Purdue, as a land grant college, offered a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program for the Army, Navy, and the Air Force. It was mandatory for men for the first two years. I was in Army ROTC; but don't recall why - probably because my Dad was in the Army. Because the program was required, the Army Corps of Cadets was very large, maybe 3,000. We had drill once a week on the huge armory floor and classes two other days a week in the armory's classrooms, on subjects such as military history and leadership.

Some of the other college students I knew were "Gung-HO," a term for those really into this type activity. In the Army ROTC program, one could join extracurricullar activities such as the Drill Team, the Scabbarb and Blade Society, and perhaps be inducted into the Purdue Order of Military Merit.

I wasn't interested in these things, and was actually a poor model of a cadet in that I would be late for class and spend the last weeks of each semester working off demerits. ROTC, an easy A, was often a B subject. But maybe I really loved it and just acted out my indifference because I did not want to be called "Gung Ho."

I did well enough at summer camp at Fort Riley, Kansas. On the first day or so of camp all the cadets got their "Army haircut" that meant essentially getting your head sheared. When I got up in the chair I told the barber to leave some on top. He said that he had been told differently but I insisted and he did it my way. I got a close haircut but wasn't a skinhead like the rest of the cadets. I was in a good squad and we did a lot of things together. We took weekend trips together and visited the ROTC club on base to drink the 3.2 beer.

One of the ways cadets were moved around Fort Riley was in large trailers that we called cattle cars. They were large flatbeds with lumber sides that were about four feet high. The prescribed manner of loading the cattle cars was from the back, as climbing up the sides and over the walls was not the best in terms of safety. But the cadre were always yelling for the cadets to load the cattle cars quickly, and they weren't happy when their unit was last to load. So on the day I was in the leadership position, I told my fellow cadets that I wanted the cattle car loaded fast, and that I didn't care how they did it. Sure enough, when we were given the command to load the trailer, our company went nuts, swarming up the sides from every direction. I got yelled at by the cadre, as expected. But I did manage to mention that we were first loaded. Yep, I broke the rules, but Army guys sometimes like it when the rules are broken.

One of the field exercises was a land navigation class. Each group of four or five cadets gets a map and a compass, and some directions to a stake in the ground somwhere in the training area. You shoot azimuths and do pacing to hopefully get to the right points. Each cadet was responsible for a leg of the course, and I had the last leg. As usual, it was boiling hot. We came up to the last leg and we could see the finish area, with water trailers and shade. However, the last leg, if someone took it straight, was down a very, very steep ravine and back up the other side. Or you could walk perhaps a quarter of a mile and walk around the ravine. I said that we'd walk around, so we finished early and didn't kill ourselves climbing into and out of that ravine. While my teammates drank water in the shade I shot a back azimuth to where we came from and did some praying and found out later that we hit our mark. Sometimes the best way to success is not hey diddle diddle, right down the middle.

During my senior year with ROTC I trained the juniors; perhaps some indication that the ROTC staff thought well of me.