Linda Wu of Brooklyn will likely attend Baruch College in Manhattan this fall, after a high school career where she did a bit of everything. The Fort Hamilton High School senior, 17, has been on the bowling, softball and track teams, is a member of the Asian culture club, and belonged to the now-defunct engineering club, where students built things out of wires and batteries and sometimes straw. Academically, Linda took part in the computer science academy, learning html and how to make Web sites. This year she is taking advanced placement courses for American history, government and literature. She also has a job as an assistant in a small local law firm. Yet in her college personal essay – the one telling prospective colleges who I am and why you should want me – she chronicled her journey through Fort Hamilton’s junior reserve officers training corps program, or JROTC, and explained how it changed her.

During Fort Hamilton’s freshmen orientation, Linda and a group of incoming freshmen trailed some cadets, as students in JROTC are called, on a tour of the school. But Linda did not join right away. Applying would mean going down a couple flights of stairs to the JROTC office in the school’s basement, a journey the “uneasy and naïve freshman” didn’t dare make. She only gathered up the courage to knock on that subterranean door two months into school, and even then Linda asked a friend to go with her. Once in, though, she realized it wasn’t as terrifying as she had thought, that it wasn’t some boot camp where cadets and instructors constantly stood in your face.

“Always having shown an interest in the military, this program was a new and exciting experience for me,” she wrote about her first semester as a cadet.

JROTC is a high school elective. In that way it’s no different from band or an arts class; students choose it. But the program stands out in a high school curriculum: what other class has a motto? JROTC’s is: To motivate young people to be better citizens. And of course there are the olive green uniforms, usually worn once a week, which many people mistaken for the real military.

The national program began in 1916 with six units; now there are 273,000 cadets in 1,555 schools, including every state and even American schools aboard, according to the Army JROTC Web site (the other services also have JROTC programs, but the Army has the largest and the oldest). JROTC came to Fort Hamilton in 1993, a first for a New York public school.

Originally viewed by the army as a source of recruits, JROTC now professes to be a “citizenship program devoted to the moral, physical and educational uplift of American youth” with no explicit goal of luring students to military service. But fears of military recruitment persist. Last November the San Francisco School Board voted 4-2 to take JROTC out of San Francisco schools, where they had existed for 90 years, despite the protest of some parents. Dan Kelly, a school board member voting in the majority, described JROTC as “basically a branding program, or a recruiting program for the military,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Students join JROTC for a variety of reasons: some out of an interest in the military or because they like the uniforms; others just to follow friends. Or to achieve something as simple as getting out of gym. The class attracts all types: there are cadet/basketball players, cadet/actors, and even a cadet/cheerleader. The number of honors students remains small. This year only two cadets, Linda and one other senior, had the privilege of wearing a yellow cord, denoting their place in the National Honor Society. But joining JROTC is not an arduous process: student get an application and they enroll. If they’ve had enough, they can always leave (when the program first started at Fort Hamilton, turnover was as high as 50 percent).

Raymond Lopez, 17, enrolled in JROTC knowing that he would join the Army after high school, so he saw it as preparation. Now about to graduate, Ray faces the denouement of his JROTC career, one that’s ending with a fall. This year he was fired from his position as first sergeant of his platoon (cadets are hired and fired from their posts by the cadets in charge). He was either he wasn’t doing his job or that he was on academic probation. Ray says it’s because of his outspokenness. But he feels less bitterness than resignation.

“I guess I was a lot more motivated over my first two, maybe three years, but now for the most part I feel like my time is done,” Ray says. “A lot of other people are moving up, they have positions, it’s their time to shine.”

Yet even as Ray has become more disillusioned, unhappy with what he sees as a static program (he wishes there were more trips, more after-school programs), he retains an appreciation for JROTC and its lessons. JROTC promotes itself as a program that boosts students’ confidence, a claim Ray says is true.

“It’s funny, it seems so peachy, like look at the stereotypical JROTC cadet and say ‘that kid’s confident, that kid knows what he’s doing,’” Ray says. “Part of me, coming into ROTC, thought, ‘ah, that’s bullshit. I’m never going to learn any of that. I’m never going to change.’ But I really did. Like, I’m really a million times more confident.”

He even recalls the moment when he realized this. In English class the students had broken up into groups to prepare a presentation. The teacher, Mr. Holke, would randomly select a representative from a group to speak in front of the class. Not knowing Ray’s name, Holke, a former Marine, just said ‘alright Army guy, you’re talking.” So Ray, dressed in his JROTC uniform, went up in front of the whole classroom, full of his peers. But it didn’t faze him: he had stood before students previously, and commanded them. At the end of class, Holke told the cadet ‘don’t think I’m picking on you: I’m actually putting you up there, I’m proud of you.”

