By JOSEPH KELLARD
The camporee includes Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts from across the U.S. and Canada, and offers them instruction in military-oriented events and skills. To receive an invitation to the camporee, a troop must be sponsored by a West Point cadet. Troop 717 got its invite from Michael Merseburg, a cadet private at West Point and an Eagle Scout emeritus from the Oceanside troop.
"Most people who come to West Point were Boy Scouts at one time," Merseburg said. "A lot of people are very attached to their troop, so those are the troops that usually get invited here."
A graduate of Oceanside High School's class of 2004, Merseburg is a member of West Point's Scout Masters' Council and, with fellow members, ran the camporee events at Lake Frederic, the academy's camping and training grounds. The 14 members of Troop 717 joined some 2,500 other scouts in a 14-event round-robin competition May 7. Among the events were survival shelter-building, obstacle courses, a stretcher carry, camouflage skills, fire building, a leadership reaction course, canoe racing, communications, first aid and marching drills.
Merseburg taught wilderness survival skills, building shelters with nothing more than sticks, leaves and dirt. While survival skills are nothing new to scouts, at West Point they learned how some standard scouting skills are employed in the military. Among these were canoeing, used to infiltrate an enemy, orienteering, as it applies to navigation, and knot-tying, applied to jumping out of aircraft.
"They also taught us a couple of knots we didn't know," said Sean Silvio, 15, of Troop 717.
Some of the uniquely military skills the boys learned were how to apply camouflage and the use of certain weapons, such as mock grenade tossing for accuracy and distance. Other activities included a shooting range, martial arts and demonstrations of infantry tactics.
Kenny Forman, 11, said he enjoyed the canoeing, rope-tying and having camouflage applied to his face. The best part was "seeing the cadets walking around in their military uniforms," he said.
Dennis Silvio, a committee chairman for Troop 717, was most impressed with the attendance at the camporee. A typical camporee hosts about 20 to 30 local troops, but West Point hosted 250 troops, some from as far away as California, Alaska and Canada.
The local boys failed to medal in any of the events, but Merseburg said the camporee gave them a chance to work as a team, challenging their abilities to coordinate and communicate with one another. And that's exactly what Christian Wagner, 14, said he'll remember most about his time at West Point. "I liked how the cadets all got together and used teamwork to put the whole camporee together," he said.
For the sponsoring cadets, the event was its own reward. "It gives me a chance to share my experience with the scouts," Merseburg said. "I've taken the same steps they have, from Tiger Scout all they way to Eagle Scout. And I see what they're going through, and I've seen how Boy Scouts is really almost a preparation for the military. Scouting really helped me here a lot, because 100 percent of the things I learned in scouting apply here."
One evening, the troops joined in a memorial ceremony, for which they were asked to bring an item that had belonged to a member of their community who had died fighting in the war overseas. Troop 717 honored Lt. Ronald Winchester of Rockville Centre. An Eagle Scout with Oceanside's Troop 303 and a graduate of both Oceanside Middle School and the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., Winchester was killed in battle in Iraq last year. The Oceanside scouts added a photo of Winchester to a wall adorned with other snapshots, letters, Mass cards and the like that the cadets built and will bring to a national jamboree.
The next morning, after Merseburg taught the scouts how to march properly, the boys demonstrated their skills in a parade ceremony and were reviewed by a general. "I think, overall, the kids learned a lot and really enjoyed the trip to West Point," Silvio said, adding with a smile, "and, boy, did they enjoy putting on the camouflage. Anything that made them dirty or scruffy, they enjoyed."
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