“We appreciate everything you have done to keep our nation’s light shining bright,” Head of School Charles Baldecchi said this morning to the military veterans attending an assembly in Thies Auditorium commemorating Veterans Day. The thirteen veterans present included Charlotte Latin graduates, parents, and employees.

Students shared the history of Veterans Day with their classmates — dating back to 1919, when it was known as “Armistice Day” and commemorated the soldiers who fought in World War I — but the featured speaker was Theresa Campobasso ’04, a Latin graduate with degrees from Notre Dame and Georgetown who served as an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps, specializing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Asia-Pacific region.

“I’m very passionate about my choice to select public service,” she said. She emphasized that her path wasn’t expected by anyone, least of all herself: at Latin, she immersed herself in her English and history classes, also doing many theatrical productions. But she started physical training with ROTC students at Notre Dame because “they were interested in pushing themselves to the ultimate limit” and gravitated toward the Marines. She soon found that “briefing and storytelling and communicating are essential skills for the intelligence community.” As she put it, “I was able to use my gifts to find my own way to serve in the military.” She now works in private industry, as the senior vice president of strategy and business development at Exiger.

Campobasso shared her story first with the assembled Upper School students and then again with Middle School students. (Lower School students gathered in Thies in the afternoon to sing patriotic songs, ranging from “America the Beautiful” to “This Land Is Your Land,” led by Lower School Music Teacher Aneudy Melendez and Director of Performing Arts Alicia Long.) She then visited the Upper School class Literature of War (taught by Richard Harris, also a former teacher of hers) to go more in-depth on the details of field operations, defining the difference between counterintelligence and counterespionage, explaining the limitations of polygraph tests, and sharing a useful acronym for the reasons people gather intelligence for foreign country. (MICE: M for Money, I for Ideology, C for Coercion, E for Ego.) 

Espionage is often aided by technological means. Campobasso’s work in counterespionage meant that she had to make sure that American secrets were safeguarded from technological hacks, like circumventing the security restrictions on an AI program by asking it to sing a lullaby that included a password. However, technology comes in many gradations, she reminded Latin’s students: in a remote region of Afghanistan, she remembered, “There was one instance when we had to teach someone to read a map.”