This weekend my fiance and I stayed over at a friend's place and my friend and I briefly recalled our ROTC days. And we quickly got into a calculation of the time we wasted going through it. By my reckoning, I spent about a whole month of my adult life marching to some officer's mumbling and sweating my shorts off under the hot sun.

Reserved Officers Training Corps (everyone say ugh) has been the subject of debate ever since I can remember shining my brass buckle and scraping the mud off my boots on an early Saturday morning. According to one website, ROTC products "were to serve as vehicles of a value system that was more representative of that held by the remainder of American society." It's interesting to note that ROTC was never made compulsary in the United States.

What I did learn from ROTC (CMT and CAT back then) was that it was a lot of fun to make fun of my officers (because most of them had funny voices or were war fanatics) and that the commanding officer (usually an adult who has a flagging military career) can be bribed with whiskey.

I didn't mind the haircuts, or the memorable characters. Like "Putol", which, despite the mean handle given by his troops to memorialize his combat injury (he lost his arm), was a gregarious, occasionally self-effacing officer who liked rolling the one-liners. And "Poodle", who had the voice of one, and the face to go with it.

The need for ROTC was often questioned during my college days. Wasting weekends that could be spent with family. Having to buy all the equipment and uniforms. All those students that did not finish because they refused to be submitted to such inanity (rightfully so). And the callous, even brutish, leadership of officers who relished their Saturday soapbox moments by spitting out expletives designed to weaken our resistance (or so they thought). Kaya laging nirarambol ang Vanguard e, kasi ubod sila nang yabang, ang babansot naman nila. Then, there were the Jehovah's witnesses whose faith can supercede the Constitution.

But never was the institution troubled as it was during 2001. According to one website, "discontent over ROTC -- its content, conduct, the competence of its training staff and the corruption that often plagued its individual units -- had been well known for years. Casual surfing of Filipino student websites often reveal short essays or articles about the perceived pointlessness of the program. Student groups also occasionally took up the matter in their roster of grievances." No where were these grievances so well felt after Marc Welson Chua's decomposed body was fished out of Pasig river after filing a complaint about his ROTC unit. The commandant was successively dismissed and six cadet officers of the UST’s Reserved Officers Training Corps have been indicted based on witness account. Maybe Romy Maganto should have been given a chance.

Needless to say, this changed ROTC in many ways. Republic Act 9163 makes ROTC an elective. This Google cache provides thorough reading. Thanks in no small part to Fidel Ramos' (West Pointer and a retired general ) belief in the irrelevance of CMT, which by dint of the Constitution had me shining buckles and cursing Saturday mornings for 4 years of my life.