Although police and school officials say they think gangs do not have a major presence at Berkeley High School, they admit the kids would know most about student membership in West Side Berkeley or H2O Front Berkeley—the two most prominent Berkeley gangs.

“Even in the junior high you’ll pick up notebooks and they’ll have H2O written all over it,” said Berkeley police Sgt. Patricia Delaluna, a gang expert. “The kids know better than anybody who’s all involved.”

However, even students are in discrepancy about the presence of gangs. Two juniors at Berkeley High, Rafi Susman and Michael Salaverry, said they don’t think gangs exist in their school.

“I don’t worry about that, not at Berkeley High,” Salaverry said.

His friend said even though there aren’t gangs at the school, there still is criminal activity.

“There’s gang-like activity but they’re not labeled as gangs,” Susman said. “I think here it’s more about ridiculous individuals than ridiculous gangs.”

However, other students are positive of the presence of gang-like groups, which sometimes engage in criminal behavior but do not label themselves as “gangs.”

“There’s gangs, but sometimes they’re called cliques,” said Cervon Rogers, a freshman at Berkeley High. “Then they say the ‘turf’ they’re from, they do signs, they target each other.”

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Lt. Col. Brad Jensen, who teaches UC Berkeley’s Air Force ROTC program, plans to soon retire after 26 years of military service. His job has taken him all over the country, including Louisiana, Utah, Guam, California, Virginia and North Dakota. Berkeley marks his last stop.

When he enlisted in 1982, the Gulf War was underway. “We sat alert, we had our airplanes, aircraft and missiles on alert and Russia was the big threat,” Jensen said. “We thought the world might end in a nuclear holocaust.”

He nodded to the dozens of Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force members doing training exercises in the middle of North Field. “We send cadets around the world for language training and cultural immersion to try and get them prepared to go work in the Balkans or the Middle East or Asia,” said Jensen, who speaks Dutch, Spanish and French. “They’re going to be stationed anywhere in the world.”

What has changed most about the military between then and now, he said, is a greater understanding of the enemy.

“In some ways, it’s a much harder threat to defend against than the Russians were during the Cold War,” Jensen said. “You know what their missiles were, you knew if we didn’t threaten them they wouldn’t hurt us. But we don’t know that with the terrorists–they want to destroy us and we don’t know where they are.”