This past week at NDU was exceptionally eventful, as our office welcomed the new class of National War College and Eisenhower School International Fellows. In addition to the plethora of in-processing tasks which kept me busy, this was exciting because we had the opportunity to interact with the officers on a more personal level. As part of my duties, I worked with a group of five officers from a wide range of countries each in day in “homeroom”. On one marathon day, I picked up these officers from their apartments and delivered them around D.C. to complete various parts of their inprocessing at offices across the city. During this time, I had the opportunity to speak with the officers, and to learn more personal details about their families and other training experiences they had had in America.

Speaking with these individuals was interesting not only in the sense of interacting with a person from another country, but even more so because of the vast differences in our age, occupation, and experience. I’m a 21 year-old American student, essentially volunteering for this job; whereas these men are in their forties and fifties, have families, have served in a number of different commands, and have been selected from an elite pool of candidates both within their home countries and across the world to come here to study, and yet we can both be equally baffled about something as mundane as GPS instruction in downtown D.C. Even over the course of the past, short week, it’s been incredibly interesting for me to glimpse a far more personal, human, individual side of persons who in theory seemed much removed and above me. I look forward to what these next few weeks will bring — what they will teach me about bridging seemingly unbreachable divides in class or age or culture. Ultimately, this is the goal of the International Fellows program at NDU, and it truly creates a remarkable atmosphere. Within its walls, men who may in any other circumstance clash in the most literal sense of the term adversary come together to converse and work together, and in the end, the ability to create a space for a dialogue and for a chance to understand each other is the most lasting and stable attempt at peace that I can fathom. With the substantiation of this goal in mind, I’m proud to play whatever part I can in this process.