It seems they are bent on vandalism and thefts.” “I looked at it more as a formation of a gang than a club. “It is a group that bands together to do illegal activity,” Green said. Club members said most of their 15 or so members-including current and former students-carry firearms, sometimes on campus. Green characterized the renegade club as a lawless street gang and said it was best known around school for its reputed criminal doings, not its professed passion for the military. One rainy night in January, two members stripped 50 Toyotas of their radios, at one point breaking into a car in front of passing motorists on Long Beach Boulevard to “increase the risk factor,” members said. Several members said one highlight of the excursion was blowing up a car near Twentynine Palms. Last year, some members took a camping trip to the High Desert equipped with an assortment of semiautomatic weapons and explosives. “We would have done it in a regular bar but we couldn’t get in.” Not all activities are highly organized in some cases, only a handful of members participate. “It was not a hate crime,” a 17-year-old senior said. “No one’s actually said: ‘I don’t care if I die,’ but it shows in the things (we) do,” said the club member.Ĭlub activities range from the simple, such as breaking into school grounds at night and rappelling from the bleachers, to the destructive, including an attack with “paint grenades” on a Long Beach gay bar, members said. According to the club members, some GIs carried the playing card to symbolize a reckless disregard for life and death, often leaving an ace of spades on the corpse of an enemy soldier or carrying it boldly in their belt or helmet. Police and club members said the group’s name and insignia derive from an unverified tale about the Vietnam War. “They were not interested in doing it with me, because they wouldn’t get to do what they wanted to do.” Mike Carpenter, who heads the school’s 73-year-old Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps unit, the oldest west of the Rocky Mountains. “They wanted to learn the tricks of the trade and graduate as some kind of warrior,” said Maj.
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