For the past year now, Zeta Johnson (11) has already started preparing for her future after she graduates from high school in 2020. She has been training to be enlisted in the Marines at the Crown Point Square in the Marines Office.

“There’s a really good sense of brotherhood and family in the marines, and there are a lot of opportunities that you can get out of it such as financial aid for schooling and financial aid just over in life. It’s really inspiring to help the country out and it’s more than helping just our country.  The Marines go to other countries and give aid to people in need and it’s just a lot of good things that I want to be apart of,” Johnson said.

In the back of her mind, Johnson had always thought about joining the Marines, but never had any connections to it. During her sophomore year, Sergeant Alan Craft, was recruiting students during lunch to join the Marines and invited her to go to physical training.

“They had workouts and I decided that would [it] be fun to do, so I got my friend Lindsay McCarroll (11) to go to it [with me] and after that I just kept going. I realized that it was something that I really wanted to do in life,” Johnson said.

Training for any branch of the military is tough, but the training for the Marines is one of the hardest and most time consuming consisting of runs, push ups, crunches, pull ups and different exercises that are done in groups.

“Sometimes we’ll run tests, like an IST which stands for Initial Strength Test. That’s max set of pullups, max set of pushups and like a mile and a half run. We also go on bike trails to do long runs or we’ll go to the football fields and train on there,” Johnson said.