Although I am not certain any of the following actually happened, I am going to regale you with some of the boorish stories I have been sharing with friends for years. They are all St Louis School JROTC Rangers stories. In High School, I was in JROTC and a member of the elite club called the Rangers. And the JROTC Rangers do exist:
The JROTC Ranger Team is a six man cadet team that competes in various physical competition with other JROTC units that include: Physical Fitness test, Rappelling, Rope Bridging, Endurance/Obstacle Course, 12 mile Team Run, 1,800 meter swim, First Aid, Terrain/Land Navigation and Tug-o-War. The team trains daily during Period 9 from 1435 to 1545 hours and selected weekends.
Contact LTC Charles Lee or 1SG Jimmy Akuna
Our public claim-to-fame is that we wore spit-polished-and-bloused jump boots and a black beret with a red and blue, school colors flash. I wore an official yellow-on-black Ranger patch on my shoulder and strutted around school ever Thursday with my chest in the air. We were so proud that we ignored the fact that we were despised by both our fellow JROTC colleagues who were not part of our club and the student body at-large. We considered the former to be jealous and the latter to be ignorant.Our private claim-to-fame was that we disappeared into the subtropical forests of the Northwestern shore of Oahu every weekend, every Spring Break, and during many of the other holidays and long weekends. Disappearing was always very important for us because the simple field trip form that our parents signed for us allowed us to be officially part of the training of weekend warriors during the mid-eighties.
We teens were used as Opposing Forces, known as OpFor, against the gentle field exercises practiced by the U.S. Army Reserves and the National Guard. We were only between two to four fire teams of five young men, but we were very well and insanely motivated. Our call was, “motivated, dedicated, hua! Rangers!” We were afraid of nothing much because we wanted to kill the enemy and because we really thought it was a game. Had no insight into the import of these little war games on old East Range.
On Friday afternoon on Saturday morning, we Rangers would collect upon Kolaipuhaku at the top of the oval driveway, ready with our Alice packs, our field jacket, our BDUs, our ponchos, our web gear, and our two-sided 30-round banana clips filled with 5.56mm blanks and lashed together with olive green duct tape.
As we awaited the white school bus with the dark tinted windows, we stood there in rank. Oftentimes, since we would deploy immediately upon arriving at the base, we would stand in-line and jump up and down. Our team leaders and our officers would weave between us, checking us for noises. We got taped-down and cinched up. We lost the loose change, and we stowed our house keys. We stowed our precious black berets and donned our floppy-brimmed boonie hats and pale green caps, the ones with the cats eyes sewn into the back.
When the bus arrived, we filtered in and some of us would crash and other would flip through their team movement and tactic manuals, memorizing L ambush techniques and the best use of cover fire, as one does. Since I never did the whole camp thing, I am feeling that this is about as close to that as I ever got. For sure, I wished I could have trained for this all summer. During the summer we did train, but it was much more casual an involved parties and the beach and girls and Boone’s Farm apple wine and Mickey’s big mouth and peppermint schnapps. But that’s another story.
So, depending on with whom we were training and where, we would either drive for an hour out to Schofield Barracks and East Range or for a stopover in Waikiki in about fifteen minutes.
From there, we would get briefed by a lieutenant who I am sure considered his career over as we fell into his lap, and then we would be shipped out, never to sleep again until Sunday night. In a nutshell, these weekends went like this:
We were dropped off at East Range, received our maps and a briefing, and then we split up into our five-man fire teams. I was the only pigman, or machine gunner, of the entire Saint Louis Rangers, but I have played the part of radio operator with my Prick 77 (PRC-77), of point man, and of pigman. As pigman, I got stuck with the 23-pound machine gun of Rambo fame. And I loved it. As the pigman, I got to have an assistant gunner, who carried extra belts of ammo and an extra barrel. Unlike the M-16, the M-60 runs a bigger caliber ammunition and runs much hotter, especially blocked as it was with a blank adapter. Nothing is better than being on your belly at the elbow of an L ambush in the middle of the night, your pig resting on its bipod and pointing downrange at the headlights of a 3AM caravan of deuce-and-a-half’s, awaiting your commander’s orders to open fire. But that’s another story.
It was very cool for sure, and felt very real. I will make a point of telling as many of the stories as I can remember.
