cap

Assignment: “What’s been the most important life lesson you’ve learned, perhaps in an unusual or unexpected way? Tell the story and the lesson.” I have chosen a day from a Civil Air Patrol encampment, an event sort of like boot camp but for younger kids, where I functioned as a flight commander. I hope you enjoy this story. After a rather miserable moment, it’s easy to almost take frustration out on other people. Even if you can, you shouldn’t…

pc: Maj. Steve Lampasona, CAP

You got up in the morning: five-thirty, to be exact. Listening to the steady drizzle against the barrack tent combined with the HVAC system stuck in the COOL-ON position, you braced yourself for the cold. Even so, it hit you like a tank as you rolled off of your cot and into your sandals. Pulling a camouflage field jacket around your shorts and t-shirt, you stumbled out into the forty-degree air and make your way to the restroom facilities, located a good quarter mile across a dirt path. You wished you had packed better for this, but it’s Florida–you wouldn’t need it, right? Returning to the encampment location, you picked up your schedule from your commander and spent awhile reading it. As sunlight started to pierce the sky above, you prepared for the day ahead.

Now it is around nine in the morning. Physical training, breakfast, and showers are behind you and your flight–thirteen student cadets you must lead for a whole week straight. As you leave them in a classroom to receive instruction from other teachers, you decide to check back inside your barrack tent. You instructed your cadets to make their personal areas into compliance with the standards the evaluations team set up. Now you’re eager to see the results. Scattered uniform pieces, mismatched shoes, and wrinkled blankets meet your eyes. Disgusted, you wonder how on earth a week with such failures will kill you–slowly, or quickly? Hopefully quickly.

“Take a knee,” you say sharply to your group of thirteen as you return them to the barracks. Standing in front of them, looking into their inquiring faces, you feel powerful. A cadet second lieutenant, you are a cadet officer with a higher rank than any of your flight. Combined with your authority and experience, you have the power to utterly discourage each one of them, or make them realize their failures. “Your beds, your personal spaces, and pretty much everything about your standards in this building, are pathetic,” you begin, coldly. Your boots glint, your starched collar and lieutenant ranks proclaim your position, and your face shows no emotion. You watch as their faces fall. Preparing to unleash on them a torrent of disgust and disappointment, you open your mouth–then pause.

Images from your first encampment flash through your brain: a messy bed, and a mile-long list of standards you know you will forget when you begin work. You’re scared, young, frightened, away from home for a week. If only someone was around to show you how.

You shake your head, returning to the moment. “What I saw today was disgusting. I am disappointed…” you begin, but suddenly the ice is gone from your voice. Then, it clicks. You walk over to a messy bed, smiling slightly at the young twelve-year-old who eyes you with apprehension. You kneel down beside it, and quickly fold a flawless hospital corner into the sheet. “…But,” you continue, “we’re going to do this right, together.” Perhaps you can be a change for good, a positive force, in thirteen lives today. As flight commander, you could make today terrible for them. However, you don’t berate or discourage them, but you help them; because you’ve realized that you shouldn’t do something just because you can.