One thing that I have learned about myself throughout my life: I'm a sucker for quotes. Therefore, I'm going to start this post with one. The following quotation comes from Henry David Thoreau's Walden: "Things do not change; we change."
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, we can move on to the point of this post. I've let my responsibilities for posting here slide this semester, because I spent the semester in Voronezh, Russia, and finding accessible internet proved more difficult than I had anticipated. However, now I'm back at West Point for summer school and will make up with several posts over the next couple weeks.
For this post I'll summarize my semester overall, focusing on the theme of change and how my experiences in Russia have changed me and my views towards West Point and the military in general.
My semester abroad was to Voronezh State University, a large public university 600 kilometers south of Moscow. I did not have much military instruction while there, excluding a class I attended once a week with a Russian Lieutenant Colonel and several Russian cadets (approximately their version of ROTC) about Russia's military and their military history. However, I learned a great deal about their military system and philosophy from talking with different Russians I met, including my landlady's husband. He spent two years as an officer in the Russian army in charge of a military construction unit (in fact, he was partly responsible for the construction of the current Ministry of Defense building in Moscow).
In Russia, military service is required for every male, before or after they complete university, with some exceptions. Military service generally is dreaded because of poor living conditions, constant abuse by superiors, and the threat of deployment to Chechnya and other places, where violence continues even to this day. This reality shocked me in contrast to the system that I had witnessed up to this point in America and our armed forces. When Russians learned that I was a volunteer, and that every American soldier is a volunteer, they were extremely surprised.
In general, I was not ready to return to America at the end of my time in Russia. I had made a lot of unforgettable friends, enjoyed a freedom that I will not have until I leave the army, and lived in a completely new and perhaps, for me, un-understandable culture. However, upon arrival in America, I realized that I viewed my homeland in a different light. No longer did I have to struggle to order food in a restaurant or focus extremely hard simply to understand what people were saying. I didn't have to pay to use public restrooms, as is the norm in Russia. I was viewing America in a different light, though it was the same as before I had left. Therefore, the trip to Russia was certainly worth it in my eyes, if for no other reason than the appreciation of my homeland. And I never would have had the chance if I had not gone to West Point.
While in Moscow we found this Cafe. (Translation: Uncle Sam's Cafe)