Officer Candidate Ike Candelaria does pushups as Marine Staff Sgt. Steven M. Salazar points to flaws on his clothing.

Like storm clouds gathering on the horizon, the RLP looms for the new students at Officer Candidate School.

In two weeks, Marine drill instructors will march into their rooms and inspect everything from their beds to their toiletry bags to what they are wearing, all while making them shout and do grueling exercises. Navy officers will grill them on their knowledge.

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Officer Candidate School recently returned to Naval Station Newport. Those who complete the rigorous 12-week program become commissioned officers in the U.S. Navy. But not all are successful. Reporter Richard Salit and photographer Frieda Squires followed five candidates—Adam Cole, Sarah Engemann, Matthew Gottschalk, Nicole Lobecker and Jason Moehlmann— who joined Class 05-08 last fall.

Your turn: How has your military experience contributed to where you are today?

The RLP — Room, Locker, Personnel — inspection won’t be anything like when their parents used to pester them to tidy their rooms and comb their hair. And failing will derail their dreams of becoming naval officers.

It’s early evening on his 12th day at OCS and Adam Cole is in his room getting ready. He’s studying Navy doctrine and stamping his clothes with his name.

“We have to be really focused and not buckle under the pressure,” he says. When Navy officers conducted a mock inspection a week ago, “A lot of us struggled.”

Adjusting to life at OCS has been tough.

“I knew right from the get-go my life was going to change because it wasn’t going to be hunky-dory easy anymore,” says Cole, a second-class petty officer who has been in the Navy since 2004. “It wasn’t going to be the freedoms I enjoyed anymore and it was going to be conforming to a new lifestyle. Whenever we go to eat, we have to eat certain ways, the way we speak to people, the way we carry ourselves, the way we move, from one point to another.… “Your body, your mind is not ready for that shock.”

While Cole, Jason Moehlmann and Matthew Gottschalk remain with Class 05-08, Sarah Engemann and Nicole Lobecker have fallen by the wayside. They are roommates now in Holding Company, also known as H Company or simply ‘H.’ It’s where students get sent after failing fitness tests or becoming too sick or injured to carry on. They remain there until they prove they are ready to join another class.

Tonight, Engemann and Lobecker are also preparing for the inspection, hopeful they’ll soon be in a new class. They sit at their desks using tiny scissors to trim loose threads off their Johnny Cashes, the nickname for their nearly black “working blues,” which they will wear during the inspection.

Engemann wound up in H Company on only the second day.

“I had abdominal pains. I think it was stress-related,” she says.

Medical tests came back negative, but she missed the physical fitness test with her class. When she took the test in H Company, she failed. She fell 12 short of the 50 sit-ups she needed to do. She must remain in H Company and won’t be ready to join Class 06-08 either.

“When you think about it, it can get to you,” she says. “You are not really progressing.”

She acknowledges having fleeting thoughts of giving up.

“But it’s only a moment,” says Engemann, who is always quick with a smile or a giggle and who lost nearly 70 pounds to come to Newport. “Then you think about all of the work it took to get here and how afterward it’s going to be nothing like it is now. The real Navy isn’t yelling and screaming and talking in the third person. Flight school is going to be way better than anything here.”

Lobecker went to Holding Company on her sixth day at OCS, when she appeared dehydrated during physical training.

“I’m fine,” she said that day, but her Marine drill instructor pointed at her and said, “You’re going straight to H.”

“I was upset. I really was,” Lobecker says. “At medical, I cried when they told me they were pulling me. I tried my hardest and it wasn’t good enough.”

She checked out medically. She says she just appeared in trouble because she sweats a lot and got red-faced that day from trying to yell a lot.

Now she accepts what happened and says the extra experience will work to her advantage. Master Gunnery Sgt. Robert Foshee, who is in charge of Holding Company, watched her meet all of her fitness targets and tells her she will soon join Class 06-08.

“I’m getting ahead of the game,” says Lobecker. “I’ll just be that much better in the next class.”

THE DAY HAS arrived. The RLP is here.

The members of Class 05-08 are nerved up. Most have had only a couple of hours of sleep the past few nights. It’s said that it takes an entire week to prepare. Some have breakfast. One candidate in another class threw up on the way back from chow hall before RLP.

RLP requirements are so extensive and so detailed, they fill 25 pages of the students’ OCS manual, which oddly incorporates nautical terms to explain some of the standards.

For example, a towel must be “folded into thirds lengthwise and then into thirds widthwise, grounded port and forward, with the single folded edge port and aft.” Dress socks must be folded in 4-inch lengths. Undershirts must be folded square, 6 inches by 6 inches. Pants must be hung so that the leg cuff is even with the waist, with the “legs to starboard.” Top chest drawers must be open 6 inches and the bottom drawer 9 inches. Rifles, which are never actually fired at OCS, must be displayed on their beds. Footwear must be placed beneath, with the toes of the shoes “aligned along the lengthwise edge.”

