Lt. Col. Marcus Majure helps shape the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps, which prepares college men and women to be commissioned in the Army. But during his college years, the ROTC program shaped him.
“In the ’80s, it was ‘Be all you could be,'” Majure, the new head of Mississippi State University’s ROTC program, said, referring to the Army slogan, which is now “An Army of One.”
He was president of his professional fraternity and involved in activities, and he thought he was being all he could be, he said.
But he wasn’t ,really, not until he joined the Army ROTC program. “The cadre took me under their wing and encouraged me not just to do well in school but to be the best I could be,” he said.
It was that guidance that prompted him to go into active duty in the Army, rather than the National Guard or the Army Reserves, and to compete against ROTC graduates from schools around the nation, he said.
When he joined ROTC after transferring from a community college to Delta State University, where he got a bachelor’s degree in commercial aviation, his GPA went from about a 3.0 to a 3.7. During his senior year, he served as executive officer, second in command, of his ROTC battalion, then as cadet commander, the senior ranking cadet.
“To me, that’s success; I did the best I could do,” he said.
The meaning of success has changed over the years for Majure. “Success now is, I want to be a better commander.”
While serving as the head of the department of military science at MSU and guiding the group of cadets known as the Bulldog Battalion, being a good commander means improving the ROTC program.
“Every morning before I go to PT, I shave, and if I don’t like what I see when I look in the mirror, I say, ‘What can I do about it?'” Majure said. He brings this same attitude to his leadership of the Bulldog Battalion.
One of Majure’s goals for the ROTC program at MSU is to increase the number of cadets in the program.
He plans to do this by breaking down what he calls the unknown barrier of knowledge about ROTC at MSU.
“Anybody from freshmen to graduate students can take my classes with no contract,” he said.
He is looking for scholar athletic leaders, what he calls SALS. “They turn their heads to our program because they think we’re trying to recruit them for Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said.
ROTC is not boot camp, he said. “We’re not developing enlisted soldiers; we’re developing officers. Officers are treated like officers; they’re developed and mentored like officers.”
Right now, he said, about 75 cadets participate in ROTC. By next year, he wants to have 150, and by the year after that, the final year of his three-year assignment to the school, he hopes to have 200 cadets.
“If I can get 1,000 in here, I will, and President Lee will build me a new building,” he said, laughing.
He has already had some success; at one point during the summer only seven freshmen were enrolled in the program, but in six weeks he and the other instructors increased enrollment in the freshman class to 25, more than triple the original number.
Another goal is to make the program fun. If cadets are having fun in the ROTC program, he said, they know the Army is right for them.
One thing Majure has done to make ROTC more fun is to have fun days on Fridays during physical training, Cadet Jerry Roberts said. The cadets will play ultimate football or ultimate Frisbee. Sometimes, they run.
“Running is fun for me, so some of them aren’t quite as thrilled, but I like it,” he said.
An upcoming lab will pit the Army ROTC cadets against those from the Air Force ROTC.
“That’s something as old as time,” Roberts said.
But the cadets haven’t had a lab like that before, and Roberts said it should be fun.
Majure said he can tell when something is going wrong in a cadet’s life. For instance, if a cadet is having trouble in Spanish class, “I’ll say to them, ‘You wanna use my desk? You wanna use my desk without all the other cadets? OK,'” he said.
Majure’s position as head of the ROTC at MSU is not his first teaching position; he previously served as an assistant professor in logistics and resource operations for the Army’s Command and General Staff College, where he was named Military Instructor of the Year for his department in 2004.
Capt. Andrew Rendon, the Bulldog Battalion’s enrollment and recruiting officer, compared the difference between teaching at CGSC and teaching ROTC to the difference between teaching graduate courses and undergraduate courses. “You were teaching graduate officer development, and now you’re teaching undergraduate development,” he said.
Majure has also served in the 101st Airborne Division, and in Kuwait and Korea.
As enthusiastic as Majure is about improving the ROTC, his job is not the only component of his life. He has a wife of 17 years and two sons, a 14-year-old ,who is considering serving in the Air Force, and a 7-year-old. Both boys are into sports, and Majure said he spends most of his time not at work, but at his sons’ sporting activities.
In coming to MSU, Majure has brought his family home. “All of my family and grandparents and uncles and cousins all graduated from MSU,” he said. He went to DSU because of offered commercial aviation, which MSU does not offer.
A group of colonels and generals chose him for the position with the Bulldog Battalion during what he described as a rigorous process.
The system, which keeps the professors at a university for three years, is beneficial for the cadets because cadets become familiar with the leadership style of two leaders, Roberts said.