While the Pentagon’s decision last month to lift its ban on women serving in combat has garnered national attention, the announcement will also directly affect the female cadets of Stanford’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).
On Veterans Day, six student veterans joined a panel to discuss their experiences of war. The event, titled “Voices from the front: Stanford students returning home from war,” was hosted by the Stanford Storytelling Project. These are some of their stories.
Karl Eikenberry M.A. ’94 has had a distinguished military and diplomatic career. Prior to his current position as the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), he spent 35 years in the United States Army. As U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 to June 2011, he led President Obama’s civilian surge, which occurred in conjunction with a 30,000-troop surge.
Speaking Thursday afternoon at the Cemex Auditorium in the Graduate School of Business (GSB), four-star General Stanley McChrystal said that the United States has struggled to find answers to global and national issues not because the country has gotten lazy or selfish, but because it has continued to apply an outdated model of leadership instead of adapting to the changing times.
“We’ve done a lot there. We haven’t done it all well, but we should be proud of what we have done,” former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry M.A. ’94 said during his closing assessment of the United States’ role in Afghanistan. Eikenberry spoke to approximately 140 attendees about the transition to Afghan sovereignty in the Central Asian state Monday in Encina Hall’s Bechtel Conference Center.
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Eric Schmitt spoke Monday evening about the U.S. campaign against terrorism, as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies. Schmitt discussed his recent book, “Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda,” co-authored with his New York Times colleague Thom Shanker.
The exhibit, part of a traveling mural project organized by Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee, was brought to campus by student organization Stanford Says No to War, in time for this week’s 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.
The latest incarnation of “Pawn”, a folk-rock musical written and directed by Stanford student Karmia Cao ‘11, paints a breathtaking portrait of the Niu family, whose history is in many ways the history of modern terrorism.