Now it’s time.

The candidates, in their neat, dark Johnny Cashes, stand rigidly in the corridor outside of their rooms, staring straight ahead and waiting for their turn. They must score 80 out of 100. Every deficiency will cost them a point.

Navy officers conduct the first part of the inspections, quizzing the candidates on their knowledge.

“Get inside,” Lt. William Martin tells Cole. “Faster, move it!”

When asked to cite the third general order of a sentry, Cole flubs.

“Wrong!” says Martin. “You’re a prior [enlisted]. You better know your general orders of a sentry.”

Cole loses only three points, which puts him in a good position for the second and much tougher part of the inspection. It arrives in the form of Marine Staff Sgt. Steven Salazar, a lanky yet intimidating drill instructor. Cole’s roommate, Ike Candelaria, goes first. But it’s over quick. Too quick. He’s missing a pair of pants, a glaring and unusual error. It’s an automatic failure.

Salazar turns to Cole.

“Get on your rack!” he says.

Cole climbs onto his bed, lies on his back and does flutter kicks, while Salazar takes a ruler and meticulously measures folded garments.

Cole yells, “Aye, sir,” every time Salazar gives him an order. Then, while exercising, Cole keeps shouting it over and over.

“Shut up! You don’t talk on your own,” says Salazar. “If no one is talking to you, you keep your mouth closed.”

Salazar deducts points for a dirt smudge on a jacket and for “contraband,” lint found on clothing or anywhere else. When it’s over, Cole has scored a 74. He fails.

“It’s unfortunate, Cole, ’cause I’m a pretty easy grader,” says Salazar.

It’s not going any easier for classmate Matthew Gottschalk. Gunnery Sgt. James Jackson has ordered him to get on his bed and to lower and raise his rifle while yelling, “One, two, three, four, I love the Marine Corps.” Sweat breaks out on his brow and his voice starts sounding hoarse.

“I know you can get louder than that,” Jackson says. “I’m not going to waste my time on you sounding weak. Weak and pathetic, right?”

Jackson measures some underwear and announces it’s not 6 inches. He finds sand in a pant pocket. He flips over a box and a piece of lint falls out.

“Easy points you are giving away because of your lack of attention to detail and lack of time management,” Jackson shouts.

Gottschalk has lost 22 points.

“Twenty-two from one hundred is what?” Jackson asks.

“Eight-Eight,” Gottschalk answers, incorrectly.

“Really! Where did you go to college?” Jackson asks. “Are you trying to cheat the system?”

Gottschalk’s score is 78. He has failed too.

“Get out right now,” Jackson tells him.

In the hallway, Gottschalk sweats heavily and sips from his canteen. His bed is a mess and his once neatly folded belongings now lie strewn about the room where Jackson threw them.

THIRTY-ONE candidates, more than half in the class, fail.

“That tells me we still got individuals,” Navy Senior Chief Jonathan Calloway says after sending students into their rooms to change out of their uniforms.

His message: It takes teamwork to prepare for RLP, much like everything else in the Navy. Some people are good at folding. Some are good at ironing. They must learn to depend upon one another.

Those who failed will get a second chance in two days. That means Cole and Gottschalk will have to endure another inspection Saturday morning, along with Jason Moehlmann, who also failed.

Candidate Officer Scott Finley, who is about to graduate and helped conduct today’s inspection, says that classmates have to help one another, even more on the second inspection. Their rooms are now a mess, their dressers utterly disheveled.

“There’s probably about 30 to 40 hours worth of work these candidates have to do. And there’s not 30 to 40 hours left of free time between now and the next [inspection],” he says. “So it’s up to the class to pull together and get the rest of those guys passed if they can. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.”

For Gottschalk, it happens. But not for Cole and Moehlmann. They fail again. They will have to spend the weekend in Holding Company, join Class 06-08 on Monday and repeat RLP all over again in a week and a half.

“I honestly didn’t feel good about the preparation I had made. It felt very haphazard. I felt like I was there, but I didn’t feel ‘locked on,’  ” Cole recalls later, using the popular expression for focus at OCS.

Upon arriving in Newport, Cole figured OCS would be difficult, but thought he had an edge since he had been in the Navy. He and other candidates wonder if the drill instructors size them up in the days leading up to the inspection and then grade them according to those impressions.

“Maybe they saw I was nonchalant,” Cole says. “I didn’t really present myself well.”

Before the inspection, on a day he served as the leader of his class, Gunnery Sgt. Sandra Center told him he lacked confidence.

“We’re going to see your confidence now,” she told him as she began his inspection on Saturday.

“I think it probably wasn’t there,” says Cole. After failing twice, “I had to really do some searching inside to take that next step in my training and really just refocus on why I’m here and what it is that brought me here.”

TOMORROW: The A-B-Cs of going to sea: Learning to be a sailor

rsalit@projo.com