Danielle Davis was embedded in First Platoon’s Third Squad for the majority of the Field Training Exercise weekend for Saturday and Sunday events.

The sun had yet to break Mount Pleasant’s wooded horizon. Seventy-two Army ROTC cadets stood at attention before their battalion leader, mock-rifles in hand and feet fixed in the cold mud. “Ten hours of STX ahead of you. Ya’ll ready?” A vigorous, in-unison, “whoop!” obscured any sense of fatigue.

But the cadets had more ahead of them than just another long day of training. Gathered from Cornell, SUNY Cortland and Binghamton, Ithaca and Elmira Colleges, their performance in the following three days of war environment tactical exercises played a role in determining the direction of their future military careers. And “STX,” or Squad Training Exercises, were at the heart of it all.

“Mission objective: eliminate two to three lightly armed men in order to prevent them from approaching a location that is pertinent to our team,” recited Cadet Francis Pedrezza ’11 to his seven squad members. Lieutenant Andrew Richley stood to the side, filling out a “Leadership Assessment Report.” While other enlisted men like Richley and Senior ROTC students are in charge of organization and evaluations, the real pressure is on the Juniors — also known as MSIIIs — like Pedrezza.

“They rotate positions as squad and platoon leaders,” Elite Won, public affairs officer, explained. “The exercises are meant to test their leadership abilities when under the pressure of real combat situations. They practice everything from ambushes to recons.”

These tests have consequences. The evaluations they receive influence their overall ROTC rank — a ranking which determines whether one receives his or her top choice in military branch placement.

Yet, when missions went unfulfilled or mistakes made, a surprising sense of calmness and quiet understanding proved prevalent.

“We don’t want to beat anybody into submission,” said Senior Cadet Dan Farey. “ROTC’s goal is to make them think on their own, to be an individual thinker.”

The culmination of all this training will come this coming summer, when MSIII’s participate in a month-long Leadership Development and Assessment Course.

“The extent of improvement between now and LDAC is pretty astounding,” Farey said. “It’s exciting to see the same transformation in them as I went through myself.”

The Seniors themselves look forward to a whole different breed of training culmination — enlistment itself.

“We’ve all accepted we were signing up for a war-time military when joining the ROTC,” Cadet Jeff Mullen ’10 said. Things have indeed changed since the early nineties, when the vague fear of Russian Communists posed only a distant threat of combat. “It’s only a matter of months between where we are now and being a lieutenant, leading a real platoon.”

While collegiate institutions have a long history in military training and involvement, some ROTC cadets feel a civil-military gap.

“I’m not sure if many people understand fully what we do here. We’re not just military machines, which I think is the conception sometimes,” Mullen said. “We go in and out of the ethics of every situation. We have respect for the region we occupy. We look for people with character who think critically about these difficult issues.”

Major Rich Brown revealed that while Cornell has two medal of honor winners in its alumni, one of whom, Matt Urban, “is one of the most decorated military men in history,” neither are on the University’s list of 100 Notable Cornelians.

“There’s a lot of different leadership courses that go on throughout Cornell — it’d be nice if there were a leadership minor that incorporated programs like the ROTC and outdoor education,” Brown said, as a suggestion to help close the civil-military gap.

“We have to remember, 90-percent of these kids — your peers — will be in Iraq, Afghanistan or Africa within 12 months after graduating college.”