LIKE insects unfurling from cocoons, they emerge from under their plastic shelters.

A faint murmur floats on the dawn as 60 teenagers, a quarter of them girls, in camouflage gear, boots and bucket hats are packing up. Stealthily.

It’s the time when the light can play tricks on shapes and colours, when an enemy is most likely to attack.

This is the edge of the Beerburrum State Forest near D’Aguilar, 70km north of Brisbane. There’s no enemy here - just a handful of men, looking on, arms folded across broad chests.

“It’s a bit of a test,” says one instructor, ex-major Brett Chamberlain. “They’ve been told to be ready by 6.30am. This is about deadlines, that deadlines exist as much in general life as they do here. Some of them are too slow and are about to find out there’s no time for breakfast.”

It’s the first weekend at a “field phase camp” of the Military Cadets - no relation to Australian Army Cadets (AAC).

Don’t call them an offshoot, or a breakaway. The group of straighttalking ex-Diggers running this show reckon they have a unique and authentic method of moulding good citizens from a group assumed to have scant interest in such matters - teenagers.

The cadets, aged 11 to 17, have just slept under hoochies - plastic sheets tied to a wire fence along one side and pegged to the ground on the other to form one long, camouflaged teenage dormitory.

Nearby, six cadets are drawing streaks of brown, green and gold paint down their faces and hauling on poncho-like suits of camouflage material, string and hessian.

They’re the reconnaissance group, the elite who have been “smashed” by instructors at previous courses to make the grade. (Of 56 kids who tried out for the last intake, only eight got through.) They’re about to scope out their “area of operations”, the state forest, while the other cadets revise lessons from earlier camps - field craft, first aid, navigation, radio and military tactics.

Something unnatural is unfolding here - 60 teens, up at dawn, quiet, falling in, following orders, eager to please, respectful.

And not a smartphone in sight. What is it about military-style training, with its centuries-old customs and seemingly purposeless rituals, that still has the power to change young minds? Why is it so effective in ushering kids into adulthood? “Discipline,” says MC co-founder Tom Bere, 60. “Why? Because from enforced discipline comes self-discipline.”

Bere, from Sandgate on Brisbane’s northern bayside, was a sergeant in the Military Police from 1973 to 1993 and spent another seven years in the Australian Army Reserve.

He’s a barrel-chested bear of a man who switches easily from fearsome to fatherly. In 2012, Bere, 60, met ex-major Damien Patterson, from Newport at the northern tip of the Redcliffe Peninsula, a former army major of 14 years with a career that included tours of East Timor and Iraq commanding up to 100 men. Patterson, 37, had another mate, Stephen Laverty, 66, from Ocean View in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, a former sapper and one of the Vietnam War tunnel rats - the men sent in to search for enemy and explosives in the bunkers and caves of the Viet Cong.

Patterson and Laverty met while volunteering at a Brisbane Army Cadets unit, but both became disenchanted with its methods, alluding to an inflexible and overly cautious organisation that had sucked both the form and the fun out of cadet life.

Parents and teachers who complete an army cadets instructor’s course cannot carry the same cachet and mystique as real soldiers whose skills were forged in the furnace of the army and combat, they argue.

“We found it crippled by bureaucracy,” Patterson says.

“There was a lack of depth in the training, there was little structure. I tried for a year to influence the situation and change things, but I just couldn’t.”

Patterson was passionate about the potential for the cadet ethos to change kids’ lives for the better, because cadets had helped turn his own life around.

That, he maintained, was down to having instructors who knew the culture and protocols of the army, men who inspired respect, awe even.

Over a beer at Sandgate RSL in late 2011, he, Laverty and Bere discussed the shortcomings and agreed there was a better way to mentor kids, using army structures and with ex-soldiers instilling authentic military culture.

Patterson had heard about the Logan City Community Cadets, founded about 15 years ago by a group of parents and employing former and serving soldiers, and decided the Logan ethos was a more effective model. Soon after that first meeting the trio set up their not-for-profit organisation, got a story in the local paper, wrote a 60-page recruit training manual and dusted off their fatigues. On March 2, 2012, 1MCU Sandgate held its inaugural recruits’ night in a girl guides hut at Sandgate. “That first night, we put out about 30 chairs and got two kids,” Bere laughs.

They’d had higher hopes so they pressed on, handing out flyers around Sandgate shops, placing ads and speaking to schools. Numbers swelled, and one unit soon became three: Sandgate, Burpengary and Rockhampton.

Today, MC has about 150 cadets under the supervision of 24 volunteer instructors in three units, with a waiting list that has fuelled a need for more veteran volunteers. They’ve been encouraged by Queensland Members of Parliament Kerry Millard (Sandgate) and Darren Grimwade (Morayfield) to tender for the government’s Youth Boot Camp program - a Justice Department early-intervention program for teenagers at risk of long-term offending. Their model and success also attracted the attention of the AAC.

Last year its commander, Brigadier Peter Jeffrey, assigned an officer to study the Military Cadets model and provide a report to the organisation to generate possible inspiration for changes. The key difference, they say, is mentoring by former soldiers. As Bere says, “When we stand up and say something, we know what we’re talking about.”

PATTERSON RECKONS ARMY CADETS probably saved his life. The youngest of four children to a single mother in working-class western Sydney, and without a solid male role model, the teenage Patterson veered well off course.

