Not so different after all
The culture of Cambridge could hardly be more different from that of Twentynine Palms, Calif. Six months before my first day of classes at the Harvard Kennedy School, I stepped from a bus into the windswept high desert scrubland of Twentynine Palms, 200 days of patrolling in Iraq just behind me. The California desert looks a lot like much of Iraq — which makes it an ideal training ground for military units about to deploy — and nothing like Cambridge. The former is a small town dominated by the massive Marine Corps base nearby and filled with a few thousand aggressive young men with clipped hair. Months later, I drove down Memorial Drive in Cambridge thinking of a joke my father had told me when he heard I had been accepted. It began, “A philosophy-major hippie, a Kennedy, and Will Hunting walk into a bah.…” That seemed pretty accurate to me, and...