Back when I was in college, I was in Air Force ROTC. I was one of the many college students that enrolled in the ROTC program in the fall of 1995. For those not that familiar with the program, ROTC is an interesting idea. Basically, no branch of the United States armed forces (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or the reserves of any of the four) will make you an officer unless you have a college degree. It doesn't much matter what your degree is in, since the military will stick you in a position where you show the most promise. Being a military officer comes with a lot of responsibility, but a pitiful paycheck. So pitiful, in fact, that the military often has a hard time finding people to become officers. So, if you're sharp enough and have good grades in high school, the military offers to pay for your college tuition in exchange for you becoming an officer upon graduation from college.

Of course, it's not like you just go through college as a normal student and then just get handed a uniform when you get handed your diploma. There is a lot of training involved during your college years. On paper, the training you receive are in the form of "military science" classes. These classes are really very simple, and aren't anything to worry about. If you do bad in these classes, it's probably better for all involved if you quit trying to become a military officer. I'm not too comfortable with having someone in charge of ballistic weapons when he or she can't even remember if you're supposed to salute with your left hand or your right hand.

The classes that you take are a lot like a typical science class like biology or physics. You take a standard classroom-based class for a few credits, and then you take this nightmare lab class that usually is worth a single credit. The lab takes roughly 90% of your total ROTC effort, and it thoroughly sucks. In a nutshell, the "leadership lab" is where you wear a uniform, get yelled at, run until you throw up, do push-ups until the feeling in your arms are a fond memory, get yelled at, sing idiotic songs while marching all over the campus, salute a whole hell of a lot, and get yelled at. People who grew up on a diet of movies such as "Full Metal Jacket", "The Guns of Navarone", and "Top Gun" seem to think this lab is a whole lotta fun.

I didn't think it was that much fun. Mostly because I was too busy being one of those guys that were throwing up in the bushes.

One of the goals of this whole lab thing was to teach a potential officer how to be both a follower and a leader. This meant that each week, a handful of cadets were selected to fill leadership roles for the duration of the week. Don't confuse "leadership roles" with "authority", because they are hardly the same. All that it meant was that you were no longer the dirt of the military, but rather the upper layer of mud that was directly stepped upon. You wanted to avoid these roles as much as possible, because they not only involved yelling at your friends (who would simply beat your ass later when it was their turn to be in charge) but also involved you being yelled at by upperclassmen. It broke down to becoming a speed-bump for verbal abuse.

For a bunch of cadets with half a brain amongst them, you could turn this whole system to your advantage. One of the positions, flight adjutant, was probably the worst job you could get, but also offered the most opportunity. The adjutant became, for the duration of his duties, the slave of the flight commander. The flight commander was the cadet officer in charge of training all the lowerclassman peons, so he basically foisted all of the paperwork on the flight adjutant/victim of the week. But, being in charge of all the paperwork had it's advantages. At least, it did when *I* was flight adjutant.

"Cadet, what's the speed of sound?" the flight commander would ask a cadet standing at attention in formation.

"Uh.... sir, I do not know, but will find out!" the cadet would respond.

"I figured as much. Henderson, that's a demerit for Cadet Johnson!" the flight commander would bark at me.

"Yes sir!" I would shout as I proficiently whipped out my clipboard and marked down a demerit for Cadet Nick Jameson, who was always hanging out over at my apartment. That'll teach Nick not to leave dirty dishes in my sink.

Anyway, you could go through all this abuse and get through the program, get your commission, and get stuck wherever the military saw it fit to stick you. Or, you could do some extracurricular activities in ROTC, get recognized as one of the better cadets, and get your pick of where you wanted to do once you received your commission. Doing extracurricular activities also had a bonus that made you stand out and get recognized as someone sharp when you were out there in formation with a hundred other cadets.

The thing that made you stand out were ribbons. Hard to get, but an amazing indicator of military l33t-ness, those rectangular colored bars that get pinned to your uniform marked out the winners from the losers. The more you had, generally speaking, the more gung-ho you were about the whole military thing. I spent the entirety of my ROTC career scheming up ways to get more ribbons on my uniform.

By the end of my freshman year of college and my first year of ROTC, I had a whopping 4 ribbons on my uniform and a cord on my left shoulder. That was a pretty darn good haul for a freshman. But, the ribbons I had gotten were mostly the "I put in a few extra hours to get this one" ribbons. It was going to start getting hard to add any more ribbons without putting in some heavy-duty extra effort. But I figured, why the hell not? Even if I lost all the ribbons when I became an officer, having them in the first place would enable me to have a better opportunity of picking exactly where I'd be stationed and what I'd be doing.

So, I joined the rifle and drill team of the 157th Air Force ROTC Training Wing of the Air Education Training Command. In retrospect, that wasn't the best idea I've ever had.

