Back in Saigon with the Boy Scouts

By Edward Cone

7-27-03

News & Record

I was back in Saigon again.

Well, I was back at Boy Scout camp, but like Willard in the opening scene of "Apocalypse Now," I was sweaty and tortured and preparing for a dangerous mission.

Not much has changed about Scout camp since I went as a kid, which was about the time that Saigon fell. They've moved the camp up to Caswell County, but otherwise it all felt familiar. Same canvas tents, same swim test, same lopsided baskets in the craft shelter. Even the hamburgers seemed to have been in the freezer since 1975.

This time around I was there as one of the dads on duty. Our job was to help out the senior patrol leader, who was really running the show. Unless the camp devolved into some sort of "Lord of Flies'' scenario, which the eighth-grader in charge of us was not going to allow, we were left to play connect the dots with our mosquito bites.

That Elijah was allowed to join my old troop shows clearly that they didn't hold my record against him. By some measures (merit badges, rank, earnestness) I was not a very good Boy Scout myself. But the secular Bar Mitzvah of Eagle Scoutdom was never my goal. I liked the camping trips and the camaraderie, the rappelling and spelunking and fire-making that we did with a casual abandon possible only in the days before the lawyers took all the fun out of things.

Although I'm not happy with the way the Boy Scouts of America has been politicized in recent years -- how can a group dedicated largely to accessorizing its uniforms be so homophobic? -- I do hope my son absorbs the Scout Law. I never did quite master Obedient, Brave or Reverent, but I'm still working at Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Cheerful, Thrifty and Clean. I think Elijah could easily go 10 for 12.

The values business is tricky stuff with kids who are old enough to recognize canned piety and condescension masked as sincerity. As Huck Finn said of any heaven that would admit Miss Watson, an early model for Dana Carvey's Church Lady, "I couldn't see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn't try for it."

It can be done well, though, as displayed at the first night of vespers by a preacher from Eden who quieted a throng of hot, restless, semi-feral boys with a quick homily involving Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego and Harrison Ford.

The Scouts are supposed to come up with some kind of improvement to their campsite each day, and on the second afternoon a group of our boys added an open-air chapel -- a rough-made cross amid a ring of stones. "That's not exactly something for me," whispered Elijah, and as he walked away alone I saw him ripping leaves from a twig in what I took to be a classic kid gesture of frustration.

But Elijah, age 12 years and one day, was not feeling sorry for himself for being different from the group. Instead he bent the wood and tied pieces together with stems and produced a nice symmetrical Star of David, which he then added to the shrine. Not only had he internalized at least some of that Scout Law, he had apparently learned something at the craft shelter, too.

Elijah's memory of Scout camp will probably center on sleeping out in a hammock with his friends and playing sports at twilight and that part of the swimming test where you make a flotation device out of your clothes. That's what I remember from my first tour. This time around, I saw a little more of what was really going on out there.

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring. com, www.edcone.com), contributes a column to the News & Record on Sunday.

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