Climbing to new heights with the cadets of ROTC
By Jay Cridlin
Editor In Chief

As our nation teeters on tenterhooks over a tinderbox of tumult and turmoil, we must all ask ourselves one question: can I hack it?

Can I, in times of political strife at home and abroad, roll up my sleeves and grit my teeth and do the hippy shake-shake and make my nation proud?

Perhaps that question is more relevant at this university than elsewhere. Let’s face it: many of us Demon Deacons are not so much hard-boiled as we are poached with a runny center. I myself am a Hostess Ding Dong soaked in Egg Beaters.

But know this — if anyone ever asks whether I can hack it, I can proudly rise from my recliner and declare that when the time came for me to leap from a 45-foot-high platform during a military field training exercise, I did not wet my pants.

I was given the opportunity to briefly test my mettle at a weekend field training exercise for the Wake Forest University Army Reserve Officer Training Corps Demon Deacon Battalion — also known as the ROTC.

Eighty cadets from this university, Winston-Salem State University and Salem College traveled to Vineyard Campground in Pilot Mountain, as they do each semester, for a weekend of leadership training and physical challenges that would buckle an American Gladiator’s spine.

With the threat of international conflict looming large on the horizon, life in any military organization, even an ROTC program at a private school, has taken on new meaning.
“If it’s done anything, it’s made what we do in the Army real,” said Lt. Col. James Page, the chairman of the military science department and the brigade commander of the ROTC program.” It’s kind of always been over there? Well, now it’s over here.”
Not that the ROTC has a better guess than you or I about what might transpire in the coming months. “What goes on isn’t common knowledge to everyone in the military,” said senior cadet Chris Hartness. “These guys know as much as we know, and that’s just from the press.”

Speaking as a member of the press, I can officially say: uh-oh. If the military is relying on 800-word regurgitations of an Ari Fleischer press briefing for strategic information, then we are in some kind of trouble.

So as a journalistic enterprise, I headed to Camp Vineyard to participate in some training exercises and get a better sense of what ROTC actually is.
As soon as I got there, I was whisked to a wooden tower the approximate height of the Space Needle that I could climb and then rappel down. No problems there, except (1) I’d never climbed before, and (2) I’d never rappelled, either.

I was fastened into a rather hilarious-looking harness and given brief instructions on how to grapple and finagle my way to the top.

In retrospect, it seems laughable that anyone could have believed I might actually scale the whole tower. I was actually told only one cadet had conquered the tower all day.

At my highest point, I was a little over twice my height from the ground, meaning that if push came to shove, in a life-or-death battle situation, I could climb to the top of: John Tesh.

Ultimately , I climbed a ladder to the top, passing Sherpa camps and albatross nests along the way. Actually, the tower was only 60 feet high, but when you’ve never rappelled, it feels like you’re bungee jumping from Mir.

I surprised myself and probably everyone else by successfully rappelling without serious injury. My arms were numb, but complete loss of sensation in your extremities is a small price to pay for writing a college newspaper column.

Then came the biggie — a high ropes course. Those souls brave enough to attempt it had to climb up a ladder, balance across a log, up another ladder, across an inclined log, up and down another ladder, back down the inclined log, and up onto a 45-foot-high platform, from which they would jump into the air and swing from an incredibly long rope attached to another incredibly high rope.

Apparently, the pit of cobras and the ring of fire were closed for repairs.

I watched another Old Gold and Black reporter, senior Jaclyn Elledge — whose ROTC article also appears in this issue — take on the ropes.

“This is not a cadet?” asked a cadet at the top of the course as Elledge started her ascent.

“She is not expendable,” answered someone at the bottom. Comforting.

Elledge made it through, and then it was my turn. I was somewhere near the second log when I began breathing like Tony Soprano after a triathlon.

Convinced I would fall, I stretched out my arms like a cartoon tightrope walker and crept inch by inch up to the platform, making a mental note to explore the possibility of surgically grafting opposable thumbs onto my feet if I lived.

When I got to the platform and calmed my heart to a rate of about 400 beats per minute, I counted to three.

“One,” I said. About five seconds passed.

“Two.” Thirty more seconds.

“Three!”

There are really no words to describe the flight. Frankly, this is because my eyes were clenched as if caulked with Poli-Grip. I swung forwards and backwards, upside down and inside out, twisting and turning in circles and ellipses for a good minute and a half until I slowed to a point where Hartness could stop me and help me climb down.

I took a deep breath, smiled and resolved to never again scale a point higher than a handicapped toilet.

I won’t earn a Purple Heart for my efforts. But I did get a nasty splinter — good enough, perhaps, for a Purple Horseshoe. I hacked it.

As I was leaving, I asked Page if any ROTC cadets were in danger of being shipped to Afghanistan.

“Unequivocally, no, regardless of the escalation,” he said. “None of our students are in jeopardy of going, which is a good thing.”

That it is, Lieutenant Colonel. That it is.