OXNARD : Spit-and-Polish Regimen for Student Cadets

Wearing newly shined shoes and crisply pressed uniforms, more than 100 Naval Junior Reserve cadets who underwent a military inspection at Hueneme High School on Tuesday appeared much better groomed than typical high school students.

But some weren’t quite tidy enough for Naval Junior Reserve Cmdr. Daniel Jorvig.

Jorvig walked slowly up and down the rows of the student cadets, stopping to inspect each person from head to toe.

And he seemed to notice everything.

“Your hat is off to the left,” Jorvig said to freshman Harold Hill. “You want to have the middle of the brim right over the bridge of your nose.”

Such minutiae may seem irrelevant to the many students in the Naval Junior Reserve who said they have no intention of joining the military as adults.

But Jorvig, who is based at the Naval Training Center in San Diego, said a major goal of the Reserve Officer Training Corps is to instill discipline and teach students to pay attention to detail.

“It teaches them that small things are as important as the large things,” Jorvig said. “You find out in life that the small things will get you in trouble. The large things take care of themselves.”

In addition to learning the proper way to wear their uniforms, students in the Naval Junior Reserve program practice military drills with dummy rifles and do course work on subjects ranging from naval history to developing better study skills.

They also have to adhere to strict classroom rules. And students who break the rules during ROTC class undergo a common form of military punishment: pushups.

“If you chew gum in our class, you do pushups,” said ROTC class instructor George Thompson, a retired Navy captain.

The strict regimen has won respect from other Hueneme High students who initially poked fun at their uniformed classmates, said junior Chris Lynch, one of a handful of students who watched the military inspection Tuesday.

“At the beginning of it everybody was making fun of them, but not anymore,” Chris said. “Everybody knows how much they have to do: a lot of work, a lot of pushups.”

For their part, some students in the ROTC class said they signed up for the course mainly to learn self-discipline. But many others said they had a less lofty motive for taking the course: ROTC satisfies Hueneme High’s physical education requirement.

As 15-year-old Angie Robles said: “It gets you out of P.E.”