Confidence also plays into Linda’s story. In her personal essay, she progresses from “quiet and shy in public and towards strangers” to battalion commander, the highest student position. She had gone from “from being the focus of ten people” who could not hear her clearly, her voice was so soft, to “the center of attention for one hundred and sixty.” She concludes with a statement of her transformation: “I have grown from a timid, young girl to a mature and strong young lady.”

The rhetoric doesn’t exactly match the person. Linda does not relish her crown. She wishes she were a squad leader again, taking orders. Linda had tried turning down the job, but the instructors insisted, giving her more time to think it over, telling her that she was the best one for it. Figuring that she would have a staff and the instructors to support her, Linda relented and reluctantly assumed the mantle of battalion commander.

As commander, she sits atop of pyramid that widens to the lowest ranking cadet, and she hears all the complaints from both the students and instructors. At parades she marches ahead of her battalion, and says it’s lonely. Leading a group of what are essentially volunteers can be also exasperating.

“I don’t mind being here with people I can work with, not the losers. But when the losers are here it annoys me. Every day in class, it annoys me,” Linda says.

In class, the divide between the students still interested in participating and those less inclined has manifested in the table arrangements, where ten plus students will cram together at one table closer to the instructor. The other table has plenty of room left, and cadets who sit there often engage in their own side conversations or stare off stoically.

The position can’t guarantee her loyalty or protection. Being battalion commander can sometimes make Linda a lightning rod because she has to set the example. For example, cadets can’t wear earrings or have painted nails in uniform, so recently she removed her bright green nail polish before uniform day.

Who will notice or say anything?

“EVERYONE,” she replies. “That’s exactly why I gotta take it off. Set the example, unlike some people.”

In the JROTC class Ray shares with Linda, the two sit at different tables. He moved to the other table when he was fired as platoon sergeant, and as his friends were fired also they naturally gravitated to a place they could sit together. At the beginning of class, Ray rises with the rest of the class as they recite the Cadet Creed, and then sits down and doesn’t participate much in the class conversations, but instead occasionally chats with a friend sitting next to him. While he sits at the “loser” table, Ray looks at his defiance differently.

“For most of my LET 4 year (senior) and at the end of my LET 3 year (junior) I sort of felt like a rebel,” Ray says with a laugh. LET means Leadership and Education Training, and each LET year corresponds to how long a student has been in the program. But Ray had once thrown himself fully into the program, joining all the special teams, which form his fondest memories. JROTC has several types of special teams. One team, the color guard, is the flag bearers. Then there is the drill team, which practices marching sequences for competition with other schools. Ray remembers the competitions well, especially the time in his sophomore year when Fort Hamilton’s drill team went to compete at Francis Hill high school, their main rival, and came away with three first place trophies. After practicing two hours a day for five days a week, they walked onto the drill floor in the large gymnasium before a silent crowd, the only sound the clicking shoes and the voice of a cadet calling out commands.

“If one person fucks up, everybody is going to see it. But walking off, knowing that you didn’t mess up, feels better than anything in the world,” Ray says.

There is also a personal side. During his sophomore year, the drill team had 25 to 30 members, Ray recalls, and everyone was motivated. They were also good friends who left practice and walked up Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue together. Throwing students together in the same class year after year, JROTC creates camaraderie. When he talks about JROTC, Ray easily rattles off the name of his former platoon leader, company commander, squad leader, and assistant squad leader–all good friends.And ultimately, Ray says, the friendships are why he has stayed even as his involvement has diminished, invoking a well-known television show as an explanation.

“You know what’s funny about it, I think about that one song from ‘Cheers’: you walk in there and ‘everybody knows your name,’” Ray says, singing a line of the show’s theme song.“Like I walk into drill sometimes and I just think it’s a really good feeling knowing that there’s a group of friends or a group of people that you can identify with, always.

“I know a lot of people who go through high school and it’s not so much they’re lonely, but they don’t have that same sort of feeling like they can link with people for so long.”

Linda has her own web of personal ties formed through JROTC. Her boyfriend, Scott Xin, is a former cadet. He is one of the 78,000 Army soldiers in Iraq, stationed in Baghdad, meaning Linda doesn’t have a prom date. The couple keeps in touch by email, and he phones her with a calling card. They share matching red rubber wristbands. Scott can’t wear his in uniform so he just keeps it around. Linda has her’s on her left wrist. She takes it off on uniform days, too, and also at track practice because she doesn’t want a tan line.They got the wristbands in the summer of 2005. One of the JROTC instructors, J.D. Lewis, had set up a trip to the minor league Brooklyn Cyclones baseball game in Coney Island. Linda and Scott won tickets at the arcade and redeemed them for the wristbands, “for fun.” That day their JROTC friends knew definitively that they were going out, and they no longer denied it. When asked if the red band means a lot to her and her boyfriend, Linda smiles and says “well, we wouldn’t want to lose it.”