War of the Cords is a drill competition that occurs within Patchogue Medford High School’s AFJROTC program annually, except for last year, when it was cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions.

But this year – we got to put the show back on!

I was on an armed team, which are the teams that spin wooden rifles. My team used ones that were only two pounds, but there are rifles that can go up to six. There were four people on our team. We had Logan Dochtermann, Sean Nash, Tyler Faust, and myself. I was the only one on the team who had never previously touched a rifle, so when I was after school learning how to spin them, I found out the moves have great names, such as “Meat-grinder.”

At home, I had to spin a walking stick in the backyard in order to practice. Since War of the Cords is in the winter, it was always very cold when I practiced, and I did not like that because it made it hard to spend the amount of time that I wanted to on it.

A funny error that I made on stage was after I caught a rifle being tossed to me, I held it upside down. I didn’t notice until I felt the tip of it hit the ground, and I realized that it felt too small to be the bottom. I hoped that no one noticed since I was in the back, but, when I told my friend that I did that, he said, “Oh yeah, I saw that, that was really funny.”

And with that, any hope of that going unnoticed by the crowd tragically died.

The leader of our team, Tyler Faust told me what he thinks of how our team did: “All of our practices resulted in a good performance.”

Although our team didn’t win, I still think so too. Overall, I had a good experience.