Friends who know me to be of weak character might be interested to learn I was once nearly saved from it: In the winter of 1962 I underwent initiation into the Boy Scouts. But it seems to be true, character is fate, and the flawed one will follow its flaws. After my first Scout camping trip, which took place in the Philippine jungle during our Christmas vacation period, I soon quit going to the weekly meetings, and never even bought a uniform.

This failure had a lot to do with the physical experience itself. December in the Philippine Islands is appreciably cooler than some other months, but it’s still the tropics—not just a welter of heat and steam, but a real cauldron of organic strife. The soil is dark and red and wet, every square inch a complicated battleground of insects, reptiles, and funguses, and any living thing that lies still—or, let’s say, “camps out”—on the ground there can expect to be devoured.

What was I doing in the Philippines? My dad was with the embassy, and we moved several times during my childhood. Every move meant a chance to reinvent myself. My style of adjustment was to arrive in a new universe, lie low while striking up a few acquaintances, and then start distinguishing myself with bad behavior. Advancing age alone would soon elevate me from Cutup to Hoodlum, and it was only my eventual discovery of the Beatnik category that saved me from the penitentiary. In the interim I made a try at Beachboy, but was frustrated by my lack of a surfboard and my failure to locate any surf. As to what attracted me, this Christmas vacation, to the Boy Scouts of America, I’m still baffled.

I underwent this transition late: Boy Scouts start at age eleven, and I was already well past twelve. In the Cub Scouts, I’d failed to progress. I’d earned the Wolf badge, and the Bear badge, but I’d wandered into a swampy obsession with the gold and silver arrows that could be earned by tiny achievements and sewn beneath these badges in long glittering strings, and my career had foundered in these near-irrelevencies until I’d become the ten-year-old equivalent of a fifty-year-old first lieutenant. And I’d failed inspection routinely, because of my Elvis Presley haircut. So why would I want to try the Scouts again? Let’s just agree that one symptom of a weak character is a sick passion for making the same mistakes over and over.

We arrived at the campsite on a sweaty Friday afternoon, about two dozen American youths, most of us in crisp green uniforms, in a convoy of family sedans driven by volunteer parents or Filipino chauffeurs, all of whom immediately drove away while we set up our tents. Tents today are like four-ounce, inflatable apartments, but in the sixties the Scouts used the same kind our fathers had used in World War II. Olive canvas, no floors, taut ropes jiggling in the wind that swept over this hillside, a wet wind, a flabby wind, while in the valley below the local people had gathered from outflung jungle villages to, of all things, slaughter pork one hog at a time, with blows of sledge hammers—this probably in preparation for Christmas celebrations.

As we gathered miscellaneous half-rotten sticks for firewood, our scoutmaster instructed us in the ancient incendiary arts. Our scoutmaster frightened me. I think his name was Jerry, a bald, spectacled figure who looked as if he’d been only recently let out of a Japanese prison camp; but this impression was wrong; he’d been let out some seventeen years before. Like many Euros who’ve lived for decades in the tropics, he’d lost a lot of his body hair and all of his fat and seemed fabricated out of cords and paper. He regarded those days of captivity and torture at the hands of his enemies as the primary character-building experience of his life, and he was bent on duplicating it, in every way possible, for his Scouts. He was enthusiastic about this opportunity. The other boys took Jerry’s attitude in stride, as far as I could tell.

The Scouts aim to build character and impart a wilderness savoir-faire with Native American overtones that would meld the Lone Ranger and Tonto into one small young self-sufficient good guy. The atmosphere on this campout was one of military discipline constantly marred by sobs and outbursts, because the Scouts were children, after all.

Unlike a lot of Americans who find themselves overseas, we youngsters had no connection with the military. The U.S. bases were far from the capital, Manila, where we all, the sons of corporate executives and career diplomats, attended the private American School. For the most part we presented the usual picture of well-to-do suburban American boys, healthy, happy, innocently evil, anxious to start fires and chop things up with hatchets.

