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thedrifter
10-30-02, 04:58 PM
By Jennifer H. Svan, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Thursday, October 31, 2002


It was no ordinary day for Stacie Joseph.

A cadet 2nd lieutenant in Yokota High School’s JROTC, the 16-year-old senior had sunk up to her knees in cold creek water, pulled a thorn out of her finger, and swore that bugs in her socks were making her legs itch.

“I didn’t think it was going to be this intense,” she said, “climbing up hills and getting knee-deep in water. I’m, like, scared for my life.”

Joseph was among 140 JROTC cadets from YHS and Yokota Middle School who spent Monday trying to locate empty white ammunition boxes in the tangled and hilly wilderness below a snow-capped Mount Fuji.

To the unprepared, the boxes would be the proverbial needles in haystacks.

But these cadets had spent hours in the classroom mapping the coordinates and devising how to find them.

They divided into 26 groups and spread out over the land-navigation course near the Marines’ Camp Fuji. Equipped with food, water, a topographical map and compass, they had about four hours to find five points.

Pinpointing all five dots on the map would earn them a gold ribbon for orienteering.

More importantly, they had to stick together, avoid getting lost, drink plenty of water, and by all means, their adult leaders advised, stay away from wildlife, such as pigs and snakes.

“The first goal is to practice in the field what you’ve done in the classroom,” said Lt. Col. Robert Mateer, JROTC instructor.

“But it’s also learning to work as a team,” he said. “Can you convince others that, ‘We really need to go back up that hill one more time because we didn’t find the point?’ ”

Joseph’s group headed off into an overgrown forest of prickly bushes and dangling vines in pursuit of the first point.

Second-year veterans, Cadet 1st Sgt. Danny Corprew and cadet 2nd Lt. Jonathan Cordell, took the lead. They were determined to improve last year’s record of two points.

Newcomers Pvt. 2nd Class Brenda Knoblauch and Pvt. 1st Class Jasmine Grace, both 13-year-old cadets, hung in the back.

“I’m scared,” Grace confided, a piece of twig already in her hair.

“I don’t like bugs,” Knoblauch shared, swatting at her neck.

Pvt. 1st Class Daniel Filoteo, another 13-year-old, said he didn’t mind the thick forest; he and his family lived briefly in the Philippines, near a more sinister jungle.

After more than an hour of counting steps, peering through the compass and then at the map, Joseph’s group found the first ammunition box — but it was beside a dirt road, when they’d navigated to the middle of the woods.

But tramping off into a dark pine forest, in pursuit of the next point, they were optimistic.

“You can’t give up, because this is our first point,” Joseph said.

By 3:30 p.m., all the groups were back at the buses, a success in and of itself, since some cadets, in years past, became so lost they didn’t return until after dark.

Mateer said 65 percent of the cadets will receive either a silver or bronze medal, for finding four or three points, respectively.

No group found all five ammo boxes.

Joseph’s group found four. Efforts to find the last point were put off by going the wrong direction.

“We went literally 180 degrees the wrong way,” she said. “We were lost for 45 minutes.”

But finding their way back turned into a lesson in teamwork.

“That’s what saved us all. We all were helping each other out,” Joseph said.


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the drifter

Seeley
10-30-02, 05:29 PM
My MCJORTC unit has just started out land navigation :). We don't have the funds to go somewhere cool like Mt. Fuji, but we do the map course at Ft. Lewis for a final test. By the way, is that an army JROTC or a MCJROTC?