Boy Scouts attending the 100th anniversary celebration of the Boy Scouts of America heard Defense Secretary Robert Gates share his own experiences with Scouting.
“Scouting has been a big part of my life and my family’s life,” Gates told a crowd of about 45,000 gathered for the 10-day event.
Among those in the audience were members of Jamboree Troop 1234 representing the Sagamore Council of Boy Scouts from Cass and surrounding counties.
In addition to the speeches by Gates and others, the Scouts saw performances by the U.S. Army Golden Knights parachuting team and the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets, who play the official fanfare for the president of the Unites States.
Carter Ulrich, a member of Troop 1234, said he was inspired by the speeches, but he also enjoyed the performances.
“My favorite was the Golden Knights,” he said.
The Scouts also saw a video from “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe, who is scheduled for an appearance at a similar gathering on Saturday.
“My favorite was the Mike Rowe video,” said Sasha Neumann, another of the Cass County representatives.
The local Scouts left Indiana last week and visited several sites in Washington, D.C., over the weekend before arriving at Fort A.P. Hill on Monday. They are scheduled back in Indiana next week.
Gates, an Eagle Scout who has served on the organization’s national executive board and past president of the National Eagle Scout Association, told of going on a father-son camping trip when he was CIA director.
“A hundred yards from our encampment were three, large black vans, a satellite dish and a number of armed security officers surrounding the campsite,” he said. “Now there’s a challenge no Scoutmaster could have anticipated.”
Gates said he was like most of the boys in his audience when he achieved the rank of Eagle Scout at age 15. “I wasn’t a straight-A student, nor was I a particularly good athlete,” he said. “I wasn’t really a student leader.”
When he arrived in Washington at age 22 to begin work at the CIA, he said, “I could fit everything I owned into the back seat of my car. I had no connections and I didn’t know a soul.”
Earning the Eagle Scout badge was “the only thing I had done in my life that led me to think that I could make a difference, that I could be a leader,” he said to applause. “It was the first thing I had done that told me I might be different because I had worked harder, was more determined, more goal-oriented, more persistent than most others.”
Gates told the Scouts that some of them would go on to be leaders in industry, the government and the military. But most importantly, he said, Scouting had set them on the path to “becoming a man of integrity and decency, a man of moral courage, a man unafraid of hard work, a man of strong character — the kind of person who built this country and made it the greatest democracy and the greatest economic powerhouse in the history of the world.”
In the past 100 years, Gates said, there has been no better program for preparing future leaders than the Boy Scouts.
“The fate of our nation in the years to come and the future of the world itself depend on the kind of people we modern Americans prove to be,” he said.
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