Word: rotc
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WASHINGTON, D.C.--The U.S. House of Representatives approved a measure last month that would eliminate Defense Department funding of universities with "anti-ROTC policies...
...university does have a record of the scholarship, its donor unknown, yet Koernke elected to spend his freshman year at the less prestigious, less expensive Eastern Michigan University. While there he joined the ROTC program, cutting a vivid and peculiar figure. "I don't often remember students who were in only briefly," says Lieut. Colonel Michael Chirio (ret.), who ran the program. "But I remember him. He was not a shrinking violet." Koernke, says Chirio, loved to lecture others "about a lot of things," especially weaponry. "He evidently knew a great deal about arms, and he just bored the hell...
Koernke complained frequently about "big government," which he extended to include university rules and ROTC regulations. Several of the staff came to believe that he had no interest in a real Army career, just in weapons training and in the commando-style "Raiders" exercises. The following year, although no longer in the ROTC, he dropped by and boasted that he had formed a Raiders group...
...Koernke went on and on about some grim fantasy, Martinez feared he "might have some sort of chemical imbalance." But the two stayed friends. Martinez was Koernke's best man when he married Nancy Wise, a home-economics student he had met while peddling chocolate-chip cookies at an rotc bake sale. At about the same time, however, Koernke's college career derailed. Nancy Koernke attributes this to the effect of nasa cutbacks in the mid-'70s. "He didn't seem as happy after that," she says. "At first his grades had been really good, but [then] they started...
...spring of 1980, recalls his wife, and they were sitting on a porch swing with their young daughter. "He came back one weekend and was troubled," she says. "It was visible-I could see it in his face that there was something wrong." An old friend from rotc had approached him, he told her, enthusing about "a great new job offer" that he had assumed Koernke knew of too. "Basically what it was," she says, "was that they were to secure an 'open-air camp,' a facility for men, women and children. And [Mark] asked, 'Well, what country is this...