ALTHOUGH just 19, Alexia Regner has vowed to serve her country to the death, if needed. As thanks, the baby-faced young lady with the quick intelligence and military bearing has had verbal bombs thrown in her face by her fellow college students. Even faculty members have subjected her to abuse.
“I’ve been called a baby killer,” said Alexia, who’s enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps.
With her crisp, white uniform and sad eyes, Alexia was one of thousands of sailors and soon-to-be soldiers who descended upon the city for Fleet Week. And although she didn’t sign up for this extra duty, the girl from Wisconsin found herself drafted as a kind of emissary – forced into offering proof that, 30 years after Vietnam, our soldiers are not baby killers, sadists or monsters.
They’re our children. And our lives may depend on them.
The day another student lobbed that slur at Alexia, she decided to keep quiet.
“I was thinking, I took an oath to defend their right to call me that. I was pissed. I would never kill a baby,” she said. “But I didn’t say anything. If I did, they’d just say, ‘Oh, another mean military person.’ ”
Alexia’s pal Kristin Sinosky, 20, is enrolled in the ROTC at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She’s an architecture major.
But when she sits in the classroom, her professors don’t see her. Many just see the white of the uniform she must wear to class. And for that, they despise her.
“My teachers make cracks,” Kristin told me. “They say, ‘You must be too busy marching to get your work done.’ ”
I met these girls unexpectedly yesterday at the USO station set up at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where sailors have been giving interviews and sending messages home as part of a living-history project sponsored by Our Living Tree. But these girls opened up off-camera, so grateful were they to be seen as individuals with aspirations. And honor.
Being in New York, a place where diversity of opinion may flourish, was a welcome relief.
“People stop you on the street and say, ‘Thank you,’ ” said Alexia.
Thanks, ladies.