Candy for the Children – An Ode to Military Humor

After my old unit went through its inactivation, I reported for duty at Pacific Lutheran University Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters in Tacoma, Washington, to learn what my duties would be while at the department.  After meeting with the ROTC detachment commander, I learned that I would be responsible for college recruiting and teaching cadet geography.  I quickly learned that geography was not exactly a favorite subject among the cadets.  It ranked right up there with military history at about a negative twenty (-20).  I figured the way to approach the subject of geography would be to link it to military history and dangle a carrot in front of the horse if you will.  Well, actually it’s dangling a carrot in front of a mule or a donkey to get it to move forward just to be technically correct.  But that’s only if we want to be technically correct.  The point here is that I had to offer the college kids some sort of bribe.  You know.  It’s like giving candy to a baby to get it to do something like be quiet.  Oh, wait a second.  You give a baby a bottle or a pacifier to get it to do something like be quiet.  You give candy to a little kid to get the little kid to do something.  Okay, now we’re straight.  Anyway, so I formulated a geography lesson that involved significant rivers in foreign countries and their importance to military history.  I selected a series of 10 rivers in 10 different countries that were significant in 10 different military campaigns throughout history and asked the cadets to identify each one.  Now you might be thinking that this would be an insurmountably difficult lesson to complete.  But it actually wasn’t.  Here is why.  Before I gave the cadets the lesson to complete, I gave them a lecture on significant rivers and military campaigns that used those rivers throughout history.  I also gave the cadets a hand-out to go along with that lecture.  Then, when I gave them the lesson as an assignment, I told them to use all resources available to them to complete the assignment.  Draw your own conclusion.  They had all the answers.  All they had to do was fill in the blanks.  It was sort of like giving kids candy.  The first time I put a lesson plan together in such a fashion, the cadets were kinda slow to get the hang of it.  But by the second time, they were fully on board.  After they realized that I was giving them all the answers, they opened up and started asking some serious questions.  One cadet asked, “Sir, why did you give us all the answers?”  I replied, “My intent is not to see how many failing grades I can hand out.  Any idiot with a grade sheet and a bunch of tests can do that.  My intent is to actually teach geography in the context of military history that you can remember.  What you learn today may prevent you from repeating the mistakes of the past on the battlefield.  That is the whole point of these lessons.  It is not to see how many of you I can fail.”  After my first week at the ROTC detachment, I started to take a couple of cadets with me on my college visits for recruiting purposes.  I figured actual college students talking to potential college students was better than an army officer talking to potential college students.  It turns out that I was absolutely correct.  When I first arrived at Pacific Lutheran University, our sister school up in Seattle was capturing most of the college recruits.  Okay.  That’s not entirely correct.  They were capturing all of the potential college prospects.  I could tell that the Colonel was worried about recruiting numbers at Pacific Lutheran University and how we could turn those numbers around.  He didn’t have a large budget to throw more scholarships at the problem, so that wasn’t the answer.  We would have to attract recruits using other programs.  I told the Colonel that I had a couple of ideas.  I mentioned that the Army offered the green to gold program.  I also mentioned that there were some soldiers who were enrolled in two-year college programs using tuition assistance through their military units.  I said that I could get those names from the education center and have the education center career counselor contact those people that were nearing completion of their two years of college credit to see if they’d be willing to transfer their college credit to Pacific Lutheran University and use their G.I. Bill for an ROTC program.  We could enroll them in a program whereby they would enroll in college on a half-time schedule and take ROTC classes for a full load so that they would have enough credits for the G.I. Bill.  The Colonel wasn’t sure that it would work, but he said he would check it out with his higher headquarters.  Once he got the go-ahead, I started recruiting ROTC prospects that way.  Between the green to gold program and recruiting from soldiers using tuition assistance with G.I. Bill availability, we improved our recruiting goals significantly.  When the Colonel asked me for the secret to my success, I replied that it was just a matter of offering the children the right candy.  I know that he had to think about that for a few days.  But that was quite alright.  The puzzled look on his face told me that candy for the children was just an exercise in futility for him.

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