Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 24, 1993 TAG: 9305220203
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JUNE ARNEY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
As the new state trooper watches, a jailer escorts a male prisoner down a hallway. Suddenly, the prisoner calls out, "Shoot him!"
Before the officer can get a shot off, a woman waiting in the hallway raises a gun and fires.
"You're dead," Terry Luce, a firearms instructor, informs the bewildered trainee at the State Police Academy. "Hesitation kills."
The trainee had just gone through a computer-simulated shoot/don't shoot exercise. His weapon: a handgun filled with blanks. The prisoner and the attacker were images on a screen.
The exercise is an important part of survival training for troopers who, after graduation May 21, will be working in a world with plenty of bad guys and plenty of guns.
Another one of Luce's students forgets to release the safety on his gun. He is powerless to protect himself.
The instructor explains cause and effect in pointedly basic terms: "Take it off safety? You're dead, dude."
In another survival exercise, trainees are taken outside to practice shooting from behind a wooden barricade. While one instructor tells students where to shoot, others try to rattle them by yelling, "Get it, get it. He's going to hurt you."
One trainee walks back to his group and says: "It took about six years off my life up there."
Friends reach for the chest of the trooper just done with combat shooting to feel what stress and excitement do to a heartbeat.
To stay alive, troopers also must learn how to keep their cruisers under control.
Ed Rivera, 32, of Norfolk, who spent 12 years in the Marines before coming to the academy, is off to the precision driving course, where he will negotiate his police car through lines of orange cones backward, forward and around curves.
"Of course I knocked most of the pins down the first time," he said. "Hopefully I'll do better this time."
Nearby, two police cars with bald tires slip and slide on the "skid pan," an oil-based surface kept wet by water sprays.
William Towles, 27, of Virginia Beach, has just come out of the skid pan and earned a score of 95 -- 15 points higher than he did in December.
"The hardest part on a skid pan is putting everything together that they teach you," he said. "It's making split-second decisions. To get a perfect score, you've got to make yourself part of the car. That's how the instructors do it. They make it look so easy, and it's not. . . . You're not going to leave here until you get it right."
High-speed driving is practiced at an airstrip. Sirens wail and the night is black except for the flashing blue lights. An experienced trooper acts as dispatcher. The voices he hears during night practice tend to be shaky.
Anthony Roberts, 23, of Henry County, gets up to about 80 mph on part of a 1.9-mile course chasing an instructor's car.
"I did a 360 and slid into a hay bale," he said. "Your adrenalin starts rushing, your heart starts beating. . . . I don't think I've felt anything like that. You feel like you're on the edge."
Days start early at the academy in Chesterfield County near Richmond, and the weeks are long. By about 6:50 a.m. the troopers walk purposefully in their dress uniforms. They turn crisp corners and line up to eat. They look straight ahead, fold their arms behind their waist at attention and wait.
Once they're in the door, they choose food, go to assigned tables and wait for their tablemates to arrive before they sit down.
They eat quickly. Chairs start scraping the floor within seven minutes. They scurry off to dust, vacuum, clean toilets and perform other chores before inspection.
By 7:20 a.m., a trooper polishes brass on the cafeteria door to work off the demerit he received for snaps undone on a shirt in his closet.
It didn't take the new troopers long at the academy to learn that sergeants don't like wrinkles.
"If you would come in here the first week, it takes some of these guys an hour to make their bed," said Sgt. David Shaver. "The biggest reason we call for this attention to detail is because when they leave here they're going to be responsible for their own car and themselves. If we can get them trained here, they'll take that attention to detail with them."
They started as a class of 82 -- now down to 73 and the largest class ever. Their average age is 26. Three-fourths of their 1,200 hours of training is academic. After graduation, they will ride with an experienced trooper for six weeks as they join the 1,685-member force.
Shaver swoops down on the next room, his hands quickly moving a ruler over various critical measurements on the bed. He swings underneath looking for dog-ears hanging down, makes sure coat hangers in the open closets are 2 inches apart, and checks to see that all the clothes and seams on the towels and blankets face the window.
John Rehme, a trainee from Potomac, Md., sighs as the sergeant moves on. "That's the toughest part of the day," he said.
A few minutes later, the troopers spread across the gym floor doing a battery of jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups and leg lifts before they head for the 30-foot climb up the rope. They touch the rafters, shout "89" for the academy's 89th class, then slide down.
Then it's off for a 3-mile run. They shout in cadence as they go up and down hills, wind around curves and wrap around lines of parked cars.
"We are . . . troopers . . . We are . . . troopers . . . We like it here. We love it here. We finally found our home."
When it is time to feel the pain of tear gas -- to experience what an unruly mob might feel -- the trainees are ordered to take off all their leather, to button up their shirts, and to take out contact lenses.
They know what this means. It's a rite of passage.
Trooper Gilbert Shomette, a firearms instructor, offers some final advice: "Take a breath before you go in. Walk on through. The more you rub your eyes, the worse it's going to be."
A cloud of gas is laid down on the firing range, and the trainees go in holding onto one another's belt loops. This day the wind dies, and the cloud of gas settles in.
The first troopers smack into a wall, and those following slam into them. Those behind realize the problem and start trying to find their own way out of the stinging cloud.
Two instructors with gas masks began pulling out the troopers.
The trooper class emerges from the cloud spitting, crying, coughing and throwing up. They were in the gas for less than a minute. They stumble, some fall.
"Don't rub your face!" The instructors speak urgently now. The troopers spread across a nearby field, letting the breeze take away some of the pain.
One says: "Oh, God, I did this voluntarily." Another shouts: "I wish we could do this every day."
"There's just no way you can explain it," said Sgt. Dane Wyatt of Waverly. "You have to experience it to really know. It's not pleasant. It's pretty ugly. If you know how you're affecting someone, you might use more restraint. We want them to have an appreciation of being on both sides."
by CNB