatural men, machine men with machine mind and machine heart. You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are human beings!"

The type of training perpetuated in the ROTC has instilled fear of the military among students. In their presence, students keep quiet in the face of maltreatment and abuse. Those with money simply buy their way out of the Sunday training. Still others prefer complacency to reasoned questioning and judgment. The very few who are brave enough to fight the system either fail to graduate or suffer a worse fate. Recently, Mark Welson Chua, a 19-year old mechanical engineering student of the University of Santo Tomas filed at the Department of National Defense a complaint against the ROTC irregularities. Soon after, he was kidnaped. A few days later, his rotting body was seen floating at the Pasig River. His hands and feet were tied and his face was covered with cloth and then wrapped with masking tape. The autopsy revealed that he was still alive when thrown into the river. He must have suffered a slow, agonizing death. Mark's father links his son's death to his revelations about the ROTC, details of which were published in The Varsitarian, the student publication of the University. Investigation is going nowhere because Mark's classmates are afraid to testify.

It is about time that schools reexamined their role as collectors of enrolment fees and encoders of grades for the ROTC. It is about time that they refused holding the ROTC training in their campuses. Better yet, legislators must pass a law abolishing the ROTC and establishing alternative programs for teaching patriotism and civic consciousness among students.