By: Cadet Corporal Aaron Loanzon
Imagine this, you are on a Naval vessel that has struck a floating land mine. The ship begins to take in water, your repair team is waiting for the signal from the investigators to go down and repair the damaged area. The investigators get back and inform the team that there is leakage, so your team rushes to the location of the leak. You are trying to patch the hole as fast as you can but the water is rising higher and higher. Finally, your team manages to stop all the leaks and has successfully stopped the ship from sinking. Well, some Madison high school cadets don’t have to imagine it. It’s already happened to them.
On October 2, 2003 53 Army JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) cadets from Madison High School got to go on a field trip to 32nd Street Naval Station in National City to take part in Damage Control Training or as the cadets like to call it, “Wet Training”. Wet training is called this obviously because you get wet. The cadets were broken up into 3 repair teams and sent into 3 chambers to repair a simulated sinking ship. The teams then worked under the guidance of the appointed leader. They were given wooden beams to brace the big holes in the wall, small holes were repaired with bucket patches, and metal rings to repair breaks in the pipes.
“Wet training was fun. Each person had a different job they needed to accomplish; it gives students a chance to have the responsibility of saving the ship. It also gave them the opportunity to see how well they would work in a stressful situation. Overall it was really fun everyone got soaking wet. I look forward to doing it again next year.” Said Cadet Staff Sergeant Chuck Diep.
The key to saving the ship was to work together as a team to repair the ship. It takes about six people to repair one of the holes, two people to hold the box patch in place, two people to hold the wood beams, and the last two are hammering the wood wedges so that the beams will tighten and hold the water back. If they don’t work together then they better be able to swim.
“Wet training was something that I was looking forward to and is an event I really enjoyed. In the simulator nobody was joking around because it was sort of a life or death situation you either win or you lose and if you lose good luck. Overall it was cool because we kind of had a first hand experience of what the Navy does every day. At the end everyone was exhausted and soaked.” stated Cadet Private First Class Javier Hernandez.
If you thought ROTC is boring and all you do is where a green uniform well you’re wrong. There are so many more things that you do in this program, such as this kind of training and more. These ROTC cadets learned a valuable lesson in teamwork and got to have fun all at the same time.