A welcome mat for veterans
To a room full of Harvard students with military backgrounds, Gen. Stanley McChrystal yesterday offered words of advice: Loosen up, and reach out. “Throw yourself on that side,” he said of the civilian and academic worlds where the rules may seem different and the people foreign. “This is a magic opportunity here.” The retired four-star general, now a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, was among those welcoming to Harvard new and continuing students with military backgrounds. McChrystal, the architect of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, was a National Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) in 1996. “You’ve been at war for more than a decade,” he added. “You shouldn’t be at war here.” The veterans’ welcome was organized and funded by the Belfer Center and the Center for Public Leadership at HKS. Listeners crowded into the main dining room at the Faculty Club. The three-year-old tradition included a...