Former Army Ranger Comes Full Circle in CAP
By Markeshia Ricks
Civil Air Patrol was a way out of small-town Pennsylvania for a young Jeff Ritsick.
It was 1981, and members of CAP had come to his junior high school to give a talk. By the end of their presentation, Ritsick was interested.
“I wanted to have some type of structure — something to do that was kind of military-related,” recalled Ritsick, who now serves as Group 2 commander for the Pennsylvania Wing and holds the CAP rank of lieutenant colonel.
He went to his first meeting and was hooked. That year he joined the Hazelton Composite Squadron and got to go to Hawk Mountain Ranger School. He attended the search and rescue training activity four years in a row, doing so well that he went on to teach fellow cadets in the program.
“My cadet time was really interesting,” Ritsick said. “I met a lot of great folks that really demonstrated to me the one thing I took out of the Civil Air Patrol: If you don’t apply for something, you definitely know what your answer is going to be.”
That lesson led him to apply and be accepted to Civil Air Patrol Cadet Officer School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and it would stick with him through a career that took him to one of the U.S. Army’s most elite units, to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, back to the Army and ultimately back to Civil Air Patrol.
An Army Life
Ritsick joined the Army right out of high school in 1986. He wanted to be an Army Ranger, and after what he described “as the hardest weeks of my life” he was assigned to the 1st Ranger Battalion in Savannah, Georgia. He’d been there just under a year when his battalion command sergeant major called him and two other soldiers into a briefing.
It turned out they met the initial entry qualifications for the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School, also known as West Point Prep, and would have a shot at attending the prestigious four-year institution after a year of intensive academic study, sports and acceptance. The lesson he had learned as a cadet in CAP about making sure to pursue every opportunity prompted him to apply to West Point.
“I did my four years there, which was fun — honestly,” Ritsick joked. “It was one of the experiences that informed me a lot more about who I am.”
After West Point, Ritsick went back into the infantry, itching to deploy to Korea and finally be a soldier, out in the field, doing what he’d been trained to do. He was assigned to a mechanized infantry platoon just south of the Korean Demilitarized Zone in Camp Hovey, which he said he enjoyed immensely.
Another job that stands out in his memory is an assignment from later in his career. This job landed him in the Pentagon.
He said he took a job in the basement of the Pentagon that “nobody wanted” — facilitating counterdrug operations missions — and decided to do it very well. And it got people’s attention. After a year on the Army staff he was selected to serve in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security.
“This was not that common for a junior major,” he said. The assignment eventually provided him an opportunity to volunteer for a one-year tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2005.
Unlikely Allies
Most people don’t have Afghanistan at the top of their deployment list, but Ritsick wanted to go. As a team chief for an embedded advisory team to an Afghan Army battalion commander, he spent the first half of his first tour in Gardez and the other half in Ghazni.
It was during this tour that he would meet some friends who would stay with him long after he left Afghanistan and eventually the military for good.
Based at an old Soviet airfield-turned-Army-camp in Ghazni, Ritsick said it wasn’t uncommon for soldiers to encounter packs of wild dogs. The smell of food and cooking often drew them into the camp. To keep them out, the camp was eventually enclosed.
But a few of the dogs — an alpha male the soldiers called One-Eared Bob, along with Mama, Bear, Shep, Red and Spanky — got to stay and help protect the camp.
A standing order prevented the soldiers from making pets of the dogs, but their presence provided practical protection for the small group of soldiers.
“We didn’t have enough people to provide security or any pest control out there,” Ritsick said. “We were on our own.”
The dogs not only kept out rodents and other packs of dogs, they also often acted as an early warning security system in the camp.
Ritsick said they also offered the soldiers a bit of mental respite after a mission. “It’s funny, my interpreters wanted to have a volleyball court,” Ritsick recalled. “In Afghanistan there are rocks and sand. The dogs turned [the court] into their playground.
“When we would come back from a mission we’d sit back and watch the dogs in this sandpit. You’d be surprised how decompressing that could be and how it created a sense of normalcy to sit down and watch these dogs play. It made a difference to us, and we knew we couldn’t let the fate of these dogs be in the next guy’s hands.”
Ritsick said in another camp, the dogs that lived there were killed after the soldiers they had primarily worked with left. He and his colleagues didn’t want that to happen to their dogs.
Ritsick and his fellow soldiers pooled their money to get Bear shipped out first, followed by Red and Shep. Red went to a fellow officer, and Bear and Shep would end up with Ritsick.
They were able to get the dogs out with the help of an organization called Afghan Stray Animal League and its founder, Pam Constable.
The league provides access to shelter and care for stray animals in Afghanistan, where culturally, people are not friendly toward stray animals; dogs are particularly frowned upon.
Constable said an outgrowth of the league’s work has been providing an avenue for adoption by not only civilians but also service members.
“These service members would not want to break the rules and get into trouble for keeping an animal as a pet,” she said. “But they feel companionship for these animals, and that is a positive thing for morale.”
They didn’t know it at the time, but Ritsick and Constable were practically neighbors in Arlington, Virginia. It was their shared love of animals and the need to get Bear and Shep back to the U.S. that helped them become friends.
Constable described Ritsick, who stands 6-foot-4, as “a big guy who is sort of intimidating” but at heart is “a very likable person.”
“He’s an example of the kind of officer who was in a leadership position and wanted to follow the rules and represent his country well in a war zone,” she said. “But he still has a soft spot for animals, and that is a positive quality.”
Full Circle
Today, Shep and Bear make their home with Ritsick and his wife Corinne in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Ritsick, who retired from military life in 2013 after more time at the Pentagon and another tour in Afghanistan, has rejoined Civil Air Patrol, bringing him back to where things all began.
He said he’s looking forward to doing some things that he didn’t get to do when he was a young cadet, such as participate in the International Air Cadet Exchange. But mostly he wants to do things for others.
“I joined Civil Air Patrol to give back a little of what I received,” he said.
Originally published in April-June 2016 Civil Air Patrol Volunteer magazine.
