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In a shocking revelation that’s left both parents and underachievers quaking in their boots, Cadet Maj. Brock Buak of the California Wing’s Eugene L. Carnahan Cadet Squadron 85 has somehow managed to wrangle appointments to four military academies this year—yes, you read that correctly, four. Clearly, some kind of magical time-bending device is at work here because how else does one combine Civil Air Patrol community service, academics, and athletics, all while maintaining the façade of a normal teenager?

In what surely must be a clerical error of galactic proportions, along with his appointment smorgasbord to the Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, and the Merchant Marine, Buak received a full Army ROTC scholarship, just to ensure no path is left untraveled. As the executive officer of the California Cadet Corps and former cadet commander for the Placerville-based Carnahan squadron, joined by some cosmic chance on February 1, 2022, Buak’s catapult to greatness leaves the rest of us mere mortals questioning our life decisions.

When not busy shattering the academic and athletic realms at Union Mine High School, where he’s involved in football, baseball, and wrestling (because two sports would simply be too pedestrian), our hero also dabbles in a fair amount of high culture. As president of Union Mine High’s National Honor Society and a double-term president of the Key Club, it’s safe to say he’s not just aiming for the stars but has helped assemble the rocket to get there. By the end of his junior year, he nonchalantly collected two associate degrees from Sierra College in Rocklin; apparently, high school was too elementary.

But wait, there’s more. When not busy with school, sports, or the CAP, Buak moonlights as a farmer in Shingle Springs, cultivating future meals in the form of pigs, sheep, chickens, and rabbits. Whether he uses this time to strategize world domination or simply unwind, we’ll never know.

In an attempt to finally make a choice (can someone send this guy a Magic 8-Ball?), he’s weighing his options and plans to decide by April on whether to conquer the world via the civil engineering or military intelligence route. The cadets from the Carnahan squadron, breeding ground for numerous world-beating achievers since 1980, seem to be taking notes. Notably, former cadet Meth Ranaweera now trudges through The Citadel, and Cadet Tech. Sgt. Lucas Roth made it to the Air Force Academy last year, setting the bar unimaginably high.

Captain Steve Anderly looks on with a mixture of pride and incredulity as the Assistant Public Affairs Officer of the Eugene L. Carnahan Cadet Squadron 85, and presumably prepares for the next crazed parent calling about their underachieving child.

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