Over spring break 2026, AGS took students to Paris, Vichy, and Lyon to study the French Resistance. Participant Viveka Mehrotra (’28) shares her reflection on the trip.
I could feel the challenger coin I had brought with me, the orange bronco, burning at my side. I carry it everywhere, my good luck charm. I had never been more painfully aware of it as I was on our last official day of the staff ride in France, when we went to Suresnes American Cemetery.
It sits five miles west of central Paris, high on the slopes of Mont Valérien. From there, the city stretches out in a soft, distant panorama. The cemetery holds 1,541 Americans from the First World War and 24 from the Second World War. Some graves are marked. Some are not. The unknown are buried beneath words that are incredibly sobering: Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.
It was there that I also realized that since landing in France, I had subconsciously begun to somewhat romanticize everything.
France makes it easy. It invites you into that kind of thinking. Standing in front of the historic Hôtel de Ville in Lyon. Skipping through the colorful streets of Vichy. Looking out across the majestic Glières Plateau as the Alps folded into the horizon. It all feels like something from a dream. I caught myself wondering, half seriously, if I could live there one day. Maybe I would. After all, once you have tasted French butter, there is not much left to tie you down anywhere else.
So when we drove an hour outside of Paris, I did not expect Suresnes to be the place that stayed with me. I thought I understood sacrifice. Then I walked through the gates. Iron, edged in gold. And just like that, everything went quiet.
The grass in the cemetery is impossibly green. It stretches out into rows of white marble. At the center stands a monument that feels almost like a fort, anchored between two American flags, which move gently in the cold sunlight, like they are breathing.
And something in me shifted. An involuntary pressure behind my eyes.
Because the question I had been carrying so comfortably for days—what does it mean to resist— began to feel insufficient. Almost naive.
The coin pressed harder against my side. Or maybe I finally understood why I had brought it.
Beyond the rows, past the marble and the flags that refused to be still, you can see it. The Eiffel Tower. It felt as if Paris itself was reminding me that life goes on. That beauty persists. That the world these soldiers left behind kept turning without them. And somewhere, looking out at a city that survived because enough people refused to let it fall, the challenger coin on my person assumed a whole new meaning.
I found myself thinking about home and about the soldiers buried there—known and unknown; They did not get to decide that leaving was more interesting than staying, or that detachment was more honest than responsibility.
They were called to something, and they answered.
And standing there, I realized how easy it is to do the opposite.
Public service is not built on ease. It is built on a kind of stubborn choosing. Again and again. When it is inconvenient and invisible. When no one is watching, and no one will ever know your name.
The neat marble rows make that undeniable.
There is no glory there, not in the way we like to imagine it. Just sacrifice. And the simple, unyielding truth that someone, at some point, decided that something mattered more than their own comfort, their own plans, their own life as they had imagined it.
The French Resistance understood something about the question—what does it mean to resist— that I think most have forgotten today. Vivre libre ou mourir. Live free or die, they said in answer. They did not resist because victory was certain. Many of them died before it came. They resisted because the alternative—to remain and say nothing—to collaborate by silence, to let the weight of occupation simply become the weight of ordinary life, was a kind of death they refused to accept first. They made that difficult decision every day, even when they had every reason to make an easier one.
America, at her best, has always been that kind of reckoning too. Not a place you are simply born in and inherit, but an idea, a proposition you have to keep choosing. The men and women in those rows chose it at the cost of everything. The Resistance fighters chose it knowing the odds.
I did not leave Suresnes with answers. If anything, I left with a different question.
Not what does it mean to resist? Not even, what does it mean to serve?
But what, exactly, am I willing to stay for?
Because choosing the status quo is easy. The coin is my reminder not to.
I want to thank AGS for not just the trip of a lifetime but helping me understand what that might actually require.