Free Republic

Three young warriors gave their all that many would live.

When an evil assailant opened fire on students attending Parkland High School last week in Florida, JROTC enlistees jumped into action to protect their peers. Grabbing Kevlar mats, they shielded students from a barrage of bullets and saved lives. JROTC Cadet Peter Wang made the ultimate sacrifice and gave his life while holding the door open for people to escape.Wang had dreams of attending West Point Academy after high school and planned to have a career serving his country in the United States Army. He was posthumously admitted to the institution this week. One of USMA's priorities is to develop leaders...

A petition on the White House website started on Friday to call on the President to give a JROTC Cadet who died in the Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School shooting a full honors military burial.Cadet Peter Wang, 15, did everything in his power to help other students make it out of the mass shooting alive. Now, people want to honor his memory by giving him the credit he deserves.Here's what the petition is asking for: Peter Wang, 15, was one of the students killed in Florida this past week. He was a Jrotc Cadet who was last seen, in uniform,...

ince the Florida school shooting happened in an election year, liberals have been working valiantly to somehow tie the National Rifle Association to the tragedy. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but some of them seemed to think they’d struck gold when they found out about a marksmanship program operated at the school which the shooter previously belonged to. It turns out that the program received a grant to partially fund it from the NRA, leading to some hot take headlines which are melting down laptop and phone screens today. These include, “Nikolas Cruz was reportedly on an NRA-funded rifle team...

Not surprisingly, liberal media quickly blamed the National Rifle Association for the deaths of 17 innocent people shot by Nikolas Cruz earlier this week in Parkland, Florida.  But today, the left-wing website Think Progress and the New York Daily News ramped up their misguided condemnation by blaming the NRA specifically for supposedly teaching Cruz how to shoot the weapon. Their reasoning was that since the NRA donated $10,000 to a club at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that instructed proper firearm use, the gun lobby earned the blame for the shooter's actions. The club in question was the high school’s...

You might remember the "Katrina girl" photo, of the little girl with a broad smile, who's hugging the Air Force pararescueman who plucked her family from a rooftop in Hurricane Katrina-flooded New Orleans.The pararescueman, Master Sgt. Mike Maroney, went on a search for the girl in the photo 10 years later. He ultimately found LeShay Brown, then 13 and living in Waveland, Miss., in Sept. 2015. The two have remained close, and as WLOX reported, LeShay took Maroney to her JROTC ball in Mississippi on Saturday.

TOMBSTONE – The Tombstone High School Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps Color Guard will be making a national television debut Sunday, Dec. 21, when they present the colors during the Arizona Cardinals football game against the Seattle Seahawks. Retired Chief Warrant Officer 4 Tom Gross, the school’s JROTC senior army instructor learned Monday the color guard had been asked to present the colors. “This is by far the biggest event we have done, as it will be on the national broadcast,” said Gross. The five cadets Gross plans to send are Cadet Sgt. 1st Class Sam Powers, Cadet Sgt. 1st...

A left-wing high school teacher is actually complaining about a text book’s treatment of the Vietnam War, because it is written for the JROTC. “The authors cite then-President Johnson’s 1964 statements that North Vietnam attacked a U. S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin as the impetus for the broader war, ignoring overwhelming evidence from declassified documents that there was no such attack,” Sylvia McGauley writes in the Fall 2014 issue of the Rethinking Schools periodical. McGauley teaches social studies at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon. As it happens, the official account of what happened at the Gulf in...

Cadets from across Arizona who are enrolled in Army JROTC, Air Force JROTC, and the Civil Air Patrol met on April 20, for the first annual Kentucky Camp Orienteering Meet. Kentucky Camp is located in Santa Cruz County, near Sonoita. Orienteering is a land navigation competition. Armed with maps and compasses, teams consisting of two cadets race across the desert searching for certain control points on the map. At each control point, cadets will find a hole punch of varying shapes that they use to stamp a score card. All teams have two hours to find as many control points...

Gannett - Link only: http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111222/NEWS01/312220066/Army-changes-JROTC-policy-Ravenwood-Muslim-case?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

SANTA TERESA, N.M. (AP) - A 15-year-old Deming girl will be honored as a hero Thursday for saving a 7-year-old boy from a potentially fatal dog mauling. The El Paso Sector Border Patrol will hold ceremonies at the Santa Teresa Border Patrol Station to formally recognize 15-year-old Gabriela Ramos, who is a young Border Patrol Explorer with the Deming Post 892.

