Charles City cadets learn ropes at camp

Perhaps the first step in beating the summer heat, or any other of life’s pressures, is to confront it.

Nearly 270 high school students from Junior ROTC programs up and down the Virginia, Maryland and Delaware coasts faced up to steamy temperatures and some of their phobias July 16-21 during the Junior Cadet Leadership Challenge Mountain 2010 at Fort Eustis.

“It’s a great place to be,” said Jonathan Hambright, a cadet from the Junior ROTC program at Charles City High School. “It’s actually a fun week to be here, and it’s really active.”

The high school cadets may have worn out their physical training muscles and blistered their marching and drilling feet from plenty of physical activity at the camp, but they also exercised their minds in classroom work and even relaxed during a boat cruise.

The fear factor for the teenagers at the six-day camp could have come from climbing the high cargo net obstacle at the Fort Eustis Confidence Course, sliding while suspended beneath a single rope “bridge” six feet from the ground, or just from being tossed into a random platoon-sized mixture of new kids selected from 24 far-flung high schools.

“It’s different and it’s taking us out of our comfort zone,” Hambright said, “but after one day of talking to people, you find people you get to know, and hang out, and you’re all one big family after a while.”

“I had a great experience from 20-plus years in the Army,” said Lt. Col. (Retired) Vernon Peters, the senior Army instructor for the Charles City High School JROTC program. “The Army paid for both my undergraduate degree and my master’s degree. I felt like I wanted to give something back to the community. And young people today look for role models, and people who have experience beyond their local area. Charles City is a very small, rural county, and I just felt that I could give something to Charles City and to the kids.”

Hambright said the JROTC program at Charles City High, “gives us self-discipline and leadership skills that you need for life and an adult role.”

“But what I see most of all is the self-discipline,” Peters said. “They’ll be given a mission or a task, and a time frame to get it done, and they get it done. And also promote teamwork. So we don’t like to give individual projects. We like to give classroom projects, or group projects, so that the kids learn how to work with others.”

Peters said the program is designed to teach good citizenship, and to “make sure they graduate from high school and that they have a goal, and a roadmap, to what they want to do,” rather than putting the students on a path to later military service. However, many do pursue a career in uniform.

“We have had people join the military, both as enlisted and also as officers,” Peters said. “I have had several cadets get ROTC scholarships to Virginia Tech, North Carolina A&T, so they come back all the time to say what it has done for them. And every spring break we have kids… come back to the classroom and want to talk to the cadets.”

Peters said that the participation numbers reveal his program is popular at Charles City High.

“Junior ROTC isn’t for everyone,” Peters said, “but even in a small school like Charles City, with only 270 kids, we still have 58 cadets. I don’t think I’ve ever had fewer than 20 percent of the school population. And one year we had 33 percent of the school in the JROTC program.”

Editor’s Note: The author works for the Fort Eustis Public Affairs Office.