Inside a Soviet Boot Camp

Journalist Roy Rowan '41 and photographer Jim Nachtwey '70 spent a week last summer in a Russian army basic training camp, eating and sleeping alongside a regiment of motorized infantry recruits. The result was a revealing nine-page feature in Life Magazine, part of an historic exchange in which a Russian reporter visited Fort Benning in Georgia (ours, not theirs). While it is, of course, a coincidence that Rowan and Nachtwey happen to be Dartmouth alumni, it is a measure of their many separate contributions to Time-Life publications that they were chosen for this assignment. At first the Russians questioned the choice of the 68-year-old Rowan; but the WW II veteran, who runs five miles a day, proved his mettle by outshooting the young recruits at the target range. He also shot these pictures though we're not quite sure about the one he's in at the left.