Ever see the military folks in parades or at sporting events that spin and throw rifles? Or perhaps a military colorguard? That's what the rifle and drill team does. It looks cool, and it IS cool if you happen to be good at spinning and throwing rifles. For me, on the other hand, it was pure torture. I SUCKED at it. No one would dare volunteer to be my partner for practicing rifle throwing because no one, including me, could say for sure what direction that rifle was going to go once it left my hand.

On the bright side, I imagine most of my former rifle throw partners could put in an application for a purple heart ribbon. I clocked one poor guy in the head on two different occasions, and I was a one man army when it came to smashing shoulders, jamming fingers, and knocking the wind out of my partners. I was so dangerous, in fact, that I was loaned out to the colorguard as a guard so that the rifle team could heal a little while I was busy standing next to an American flag and looking grim while holding a rifle.

My amazing level of ineptitude in the area of thrown firearms was quite noteable. That's what makes this next bit so shocking.

About two weeks into the semester, I had just finished my first week of acting as a rifleman with the team colorguard. The three cadet officers that were in charge of the rifle team called me out of formation and said that they wanted to talk to me. I figured that they were going to have a heart-to-heart with me along the lines of "please do us all a favor and quit before you kill someone." What they told me, however, was quite the opposite:

"Henderson, we've got another rifleman coming in... a late starter... and we need you to work with her and get her up to speed," the team commander said to me while giving me a wary eye. "Quite frankly, you suck at handling a rifle, Henderson. I've seen monkeys that have more coordination than you. But you're the only one on the team with GPA to spare, and we think that the extra practice could really help you out. Besides, I know you've got what it takes to work on something until you get it right. If you didn't, you wouldn't be wearing that Arnold Air Society ribbon on your uniform."

Aw, God damn it. The ribbons strike back.

The executive officer for the rifle team peered at me and said, "Now all of this helping that you're going to be doing is going to be outside of practice, OK? We want you to concentrate on your colorguard duties while you're here. We'll work on showing her the basics here in practice. You'll just help her fine tune them." I translated this to mean something along the lines of, "We'd rather not be responsible for when you accidentally throw a rifle directly into this poor girl's face, but she's gotta learn how to dodge stuff sooner or later."

The chief training officer smirked at me and said, "She was watching a few previous practices and told me that she wanted to join." He paused for a second before adding, "... and she specifically requested that you help bring her up to speed."

"Err... requested me, sir?" I asked in disbelief. Why the hell would this girl request me? If she was watching previous practices, then she should already be full aware that anyone not wearing body armor was taking a real chance in practicing with me. If she was here to pick up guys, she was going about it the wrong way. There were about 12 guys to every girl on campus, so all she'd really have to do is wear a skirt. Wearing a skirt is much safer than having bolt-action rifles winged at your neck.

The commander shrugged before he added, "I don't ask questions. I suggested that she work with Cook." He jerked his thumb towards the parking lot where cadet Ben Cook was throwing a spinning rifle about 20 feet up in the air and then catching it behind his back. These days, Ben is an Air Force officer, and he's currently in flight training and has been assigned to be an F-15 pilot.

Ben, besides being a great guy and fellow computer science student, also had a lot of ribbons.

"She agreed to work with Cook, but she also wants to work with you as well. In fact, here's our woman now," the executive officer said as he pointed out of the practice area and back towards the quad of the college. I looked off to where the XO was pointing and saw a girl moving across the campus quad at a jogging pace. I couldn't make out too many details of her, but I could tell that she was just a little bit of a thing... probably only about five feet tall.

Within a minute she was right up next to us, presenting a salute to the rifle team commander. The commander introduced her as a miss Myriam Velez. She turned to me, smiled, and said, "My friends call me by my middle name, Neri. You can call me that."

The chief training officer snarled at Velez and yelled, "He'll call you 'Velez'. When you're out here, your first name is 'Cadet', got it??" She jumped back a step, scowled at the training officer, and snapped back at him with an emphatic "Yes Sir!". The executive officer shook his head, and the commander peered at me for a second before instructing me to take five minutes to talk to this young lady in order to swap contact information, and then I was to get my butt back to the practice area.

I held out my arm towards the edge of the practice field, looked at Velez, and asked, "Shall we?" A smile popped onto her face and she said, "You're the guy holding the rifle. After you, sir." With that, Miss Velez and I jogged over to the edge of the practice area and began talking.

Little did I know what mischief and mayhem were about to enter my life by meeting Neri Velez. Within the next few weeks, I was going to be in a bar fight, spotlighted and surrounded at gunpoint by the police, and lots of other nastiness... all because of this girl.

Hey, at least she was really cute.

Next Military Update: Trouble comes in small packages.