To honor the living and the dead
Veterans Day this year comes on the numerically memorable 11/11/11. The holiday is especially significant for Harvard, since it’s the first Veterans Day in 40 years when there has been a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) office on campus. “That means an awful lot to a lot of us,” said Thomas Reardon ’68, who was an Army infantry officer in Vietnam. He praised President Drew Faust for her “great, bold, decisive moves” in bringing ROTC back. Reardon is president of the Harvard Veterans Alumni Organization, a nonprofit that is sponsoring an 11 a.m. Veterans Day ceremony at the Memorial Church and a luncheon afterward. The event will celebrate the return of ROTC, he said, and commemorate the more than 1,250 Harvard affiliates who lost their lives in America’s wars. A new plaque will be unveiled at the Memorial Church, honoring the Harvard men who received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. military...