Ole Miss Army ROTC program participated in field training exercises at Fort McCain in Grenada over the weekend.
Ole Miss ROTC took 120 cadets to Fort McCain, where they participated in exercises related to navigation, tactics training, rifle marksmanship, hand grenades, medical treatment and an obstacle course.
According to Lt. Col. Nathan Minami, the field training exercises take place in order to develop skills that will later help them as army officers.
“These exercises are to provide cadets with a challenging training experience in a field environment that will help them develop their individual technical, tactical and leadership skills in preparation to become an army officer,” Minami said.
The training is also used to help cadets prepare for the leader development and assessment course.
The course lasts 29 days and is taken by all third-year ROTC students from all 274 ROTC programs in the country. During the course, cadets are not only tested on things they are taught in ROTC, but are also put in tough leadership positions while in charge of anywhere from 14 to 200 cadets from different schools at any point in time.
The course is generally taken by juniors, while seniors take charge of planning the field training exercises and serve as trainers for every event during the weekend training.
“This provides them a chance to teach the skills that they have learned over the past three years to more junior cadets and to learn how to serve as “trainers,” an important role they will fill as army officers,” Minami said.
The ROTC cadets returned to Oxford Sunday morning. The cadets received positive feedback despite the unexpected weather.
“We can’t really plan for rain,” said John Bolding, senior ROTC cadet. “It rained until noon on Saturday, so we spent the night in the barracks on Friday night. Other than that, the third-year cadets spent the rest of the time in the field doing land navigation in the rain and did quite well.”
