General Charles R. Hamilton Addresses Kappa Leaguers in St. Louis, Missouri By Damon Peebles
B rother General Charles R. Hamilton is the 21 st Com- manding General of the U.S. Army Materiel Command. He took time to address the National Kappa League Centennial Conference delegates. He leads one of the Army’s largest commands with 165,000 military, civilian and contractor employees, im- pacting all 50 states and more than 150 countries. However, as busy as he is, he made time to visit and speak to the Kappa Leaguers during the centennial celebration in St. Louis in July 2022. He was impressed with the young men and their mentors. “What a blessing. What an outstanding event…for the brothers to take their time, their pre-
cious weekend time to spend it with these young men is incredible. To do something really, that's bigger than themselves, that's going to have an ever- lasting impact,” he said. Brother Hamilton addressed the young men during a lunch break and provided them with sound advice: “A couple of things I shared with him that were really important is one, make sure you don't make any catastrophic mistakes in your life, because they're really hard to over- come. You can fail, but fail forward, get right back up, and keep going again, and then two, make sure you take advantage of the mentorship (you’re) getting today, and then listen to your parents. It's like simple things that sometimes we don't
do, that can get us in the most trouble, or in a bad situation.”
Sharing his own experience with men- tors while growing up, surprisingly Brother Hamilton admits he could have done more on his part. “I had a lot of great mentors…I probably was a bad mentee. I mean, I didn't keep in contact as well as I should have. But for some reason, they saw something in me, and they would, on occasion, call or write a letter, just to check on me to make sure that I was doing okay,” he said. He encourages young men to have a mentor that they can have a personal relation- ship with.
Reflecting on the 100-year anniversary
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