Back in the Spring of 2009, my ROTC detachment was completing preparatory training for a group of our sophomore cadets due to attend summer field training in Alabama. This pre-training experience itself wasn't exactly a walk in the park, bringing the same time management demands of being a cadet and a student, but adding in arriving earlier than the rest of the unit, being subject to have scrutiny in extra inspections and marching drills, and being given something of a simulated boot camp experience with much terser instruction techniques and greater expectations of independence.
I saw my peers just one year behind me going through this, and although I wasn't directly involved in their training other than being an assistant to the senior cadet that oversaw the training flight, I wanted to do something extra for them. Not that long ago I was in their position, and that experience plus the summer encampment was indeed difficult, but very empowering in 20/20 hindsight.
When it came time for the last session for last thoughts and questions, I asked my supervising cadet for a few minutes to tell my story. Looking back, I'm not too sure if it focused on any particular anomaly like Denning notes stories should do, but it did have something of a "things working out better than expected" tone that is a touch anomalous and mostly just a positive message.
Without immediately telling these sophomores who the protagonist my story was, I shared the fragment's of one cadets experience...forgetting their hat when they flew off, fumbling through parade steps, and their attempts at trying to play the leader on command. I shared an experience of what seemed like a rather bleak and less than ideal situation given how they'd been trained. The kicker though, was the fact that in the end all these less than ideal experiences turned into an opportunity to really learn what it meant to stop thinking so much and to have some basic confidence. On top of that, the protagonist in question not only found themselves to be relatively successful as a cadet, but they were from our detachment...and it was I, the one who was telling the story. One might say I stalked the potentially sensitive topic of "what if it's just not my month out there?" Rather than simply saying a platitude, I presented an account of this happening as well as what happened next.
That talk ended up being received with great ovation, and our Commandant said outright he was quite challenged to follow that up. It became something of a subtle legend within our class year. While I didn't necessarily impart any specific skill or technique, I did impart the knowledge of an experience to show that people with a very broad range of success at this one particular snapshot in their cadet career could still come out in very good shape over their junior and senior year of school. I shared the key value of confidence, and the good that can come of simply never quitting.
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