The military in a democracy cannot be "them;" it has to be "us," collectively, all Americans. - Nathaniel Fick

Best explained here in an interview of Nathaniel Fick; an MBA candidate at the Harvard Business School, author of the NY Times bestseller, One Bullet Away, commissioned 2LT in the USMC after graduating with high honors from Dartmouth College in 1999, and left the Marines as a captain in 2004, and earned a master's degree in International Security Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the Board of Visitors at the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth, and served as a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington.

Q: Your path - from Dartmouth classics major to Marine combat officer - is unusual. Why did you do it?
It's said that the nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. Military service in America has increasingly become the career path of those for whom it's a family tradition, and those without many alternatives. It's a travesty. Studying classics in college really emphasized civic duty, the responsibilities of citizenship. In the ancient world, one of the greatest of those responsibilities was military service. Allowing a gulf to grow between the military and the rest of American society is bad for all of us. Tom Ricks, then the Wall Street Journal's Pentagon correspondent, spoke at Dartmouth during my junior year, and he argued for putting ROTC back on all the Ivy League campuses. A woman stood up after his talk and said that ROTC at Dartmouth would militarize the campus. Ricks told her she was wrong, that it would liberalize the military. And that's a good thing, not only for the military, but for every citizen. The military in a democracy cannot be "them;" it has to be "us," collectively, all Americans.