DUNBAR WVa- Dunbar Police have arrested a man on charges of sexual abuse. Edwin Albert Smuda, 58, of Dunbar, is charged with sexual abuse by a parent, guardian, custodian or person of trust. He is a Junior ROTC instructor at South Charleston High School. According to release from Chief E. E. Whittington Smuda was arrested at him home Thursday afternoon. He was arraigned by a Kanawha County Magistrate. Bond is set at $25,000. Smuda will be back in court at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011.

You can wear a Muslim head scarf, and you can wear the uniform of the Junior ROTC. Just not at the same time. That’s the word from the U.S. Army, which is supporting an officer’s ruling last month that a 14-year-old Tennessee girl could not wear her traditional head covering while in uniform at a parade. The student, Demin Zawity, of Brentwood, Tenn., quit the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Ravenwood High School and returned to regular gym classes when commanding officers said she had to take off her hijab if she wanted to march in the homecoming...

Rebecca Godwin has never flown on an airplane. But she'll get her chance Feb. 17 when she travels to Albuquerque, N.M., to compete in the Marine Corps JROTC Service Championship. The sophomore was the lone member of the North Forsyth High rifle team to qualify for the national competition. Gunnery Sgt. Jack "Gunny" Snook leads the team, which is part of the county's only JROTC program. He said based on qualifying scores, Godwin is ranked third in the nation. Snook said she's reached scores as high as 292 during practice sessions. A perfect score is 300. She's also one of...

Buena High School JROTC cadets place wreaths at grave markers on Saturday. (Ty Holland • For the Herald/Review) SIERRA VISTA — A year ago, when just 242 holiday wreaths were laid on the graves of veterans in Sierra Vista, a group of local women thought those who served this country deserved better, and they decided to do something about it. On Saturday morning, each and every one of the nearly 1,400 graves at the Southern Arizona Veterans Memorial Cemetery was adorned with a touch of red and green as a result of their effort.

Funderburg credits training in JROTC A North Forsyth High graduate recently hit the spot, literally, during two national rifle shooting competitions. Chris Funderburg earned the distinction of being named the Navy’s top shooter during the 48th Annual Interservice Rifle Championships, in which teams from each military branch compete against one another. Shortly thereafter, he also placed 56th out of nearly 1,500 riflemen during the National Rifle Championship, open to both military and civilian shooters. The national championship is considered “the Super Bowl of shooters,” according to its Web site. Funderburg said between the two contests he spent an entire month...

School calls account untrue ROTC student feels wronged SPRING HILL - It's getting personal for Heather Lawrence and her father. "Now they're calling my daughter a liar," Mark Lawrence said today. Heather returns to Springstead High School on Wednesday after a three-day suspension for telling a Muslim classmate to "take that thing off your head and act like you're proud to be an American." She said the student, whom she previously had never met, remained seated during the Pledge of Allegiance last Tuesday morning during homeroom. A few days later, an assistant principal sent her home and issued a five-day...

SPRING HILL — The JROTC member at Springstead High School who said she confronted a Muslim student last week because the girl did not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance fabricated that part of the story, school officials said Monday. Heather Lawrence, a 16-year-old junior at the school, has said she was walking by another homeroom Wednesday morning when she saw a girl with the traditional Muslim head scarf sitting during the pledge. Later, Lawrence said she confronted the girl, told her she should stand during the pledge and, according to her own account and a school report, said, "Take...

SPRING HILL, FL -- While showing off her JROTC uniform, 16-year-old Heather Lawrence told us joining the Army is her next big goal, to follow in the footsteps of her father and grandfather. "Our flag represents everything that our country is," she said. The teen says an issue over the American flag is why she was written up and handed a five-day suspension from Springstead High School this week for criticizing a Muslim student. Heather says the other girl was sitting down during the Pledge of Allegiance. "You know, I made a not-so-kind remark, and I do sincerely apologize for...

SAN FRANCISCO -- After three years of emotional debate and back-and-forth votes, the San Francisco school board Tuesday night hit the reset button on the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, restoring the program to nearly its original condition before the 2006 effort to kill it. The board voted 4-3 to allow the JROTC program to satisfy physical education requirements - something needed to maintain enrollment numbers that financially justify the program at seven district high schools.The measure gives JROTC students the option to earn P.E. credit through independent study.The vote is the latest in a nearly three-year battle over the...