Times Staff Report

PORTAGE | If Ryan Dame gets his wish, he'll skip his own high school graduation ceremony.

Because if he has it his way, this June he'll already be in basic training to become a Marine.

Dame, 18, has racked up the most community services -- 144 one year -- and is the most decorated of the JROTC's students.

He's practiced in the art of polite handshaking, and could easily be a spokesman for his JROTC classmates.

"We're not uptight," he said. "People think we're different. We're just normal kids, too.

"We're all a big family."

But he wasn't always so confident.

"If you ask Major, he'd tell you I was afraid of my shadow," he said.

He joined JROTC at the urging of family members, who told him it would be good discipline.

Once "that quiet kid who sat in the library," Dame faces the busy life of a military linguist. And though he'd love German, he's sure he'll get saddled with Arabic or Korean.

Like some of his classmates, he hopes to parlay his service experience into college courses and become a teacher.

The students he'd like to teach? High school JROTC cadets.