Serious War Games : ROTC Cadets Fight Mock Battles, Mindful That Others Are Dying in Real-Life Drama Overseas

SAN BERNARDINO —  The squad leader knelt in the bone-dry earth, his gaze roving slowly over the green-and-yellow painted faces before him.

“Our mission,” he said gravely as he jabbed a stick at a tiny toy truck in the sand, “is to destroy, and to get whatever information we can from this ambush.”

As he issued orders to his soldiers, a second squad was already elbowing its way through the crackling brush, preparing to respond to a deadly sniper attack. Another squad was combing a nearby hill on reconnaissance.

They knew they were thousands of miles from the border of occupied Kuwait. They knew that the enemy soldiers were really friends and that the M-16s all of them carried were made of rubber. But the 100 Army ROTC cadets--including 24 from Cal State Fullerton--who gathered in the San Bernardino Mountains for war games Saturday were deadly serious about their daylong field-training exercises.

“There’s a saying in the military: ‘The way you train is the way you fight,’ ” said Army Capt. Mark Godina, an adviser based at the Fullerton campus who helped supervise Saturday’s mock maneuvers. “They realize what we’re teaching them is serious.”

Added Lt. Col. James D’Ambrosia: “Everything they’re doing here is applicable anywhere else. Making decisions here is the same as making decisions in Operation Desert Storm. Giving orders here is the same as giving orders in Desert Storm.”

It was inevitable that the Persian Gulf War supplied the subtext for the exercises. As the eight squads practiced blowing up bunkers, reacted to ambushes and scouted hostile terrain under sunny Southern California skies, the fact that fellow soldiers were gearing up for a real land war in the Middle East was not far from their minds.

“It’s something that everyone here is painfully aware of,” said Cadet Ekkehard Grimm, a 24-year-old Cal State Fullerton senior. “A lot of people in Desert Storm probably didn’t think they’d ever see combat. So we’ve got to make this as realistic as possible.”

The cadets hailed from four Southland colleges: Cal State Fullerton, Cal State San Bernardino, Cal Poly Pomona and Claremont McKenna College. None of the cadets are in imminent danger of being called up to the Persian Gulf, but many said that the threat of combat, coupled with disturbing images from the war, did not discourage them from military careers.

“War is a terrible thing,” Grimm said. “But when I signed on the dotted line, I knew that I might be called up someday.”

Victoria Gibb, one of 11 female cadets who participated in the exercises, said, “I didn’t expect (a war), but I knew there was the possibility.

“It doesn’t discourage me,” said the 25-year-old geography graduate student from Fullerton. “It makes me take the training more seriously.”

Since the invasion of Kuwait in August of last year, enrollment in the Army ROTC program at Cal State Fullerton has increased slightly, according to Capt. John Sarneckey, who is based at the campus. Cal State Fullerton has added 10 new cadets since school began in September, slightly more than the number added over the same period the year before.

Several cadets who took part in Saturday’s war games said they had friends serving in the Gulf and had heard firsthand of their experiences.

Randy Dick, a 23-year-old aerospace engineering and technology student at Cal Poly Pomona, said several of his friends were stationed on the front lines in the Saudi Arabian desert.

“They write letters back that say they can actually see Iraqis over the border,” he said. “You feel for them--it’s got to be a tough situation.”

He paused to watch as a squad of cadets swarmed toward an enemy vehicle, yelling “Bam bam bam!” to simulate gunfire.