It’s 5:47 a.m. on a Thursday in March, and the cadets of UC Berkeley’s Army ROTC are assembled in the hills above campus, listening to the plan for the morning. A third-year cadet explains they’ll be starting with an ambush drill. Seniors will play the enemy.
“It’s completely silent as they walk up the hill,” said photographer Sophia Cutino, M.J. ’26. “They only do hand signals.” The rifles are dummies. Cadets yell “bang, bang, bang, and then the seniors fall over and play dead briefly, and that’s when the mission is complete.”
Military training at Berkeley is hardly new. Under the 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act, it was mandatory for all male undergraduates for nearly a century, from 1870 until 1962. The regents ended the requirement in the face of student resistance that dated as far back as the 1930s. It didn’t end there; in 1970, protestors tried to burn down the campus ROTC building.
Today the Reserve Officer Training Corps keeps a low profile.
Cutino said that when she told her fellow students what she was doing, the response was generally, “What? At Berkeley?”
What she was doing was a photography project for her final semester at the Graduate School of Journalism. Up until then, Cutino’s work had focused on queer life and womanhood. Now, wanting to stretch herself, she looked for “worlds that seem so opposite of me.” What she found was “the humanity behind the uniform.”
Cutino, who recently won the journalism school’s prestigious Dorothea Lange Fellowship, said that when she asked cadets why they joined, their reasons boiled down to four: pride, tradition, tuition help, and “because it’s so cool.”
“I grew up watching war movies,” one cadet said to her, “and it’s just one of the coolest things you can do.”
