‘Unprecedented’ number of Bethel grads become military officers
BETHEL — Savanah Pipkin joined the Navy Junior ROTC last minute as a high school freshman to be in the same class as her best friend.
By her senior year, she turned down athletic scholarships in the hopes of receiving a college ROTC scholarship. And she did.
“I wanted to be a part of something that not everyone going through college is going to be a part of once they graduate,” said
Pipkin, who recently earned a biomedical engineer degree from the University of Oklahoma.
Now, Pipkin is one of nine former members of Bethel High School’s NJROTC being commissioned as an officer in the military this year. She is in the Navy and will go to flight school in October.
To have that many alumni become officers in one year is “unprecedented” for a small town like Bethel, said Lt. Commander Mark Dwinells, who has been the instructor for the NJROTC since the program started in 2002. The school is “fortunate” to have one each year, he said.
Many of these students graduated high school in 2016, but at least two, including Pipkin, finished high school in 2015.
Dwinells said the students were leaders in sports and other programs, and that ROTC enhanced their various strengths and skills.
“High school ROTC was their place to really come together, to
bond and challenge each other as leaders,” he said.
Bethel has the largest NJROTC unit in New England, he said. There are 187 cadets this year, which is the lowest number in 10 years. But next academic year, the elective class expects more than 200 cadets, which is more than 20 percent of the school, he said.
The school has not seen an increase in students joining the military since the program began, but more students have participated in service academy or college ROTC, often at prestigious universities, Dwinells said.
“We don’t recruit,” he said. “We’re not here to push students into the military. The NJROTC is a leadership and citizenship development program.”
The focus on leadership was one of the things students said they appreciated
the most about the program.
“It was leadership in a very influential time in my life,” said Marko Pilepich, who graduated from Boston University and will serve as a naval reactors engineer. “It was teaching me good values, how to lead, how to interact with people, the basics of drill and military bearing, all of the things that definitely drew me into the Navy atmosphere and kept me interested.”
Anthony Rodriguez said he became interested in enlisting at a young age by watching military shows on the History Channel.
But NJROTC was his “springboard” into the military, helping him earn an ROTC scholarship to attend University of Connecticut.
“It definitely helped push me out of my comfort zone and definitely helped me experience more leadership opportunities,” said Rodriguez, who will serve as an infantry officer in the Army.
He is waiting to go to his basic officers leadership course before being deployed in early 2021 somewhere in Africa.
Andersen DeRosier said the NJROTC program helped him build confidence and make lifelong friends.
“Along with that, being in leadership roles allowed me to develop my own leadership style by trying different things and seeing what worked for me,” said DeRosier, who recently moved to Guam where he will be stationed as a Navy submarine officer on the USS Topeka. “I was able to be a mentor to underclassmen in my later years, and hearing some of them say how I helped them out in some way definitely was impactful to me.”
Peer mentoring is prominent at the Bethel ROTC, with older students leading the younger ones. The upperclassmen who mentored the students becoming officers this year helped
“set this class up for success,” Dwinells said.
The program focuses on project-based learning, with students practicing various skills, including marching, marksmanship, dressing professionally and flying through a simulator in the classroom and a trip to the Danbury Airport, he said.
These opportunities — and the actual understanding of Navy structure — gave Bryan Bornn a “head start” in his ROTC program at the University of Maryland.
“You’ve already been in a lot of those scenarios,” said Bornn, who was commissioned Friday as an ensign in the Navy. “It’s nice because you can help out with a lot of your friends in the unit, get them up to par. You have that leadership role in teaching others, as well.”
Bornn will go to Navy nuclear power school in Charleston, S.C. in August and eventually work with
nuclear reactors on submarines. He said he never wanted a desk job.
“It’s the unpredictability of what your job is every day and really getting to do really cool things around the world,” he said.
Some of the students, including Ryan Morton and David Hayes, said they were attracted to NJROTC because their relatives served in the military. Morton’s father is a Navy veteran, while Hayes’ grandfather was in the Army from 1962 to 1964.
“Military provides so many opportunities, one to travel, income, great experiences,” Hayes said. “But above all, it allows me to really give back to my community and try to help as many people as possible.”
Hayes’ grandfather, who helped raise him, died earlier this month and was supposed to be the one to pin on his grandson’s new Army rank.
“I always wanted to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps,” Hayes said. “He was my hero growing up. He was my role model. I never had a father, so he stepped up and fulfilled the role of one.”
While some students join NJROTC to honor relatives who have served, most do not, Dwinells said.
“Most of them are doing it because they really feel it’s a good fit for them,” he said. “They want to be leaders. I always teach all the cadets, the military doesn’t have a monopoly on serving your country.”
These lessons and others have stuck with the students.
“Commander Dwinells did a really good job of making NJROTC applicable to life and not military,” Pipkin said. “A lot of the things he taught us just came down to how to be a good person and how to be able to look yourself in the mirror ... and decide what your morals are going to be.”