(gentle music)
- Hi, I'm Karina Mitchell.
I am a 23 here at Dartmouth College.
I'm from Charlotte, North Carolina,
and I'm here studying biomedical engineering.
I'm also a member of our ROTC program.
I'm currently the company commander.
- My name's Anant Shukla.
I'm an emergency medicine physician,
and I'm a major in the United States Army.
And I was very fortunate
to get a training opportunity at Dartmouth Hitchcock
in their emergency medicine residency.
- Hi, I'm John Emery.
I'm a second-year medical student at Geisel.
Prior to coming to medical school,
I served as a submarine officer in the Navy for eight years.
Living on a submarine was a mixed bag of feeling anxious,
excited, and also very melancholic at the same time.
Imagine your house, but all of your windows are blacked out.
And you can't see outside at all,
and it's you and about 30 of your colleagues
all in the house at the same time.
But you're all completely disconnected from everything.
Submarines go out, and they stay out.
And we go deep, and so we don't have wifi.
So I was lucky if I got an email from my family
maybe once a week.
And the people that you're on the submarine with
kind of become your family,
and the people that are in your watch section
become your family.
There is a bond between that group
because we did things that nobody else
or very, very small amounts of other people have done,
and that connects you in a way that few other things do.
- My parents are immigrants from India, and growing up,
I really didn't have like a sense of community.
The Army gave it to me.
It started when I got into
the Uniformed Services University for medical school.
My best friends are people
that I went to medical school with, and then,
before I knew it, I was basically this physician
for this helicopter unit in Afghanistan.
And we would end up in
one of the most violent areas of the country,
and it was a place called forward operating base Dahlke.
(soldiers shouting) (dramatic music)
- [Soldier] Fire!
(gun firing)
It was crazy.
It became almost a focal point of the war.
Our little aid station, our podunk little aid station,
we kept that open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And being the physician for those guys
was honestly one of the best jobs I've ever had.
What that does is it brings people together
in a way that most individuals will never understand.
It's kind of what I was looking for my whole life,
which is a sense of belonging.
(helicopter blades whirring)
- One of my biggest idols is definitely my dad.
He's currently a brigadier general in the Army.
For people outside of the army, that may not be a big deal.
But for him to be an African American,
to be a one-star general, that's a major accomplishment.
And he's definitely been a rock for me.
He, too, did ROTC when he was in college.
I have cousins that go to West Point.
Their father was also in the Army.
My grandfather was in the Navy.
So military runs very deep in my family.
It's just something that you definitely want to carry on.
Like you have a sense of like pride,
of like, oh, like I want to be just as good as my grandfather.
I want to be just as good as my dad.
I want to be able to say
that I made a difference in the society that I lived in.
I would say that, on average, a lot of Dartmouth students
don't know about the ROTC program.
When people think of me,
they definitely think oh, Karina, the basketball player.
Maybe not Karina, the ROTC cadet.
But I think people should know that those that have served,
served for the better good of everyone else around them.
And so, on this Veteran's Day,
I would appreciate if people could take the time
to recognize those that served
for the betterment of our society.
(gentle music)