21 March 2004

Longwood ROTC program to have new leader

An Army Reserve officer who recently returned from duty in Iraq will soon take over Longwood's ROTC program.

Capt. Scott Victor, who started working at Longwood on Feb. 1, will replace Master Sgt. Jim Carver, who is retiring from the Army in June after 21 years' active duty service. Carver has been at Longwood since August 2001 and was the U.S. Army Cadet Command's national Instructor of the Year for 2004, being chosen the best in the nation from among 626 ROTC instructors.

Victor had been the battalion recruiting officer for the University of Richmond, with which Longwood's unit is a partner. He was the 4 th Brigade Recruiting Officer of the Year for 2003; he learned of the award while serving in Iraq in December 2003. The 4 th Brigade encompasses 19 ROTC programs at colleges and universities in southern Virginia and North Carolina, each of which is called a battalion.

After being mobilized in November 2003, Victor was sent to southeastern Iraq where he served as company commander for a logistical headquarters unit, supporting them with supplies and logistics. He served with coalition forces from Italy, the Netherlands and South Korea. He returned to the United States last Dec. 29 and was de-mobilized a month later.

Victor served on active duty from 1997, after graduating from the State University of New York at Brockport, where he was in the ROTC program, until July 2002. He served in Mannheim, Germany, for three years and at Fort Campbell, Kentucky for about a year. While stationed in Germany, he went to Hungary in February-June 1998 as part of the Balkans peacekeeping force. A native of Utica, N.Y., near Syracuse, he is married and has two children.

In February the UR-based ROTC battalion was selected the 2004 "Top Battalion" in the 4 th Brigade. Also, the battalion was recently ranked 28 th in the nation among the 272 Army ROTC programs. The ROTC programs at Hampden-Sydney College and Virginia Commonwealth University also are part of the 4th Brigade. Longwood's program has about 40 cadets, including the H-SC contingent, and the entire brigade has close to 100 cadets.

During the 2003-2004 academic year, Carver had to assume responsibility for the entire UR battalion when the training officer was deployed to Iraq. A member of Special Forces and a Desert Storm veteran, he has led two training missions to Guinea in west Africa.

The Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps provides college-trained officers for the Regular Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard. Its mission is to develop the future officer leadership of the U.S. Army (nearly 70 percent of the Army's commissioned officers are ROTC products) and to motivate young people to be better citizens. In addition to their regular studies, ROTC students take prescribed military science courses, participate in scheduled leadership laboratories and attend the five-week ROTC Advanced Camp, held at Fort Lewis near Tacoma, Washington, usually in the summer between their junior and senior years.