I was in CAP for a while as a cadet and it was a pretty good organization. The two coolest things they did were search and rescue and flying planes, they also had two pretty intense boot camps we had the opportunity to go to, a week long program and a weekend one, I think it's called BCS for basic cadet school. I never got to go but a friend of mine went and he said he almost cried getting smoked (he was 14 I think but he grew up in a bad neighborhood and worked out so much he was bigger than my dad, so I was surprised.) supposedly they hated it on the first day and didn't want to leave by the last.
There was also a lot of volunteer work, we would go door to door asking for donations to buy wreaths and then lay them on gravestones in military graveyards, and also bus tables at veterans dinner events, provide security at airshows stuff like that. These were the most common opportunities provided, and personally, I liked doing it because it was rewarding.
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet as I am under the impression this isn't just something unique to my area but we did do search and rescue. I never did search and rescue, but I regret that because there wasn't any age limit since they weren't doing anything crazy like pulling people out of burning wreckage. The requirements to do SAR were completing a bunch of online modules, we didn't even have to learn CPR since our ground teams were only allowed to do the S part of SAR. I remember guys talking about being in high school and then getting a text and before they knew it they were up in the mountains looking for crashed planes, when they found them they set up a perimeter and contacted the professionals to pull off the rescue part. We also had pilots who flew planes over natural disasters to help keep SAR informed, but they had to be adults so I never really bothered to learn much about it. Everyone there pretty much wanted a military career and my squadron's captain was trying to join AF Pararescue. He had already gotten to do training with PJs and had an extensive background in search and rescue before even leaving high school.
As for the flying aspect I remember it was insanely cool to fly a plane, despite me getting airsick and throwing up after we landed. This may be unique to my area, but we only got five O-rides, then we couldn't go anymore. Again, not sure if this was the norm, it may have been rationing since we always had a lot of cadets going out for o-rides that would make sense. Some of the future pilots I knew would use another program that I forget the name of that was solely dedicated to flying.
We met up once a week at an actual retired military base and got updates, watched presentations, and did PT (testing only), which was a joke for the most part but PT standards didn't need to be high, uniforms on the other hand were held up to pretty decent standards, It wasn't that bad looking back but I was a VERY lazy kid so spending hours shining boots examining my uniforms (dress blues or BDUs) for bomb cords and creases and other such stuff was annoying but it helped my discipline. We also got cards that allowed us to get on to Air Force bases (can't recall exactly how this worked), which was shocking, I had a movie based image of military bases, so when I saw a Gamestop and a small mall I was shocked.
we had packets full of information we had to memorize to move up in the organization stuff like rank structure the names of all the highest ranking officers, stuff like that. CAP was a pretty good experience, I can't recommend it enough and I hope some of this was helpful, sorry if I rambled on a bit too much.