The most spectacular character-building was being undertaken by one of my classmates, a paralyzed kid in a wheelchair. His houseboy pitched his tent for him on a metropolis of jungle fire ants and drove away, and this boy spent the weekend trading his supply of ice-water—a big jug of it he had—for insecticide and bug repellant. Although we weren’t friends, just vaguely acquainted, under these unusual circumstances I suddenly recognized that we were a lot alike. He allowed himself to be enrolled in everything, clubs, Little League, choir, and so on, but he refused to stick to his script—we were supposed to admire and pity him and he was supposed to be cool, but actually he acted like a big brat, uncontrollably dissatisfied and constantly sneering or complaining or acting defeated. I still see him slumped over in his wheelchair, flushed with baby anger, squirting poison fumes into the dirt around him.

The first day we dug rain ditches around our tents and policed the area of litter and then circled the campfire and listened to our scoutmaster reminisce about his days of dysentery, starvation, and terror, and we roasted weenies and devoured flaming marshmallows while the screams of dying hogs lofted up from the valley. According to Jerry, the best way to manage with dysentery is to wear nothing but a jockstrap, so you can get down to business quick, without having to negotiate, and it terrified me that everybody but me seemed to feel this was information worth filing away.

Staring into the flames brought on a kind of hypnosis that added to my sense of dislocation. Hacking away with a hatchet at some kindling for our fire, I managed to opened a hole in my tennis shoe and sheer off the tip of my right big toe. This turned out to be a smaller wound than I feared at first, but it had to be bandaged, and, before that, disinfected. Our leader dumped a pint of Merthiolate into a canvas bucket and took me away from the circle of fire, as it was night by now, very dark by now, and into the jungle where he sat me on a rotten log and plunged my foot into the Merthiolate. I was proud to be told by the others, “We could hear you screaming all the way back here at camp,” and I was glad, also, that I’d managed to do some serious agonizing for the scoutmaster’s benefit. I hoped it meant I had a future in the Scouts—not that I intended ever to have anything to do with them again; but I wanted the scoutmaster to be pleased with me while he had us in the dark jungle, and above all I didn’t want him to understand that he had on his hands here a little Scout who intended to desert the ranks first chance he got. In fact if this had been a real army, one with an enemy, I would have joined them and pinpointed this location on a map for their artillery. All of this was unknown to me in any specific way. Inside, I was blank and blameless.

When midnight came, that first night, three or four of us underwent the initiation rites, which took several hours and which I don’t remember much of—tired and disoriented, also blindfolded, and wearing only one shoe—except that at one point the veteran Scouts in charge of my transformation poured cooking oil all over me and claimed I was being peed on by a water buffalo. I seem to remember also that I had a length of rope, symbolizing something mythological and Native American, tied around my neck, and that I wasn’t supposed to talk until it was removed. I’m not sure whether or not I kept the silence, but I’ll certainly believe it if somebody who reads this small memoir calls me up and tells me I babbled the whole time.

The actual camping was cut short the next night by a downpour that flattened our gathering of tents like so many small cocktail napkins. It came from the source of all such tropical storms, from absolutely nowhere, and it filled our pitiful rain ditches in a couple of seconds and started rapidly eroding the hilltop itself, so that the muck went sliding out from under us. The sopping canvas tents collapsed and we youngsters succumbed, in their monstrous, drowning embrace, to panic completely unbecoming the ranks. We didn’t know whether to hang on to the tents and go down with them or abandon ship and be swept away on the heaving seas of mud. Jerry stalked among the weeping scouts like Captain Ahab, reminding us that he’d not only gone through this many times in the war, but gone through it wearing only a jockstrap. But his voice was tiny in the wind and rain, and eventually he gave up exhorting us to be men and led us off the mountain. We slept on the floor of the church in the nearest village, the building all the villagers slept in when it rained like this, listening to the water roar down the hillside in cataracts. Early in the morning we left that place forever, some of us strengthened after adversity, and some of us with our weaknesses unspoiled.