Scouting with Psychos
Or there’s more than one way to abuse a bunch of kids.
I was in the Boy Scouts for about five years from the age of twelve to sixteen. On the whole I enjoyed it. I loved camping and even went to the Boy Scout ranch in New Mexico, Philmont twice. My drive to be an Eagle Scout, however, disappeared in a cloud of marijuana smoke at the age of sixteen.
Despite my overall enjoyment of scouting one particular incident stands out that was truly insane, abusive and utterly irresponsible on the part of our Scoutmasters. Who one’s Scoutmaster is can make scouting a great experience or create real trauma in a young man. I’m still distressed by this incident fifty five years later.
When I was thirteen, we lost a great Scoutmaster and we got two new ones, the Thompsons. They were dire, psychotic, sadistic nut cases. They were both called Tommy and the elder had been a non-com in the army and had served in World War II. The younger Thompson had just come back from a tour of duty in Vietnam where he had been a Captain the Medical Corp. This despicable man was definitely warped and twisted and took delight on one occasion in telling us how he’d had Vietnamese prostitutes come to him asking for birth control pills and he gave them aspirin. He thought this was really funny. I thought he was sick and cruel.
The Thompsons instituted a military type of regime and instead of playing British Bulldog at our weekly meetings we were given close order drill. I recall one campout we had in the dead of winter. There was about six inches of snow on the ground and we were staying in some kind of prefab teepees. There was a fire box in the teepee so as long as you were inside it wasn’t too bad. Another boy, Bill Coley and I were the most senior boys there and were let off drill. However, the younger Thompson had the younger boys out drilling in the snow for quite some time. They were cold and wet and miserable.
The climax of the Thompsons’ insanity came during the summer of 1968 when we went to Camp Goshen. Camp Goshen was a new Boy Scout camp in Virginia which was inaugurated that year. Several troops went and we had one of the coveted places.
In general, I enjoyed this weeklong campout. We had large canvas tents with cots and wooden floors. A couple of us got caught smoking. My watch was stolen in the communal showers. I had only turned my back on it for about 30 seconds and someone lifted it. So much for the Boy Scouts oath of honesty! I completed swimming, canoeing and archery merit badges. This latter despite managing to get one of the feathers off an arrow impaled in my thumb as a result of a misfire.
But two truly extraordinary incidents took place that week. We had four adults with us. The two Thompsons, another American who was a Korean War Veteran and a Russian, the father of one of my friends named Serge Alexandroff. Serge’s father had a very interesting background. He had been in the Red Army during the Second World War but had been captured by the Germans. As he was an airplane mechanic the Germans put him to work repairing planes for the Luftwaffe. At the end of the war, he was able to surrender to the Americans, thus saving his life as the Russians would have shot him if they had got their hands on him. As a result, he was able to immigrate to the United States.
During the course of the week tensions between Serge’s father and the elder Thompson had been rising, some of it having to do with the war. Finally, about five days into the campout, the two of them, both men in their 50’s got into a fist fight in front of all of us. I couldn’t believe it. Thompson managed to knock Serge’s father down. After that he took Serge and they left. The younger Thompson and the Korean War vet crowed over the incident and thoroughly approved of the fight. We boys were dumbfounded. I had certainly never seen adults fighting like children before and was thoroughly shocked by this behavior.
On the last day at Camp Goshen there occurred what still remains one of the most extraordinary incidents of my life.
There was a series of contests between the troops involving different skills. The winners were awarded gold rocks and the troop with the most rocks was to receive a prize during the evening campfire. During one of the contests, we had an altercation with another troop, and someone threw a rock and hit me in the back of the head. Threats of violence then escalated, and the other troop threatened to raid our camp that night. We reported the matter to the Thompsons, who instead of settling everyone down and defusing the situation decided to organize a defense of our camp.
We were camped on a small rise of ground. There were two trails that led into the camp, the main trail which came up the side of the hill and a smaller trail which came into the back of the camp at the end of the rise. The Thompson’s, being military men, decided that the main assault would probably come up the main trail and that our defense should be concentrated in that direction. However, they felt they couldn’t leave the smaller trail into our rear undefended. In order to protect this flank, the younger Thompson reached into his Vietnam experience and came up with the bright idea, and I am not making this up, of rigging up a picnic table as a man trap. I swear to God he had us string up a picnic table on ropes in the trees and run a trip wire across the path so that if anyone came up that way the table would swing down and whack them. God only knows what this would have done to a 13- or 14-year-old kid but that was what he did.
They had the rest of the boys make up mustard and mayonnaise bombs in plastic baggies and issued sticks to everyone and stationed them in the bushes in a perimeter along the side of the hill flanking the main trail. One boy was put on the roof of the latrine with a flashlight covered with a neckerchief. A boy named Tal Luther and I were sent down to the bottom of the hill and told to hide in the bushes. We were given a flashlight covered with a neckerchief with instructions that when the enemy raiders came, we were to signal the boy on top of the latrine so he could raise the general alarm.
The other order that the younger Thompson gave us was to wait until the last boy in the other troop came along and then step out of the bushes. One of us was to hit him in the stomach with our stick and when he bent forward the other was to hit him on the back of the head and knock him out. Then we were instructed to drag his body into the bushes and make our way back up the hill to our own lines.
I remember Tal Luther and I sitting in these bushes and whining to each other “I don’t want to hit anyone”. Of course, nothing happened and there was no raid. Nonetheless the Thompsons kept us up until one in the morning on alert before they stood us down.
I can only assume that the other troop was run by responsible adults who getting wind of the raid settled their boys down and put them to bed as they should have.
In the fall, mercifully, the Thompsons departed and were replaced by Bill Coley’s father, Major Coley. He had come back from his second tour of duty in Vietnam and was working at the Pentagon. He was a professional officer, a proper leader and was an excellent Scoutmaster.