“Mum couldn’t pin me down,” he says. “She got me [at 13] into the Army Cadets where I was under the eye of a regular army soldier. He put me on the straight and narrow, saw I was clever, and cunning, and that I should channel that in the right way.

“Here was a strong male figure in my life showing me the way and not taking any shit from me. I had so much respect for him that I didn’t want to let him down.” In 1996 Patterson was accepted into the ACT’s Royal Military College, Duntroon, one of only three 18-year-olds in his intake but the only one to graduate. Men accepted into Duntroon are more commonly 21-plus and have a tertiary qualification.

“At the end of the day, my goal here is ensuring these kids get the same result I did,” he says.

The MC calendar features almost 40 events through the year, including Friday-night drill parades, field camps each term, shooting practice at a range in Belmont in Brisbane’s south and a week-long annual camp (this year at Central Queensland’s Hervey Bay).

On top of that are adventure activities such as parachuting, rock climbing, abseiling, survival training, and a Story Bridge climb. Patterson says the approach might be paramilitary, but the aims aren’t. MC, like army cadets, is primarily about self-development, based on core values of leadership, integrity, initiative and courage. Instructors mention teamwork, confidence, mateship and resilience like a mantra.

The motivations of children and their parents vary - some are troubled, a bit lippy or lack solid role models. Others might be performing poorly at school, are a touch lazy or just keen for some fun and challenges. Many cite a lack of direction, while fatherlessness, too much time on screens and playing shoot-’em-up computer games loom large. (A survey among MC parents in late 2013 found there was a 70 per cent drop in computer game time among their children in just a year.)

JOHN RIDDICK, 60, FROM MORAYFIELD, also in the Moreton Bay region, is a former sergeant who served with the Rhodesian SAS from 1972-1980 and emigrated to Australia in 1988.

He’s a thoughtful, avuncular man who’s witnessed some horrors in the jungles of Zambia and Mozambique and was once shot down in a helicopter ... “But it was only once.” For a man from one of the most hardcore sections of the armed forces, Riddick has a surprisingly gentle touch with the kids. “With love and discipline you cultivate a quality person,” he says.

“As far as I’m concerned, with my approach I get through to them too and still teach them resilience, survival, to work as a team and look after your mates.” Riddick says MC is an ersatz family for some kids, particularly those without fathers or father figures - the modern malady of society and young men in particular.

The boys connect with instructors as strong and honourable male role models, men they can rely on, he says. All the ex-soldiers at MC are volunteers. But it’s clear there’s more than altruism at play in this cosy symbiosis.

“We like to think of this as veterans helping kids helping veterans,” says instructor and ex-captain Brendan Guy. To the former soldiers, MC isn’t just a youth development program.

For men like Riddick it provides the pride and joy of imparting experience and life lessons; it gives purpose to those who might struggle to find their feet in civilian street; and it’s communion for like-minded men with shared experiences and a distraction from the scarring fallout of war, effectively a rekindling of the brotherhood of soldiering.

As Guy notes: “You might leave the army but you never leave the corps.” Guy was two years out of the army when his wife was diagnosed with cancer, and his former unit raised $35,000 to help with drugs and treatment.

“So you could say this whole [Military Cadets] thing makes us feel part of that family again.” For Tom Bere, who’s suffered poor health and post-traumatic stress disorder since leaving the services, it’s provided a new dimension to his life.

“Not so long ago I was sitting around here watching the grass grow,” says Bere, who left the army in 1993 and worked until 2002 in security, for the Army Reserves and Military Police.

“Last Fathers’ Day I got 19 phone calls from kids in the unit. I can’t tell you what that meant to me.” Riddick, too, has found huge satisfaction in sharing his experience. “This has been the best thing for me, to be able to pass on to kids what I know and have learned. It’s fantastic and gives me a real sense of belonging.” When young people run amok or thumb their noses at authority, the collective cry goes up about all that’s wrong with modern youth - as the cliche goes, old-fashioned military discipline is what they need. But the cadets model is often associated with worst-case scenarios, distracting kids from criminal temptation or antisocial behaviour. Its greater benefits are less spectacular, more prosaic.

Just ask the converts who’ve been transformed in attitude, in confidence and in attainment.

It’s people like Mickayla Martin, 14, from the Glass House Mountains in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, who arrived as a shy 12-year-old and today is a cadet sergeant booming orders at her charges, confident and decisive.

Or the bookish, introverted Amy Martin (no relation), who came to MC as a “princess” and has just slept under the stars, gone without breakfast and daubed her face in a palette of camouflage. Or Tyson Muraca, 14, who arrived at the unit in late 2012, an easily led and directionless 13-year-old. “I wasn’t doing so well at school,” he concedes.

“I was playing up, not keeping my head straight discipline-wise, being a bit of a clown, basically.” MC was a chance for a fresh start, one with the security of a focused, like-minded peer group around him. Tyson has become one of their star recruits - a cadet instructor and top achiever in his Junior Leadership Course. Mother Anita says the turnaround after four months has been remarkable, with improved grades, greater diligence and pride in himself.

“It’s been a real eye-opener for me in that I’ve realised I can achieve something in life,” Tyson says.

After the 2013 MC camp to Canberra, Tyson set his sights on a degree in law and business through the army. “I’m proud of what I’ve done here and the fact that I learn something new every time I come here,” he says. “It’s given me a real focus; it gets you out and shows you some real options, like what’s beyond the front gate.

“It’s like Xbox ... but for real.”