AEDC's Lance Baxter helps bring scouting back

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  When Lance Baxter, chief of AEDC's technology branch, volunteered to deploy to Iraq late last year, he made an interesting and unexpected discovery.

Baxter, who works for the Missile and Space Intelligence Center in Huntsville in his capacity as a major in the Air Force reserves, arrived at Baghdad's Victory Base Complex in 2010 to help wind down the mission before American forces depart the country.

"My job was to help the organization plan for an orderly and responsible withdrawal while maintaining mission coverage and support to the commanders in theater," Baxter explained. "That's a real challenge and it's a big mission to do."

Baxter said his assignment normally wouldn't have brought him into contact with many Iraqis, but two weeks into a four-month deployment, his first ever, that all changed.

Word reached him about a need for volunteers to help a three-year-old effort to restore scouting as a viable youth organization in Iraq.

"My day-to-day work contact was largely with the U.S. side," he said. "But then I got involved with the Victory Base Council, which is an organization that was formed a few years before I arrived to provide a scouting program for the children of some Iraqi soldiers who live on the Victory Base Complex."

Baxter's three sons had drawn the electrical engineer into scouting, first as a den leader and cub master in Pack 142 and now as troop committee chairman for Troop 158 in Tullahoma. He said the last thing he expected to see or experience in Iraq was scouting.

"Iraq has a really strong scouting tradition," he said. "They're one of the nations that helped to form the World Scouting Organization back in the 1920s and 1930s. With their English colonial history, they were very strongly tied to the original English scouting movement.

"The British military brought the program with them and the Iraqi culture really embraced it and had a very strong scouting program for many years. Saddam Hussein corrupted that, and eventually toward the end of his rule, he made their scouting program very militant. They were dismissed from the World Scouting Organization at that point."

Baxter said highly motivated Iraqis, several who spoke very good English and worked as translators, helped to enable the Iraqi and American military volunteers to interact well with each other and with the children.

"Not much Arabic is necessary when you want the kids to kick a soccer ball, but doing things like teaching archery, how to play basketball or football or teaching them about principle-centered leadership is a little more difficult," he said. "It's not too hard to convince kids that [it's] a good time to play soccer by dragging out a soccer ball and start to kicking it around, they catch on to that pretty quickly."

Baxter was encouraged by the growth in scouting he witnessed during his deployment. There were approximately 75 children when he first arrived in Iraq. Four months later that number had grown to about 150 boys and girls ages 4-18.

"By the time I left, we had some very encouraging developments with the Iraqi side picking up more responsibility for planning and directing the program and an Iraqi business was providing additional buses to bring even more kids in from the Iraqi village just outside the base," he said.

Baxter said his first deployment proved to be an excellent experience, both professionally and personally. Having the opportunity to contribute to the renewal of Iraq's scouting program was particularly satisfying.

"Frankly I think it was the best thing that I did," he said. "I think it's the thing that has the potential to make the biggest difference over time - these are the kids who are going to grow up to be in charge of Iraq, and they will be better prepared to do it because of the scouting program."

Baxter said he views the U.S. military volunteers who've teamed up with their Iraqi counterparts to help restore scouting in the country as an essential partnership.

"It lets these children see what's possible and helps them to understand who we are as Americans and how we really feel about them," he said. "They're going to be better equipped to be the good leaders that their country needs, just like scouts are here in the United States."