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The sun is still an hour and a half from warming the campus grounds when cadet Nic Pilley is grabbed by his shirt and shoved into a pool.
Pilley surfaces and spits out a little water, swims to the edge and pulls himself and his water-logged fatigues out of the pool.
“Do it again,” a senior cadet says.
Without a sound, Pilley straps on his equipment belt and harness, grabs his mock rifle and prepares for another shove.
Before the rest of campus wakes on Friday, the Army ROTC’s Alpha Company runs through its water drills in preparation for the Leadership Development and Assessment Course.
“Alpha Company is made up entirely of juniors heading to LDAC,” Michael Habash, a senior cadet in Alpha Company said.
All juniors in Army ROTC are required to go through the LDAC before their senior year as part of their progress towards commissioning.
“[The juniors] are pulled out to train just for summer training,” Habash said.
Friday’s morning drills are set up to prepare the cadets for the swimming requirements of LDAC.
A rigorous rotation of four drills, Alpha Company soldiered through a high dive, a 25-meter swim, a gear ditch and a 10-minute swim in their physical training uniforms.
But the drills weren’t all drudgery.
For Diab Rasheed, a senior in criminology, there was something thrilling about marching to the end of the pool’s diving platform with a blindfold and a mock rifle, where nine meters of empty air separated the position from the clear blue water.
This was the high dive, where cadets where pushed from the board and required to hold onto the rifle during the fall and entry, then swim to the side.
“It’s like a roller coaster ride,” Rasheed said.
The hardest drill for Rasheed however was the 25-meter swim, conducted in full fatigues with a mock rifle.
“I ran out of juice,” Rasheed said.
But failure is not an option for these cadets, who will continue to retake the drills until completion.
For Alpha Company, perfection is not an ideal — just an early-morning routine.