Ripon College Days

Issue date: 10/10/07 Section: Opinion

Parissa DJangi.

Dear Editor,
As the officer in charge of the Ripon ROTC program, I would like to ask the student body's assistance in the training of our Cadets. As many students have observed, our cadets conduct physical training three times a week from 6-7 in the morning. We routinely jog in formation through city streets, call cadences and train in the vicinity of the college. Most mornings, we use city roads south of Fond du Lac St. and the college campus to conduct our physical training.

The ROTC program is not just students pretending to play Army. Most of our cadets (17 of 27) are contracted with the Army as federal scholarship recipients and have agreed to service obligations as US?Army Officers following their graduation from Ripon College. Our senior cadets may well be leading our nation's soldiers during combat in Iraq or Afghanistan in less than two years time. Almost everyone knows a service member who has served or will serve overseas. The men and women of our ROTC programs, once commissioned, will be charged with leading your brothers, sisters, sons and daughters during dangerous and challenging combat missions around the world.

Physical training (PT) is essential to the development of our future Army leaders. Army officers need to be disciplined, athletic, aggressive and tough. All of these critical traits are tested during our PT sessions.

Generally we observe that our program is well-supported and people are accommodating to our training, particularly after we identify ourselves and our purpose.

However, we have experienced incidents over the past year regarding motorist, student and homeowner reactions to our presence. On several occasions we have had motorists dangerously approach our running formations and excessively use their horns. Homeowners and students have interrupted our training to demand that we not make any noise or that we train somewhere else. Students have also made derogatory and unsupportive comments from their windows as we train outside. Some motorists do even slow down to the town speed limit when passing our formations of cadets.

Regardless of your opinion of world events, the United States has committed to maintaining a strong and formidable military. Our Army depends on programs such as Ripon ROTC to produce over 60% of the officer corps. Officers trained at liberal arts colleges provide valuable leadership and moral direction in all of the nation's armed services.

Our cadets have sworn to support and defend their country in a time of war. They will all sacrifice greatly in defense of the United States following graduation. Someday one of them may give their life in defense of our freedoms.

In order to accomplish these lofty goals, we request your tolerance of a modest amount of noise every so often as we train in and around campus. Secondly, please observe a 10 mph speed and 10 foot distance limit when driving near our cadet formations. For our part, we will limit our noise output, ensure appropriate cadences and identify ourselves with uniforms and highly visible reflective garments. We also vary our routes to avoid excessive use of the same area. Use of the area around campus as well as city streets remains necessary as we are limited by time available, safety concerns, gymnasium availability, as well as logistics from conducting our training at locations of any distance from campus.

I encourage students to support our efforts or even join our training sessions at the Storzer lobby from 6-7 a.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We would greatly welcome participation by any member of the student body interested in learning what we do.

Please talk to your friends and neighbors about this request and ask that they show our future Army leaders the respect they deserve by allowing them to train safely and effectively in preparation for successful careers.

Jeffrey T. Painter
US Army, Captain of Armor
Ripon ROTC Department Head

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