Local Town Welcomes Returning Cadet
by ANN Staff
At a recent ceremony, a local Cadet was honored as a returning hero after completing Ranger School. The small town sponsored a parade, a band, and speeches by local dignitaries.
But the celebration was cut short when those attending realized that the young man standing proudly in their midst wearing a camoflage uniform wasn’t a young Soldier returning from Columbus, Georgia. He was a 15 year-old CAP Cadet returning from Kemptom, Pennsylvania. And it wasn’t from the Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, but the Patrol’s Hawk Mountain Ranger School at the Neuweiler Ranger Training Facility.
Even as the celebration broke up and the town’s citizens returned to their normal activities, people began to wonder what had happened. How had the return of the this local cadet from a summer camp gotten out of hand?
Soon, the accusations and recriminations began.
Mayor Hal Turner, who is also the commander of the local VFW post, explains that it was the enormous yard sign that appeared on a local lawn that initially attracted the attention of a member of his post.
“It was huge. Almost a billboard,” he recalls. “It had a picture of this young fellow wearing camoflage and a thousand-yard stare, and it said, ‘WELCOME HOME CODY. OUR RANGER, OUR HERO!'”
The sign was for local CAP Cadet Cody Emory, and had been commissioned and erected by his mother, Justine. “One of our older members, who doesn’t see very well, spotted the sign and said we should do something to welcome this hero home. We didn’t ask for as much detail as we should have, I guess,” said Turner.
Turner says that though the sign was the catalyst, ultimately it was Mrs. Emory’s enthusiasm, her unwavering support for her only child, and her loose grasp of concepts like ‘ranger’ and ‘difficult’ that carried the project forward.
“Mrs. Emory kept at us, going on about ‘ranger school’ and she said words like ‘extreme’ and ‘austere’ a bunch. By the time we talked to the squadron commander and figured out that it was just a summer camp with delusions of grandeur, and not the Q Course or some shit, well, it was too late. So, we just ran with it.”
Derrick Niven, commander of the local squadron, states that he was against the ceremony from the start.
“Oh, yeah, sure, Cadet Emory, sure. He went off to Hawk, but it isn’t like he was in the pipeline to become a PJ!”, Niven says. Pararescuemen, or PJs, are Air Force Special Operations troops who are charged with recovering downed pilots from behind enemy lines. Their training school, called the Pipeline, is considered one of the toughest in the Armed Forces.
“This was just Hawk Mountain. It’s like a summer camp on steroids. Very light steroids. Really, pretty much just extreme protein powder. Maybe mixed with Rip-Its” Niven says. “I’ve had tougher visits to my proctologist”.
Niven also blames the yard sign.
“It’s his damn Mom who put up the damn welcome home sign, the crazy broad,” Niven shakes his head in frustration. “I told her, fifty damn times I told her, ‘Take down the damn welcome home sign, you crazy broad!'”
Mayor Turner and Niven have apologized to the town for the misunderstanding, but that hasn’t appeased everyone.
“Basically, we honored the ‘service’ of some dorky kid with a helicopter mom,” said a disillusioned attendee.
