• Sapper Leader Course as a Cadet

  October 2, 2010

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  As an ROTC cadet, you are given many opportunities to further your professional development through schools like airborne and air assault, study abroad programs, and through the normal ROTC curriculum. There is also an opportunity to go to the Sapper Leader Course, a 28 day course that trains soldiers in planning and executing combat engineering missions (mine detection/clearing, demolitions, etc.). In the regular Army (i.e. not ROTC) units are allocated a certain number of slots to send their personnel through the course. Soldiers apply and the commanders of the unit decide who will be sent. It is similar for ROTC, except that there is only one slot per brigade each year. That means only 9 cadets were sent to Sapper School this summer across the nation (I believe another 13 were sent from West Point).
  The course is located at Fort Leonard Wood Missouri, and is a two phase course. The first two week phase is the general studies phase in which students learn and are tested on a wide variety of skills and gain knowledge in demolitions, mountaineering, land navigation, medical aid, water operations, air operations, and several other topics. In this phase, a typical day would be physical training first thing in the morning (approximately 5:00-7:30am) followed by various blocks of instruction in a classroom environment. There are also several physical activities and practical exercises throughout the day to apply the knowledge. The second two week phase is the patrolling phase in which the students operate as a platoon in a simulated combat environment. A typical day in this phase would begin with a mission briefing to the student leadership at 7:00am. After that, several missions are conducted throughout the day as well as through the night. We typically got to sleep about an hour and a half each night on average.
  It is rare to get into Sapper School because there just aren't that many available openings per year. There are only 10 classes each year, each consisting of about 40 students initially. Approximately 400 soldiers go through each year and on average only half will graduate with a Sapper Tab. The major reason for people not passing is the patrolling phase. You are graded on your leadership while conducting missions and the stress of having very little sleep and very little food begins to wear on everyone. That makes it especially difficult to lead soldiers because many of them are on edge or just plain cannot stay awake. I remember when I was squad leader, I was giving some instructions to one of my team leaders and he responded to me in complete gibberish. He was awake but incoherent so I had him stand up and walk around a bit to wake him up before I could talk to him. Challenges like that cause many students to get frustrated and angry at their subordinates, which don't get me wrong is completely necessary sometimes, but that frustration leads some students to make poor decisions or no decision at all because of the amount of mental and physical strain that they are under. Another reason that many students do not graduate is that everything you do or are tested on is worth a certain amount of points. Throughout the course, there are 1000 available points and you must get 700 to graduate. This gets a lot of students because they never tell you how many points anything is worth (or how much you have earned so far), or whether or not you passed tests. The idea there is that the instructors do not want students to quit on themselves or their fellow students, which they might do if they knew they were not going to graduate due to points.
  For me, food deprivation was the biggest challenge. For the patrolling phase, we were given one MRE each day. We were given time each morning to eat it and I did just that, ate absolutely everything from it, including the salt packet and the non dairy creamer. Most students would save some snacks to eat throughout the day, but I ate it all in one sitting which caused a lot of hunger and increased my stress level throughout the day.
  This was a phenomenal experience and the fact that I was able to go as a cadet and get a lot of experience early in my career makes it even better. There are definitely challenges due to the fact that most of the soldiers there have much more experience than I did, but I'd like to believe that I pulled my weight and earned some respect. Bottom line, I was given a rare chance to go through the course and I would recommend that everyone in the Army, including cadets, strive towards going to as many schools as possible to develop as leaders in order to make the Army even stronger.
   

  submitted by Cadet Aaron Weatherly on Oct 2 2010

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