Greg Camp has served National Infantry Museum Foundation long and well

When Col. Greg Camp retired from the Army in 1996 as a chief of staff at Fort Benning after more than 28 years of service, including a 1969-70 tour of duty in Vietnam, he began a civilian career in the financial services industry. But his service to the Army was far from over.

When Camp left TSYS in June of 2002, he joined former Fort Benning commander Gen. Jerry White and retired CB&T Vice President Ben Williams, also an Army veteran, in a small suite of offices in the Corporate Center on 12th Street that was then the headquarters of the National Infantry Museum Foundation.

What that organization has since become, and produced — namely the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center — is a local and national phenomenon.

Now Camp, who last year succeeded Williams as president and chief operating officer of the foundation after a long stint as executive VP, will be retiring from that post as well. And not surprisingly, his service still isn’t over.

The National Infantry Foundation board of directors announced Camp’s retirement Wednesday, effective Jan. 10, and named just-retired Brig. Gen. Peter Jones — formerly commandant of the U.S. Army Infantry School at the post — to be Camp’s successor.

In a Friday interview, Camp reflected on the 15 years during which he has seen the Infantry Museum move from a 1920s-vintage former Army hospital, where irreplaceable historic archives were deteriorating in storage for lack of space, to a national destination and a hallowed place of honor and pilgrimage.

“It has just turned out so much better than our wildest dreams” Camp said. “We just didn’t have enough imagination to see how wonderful this thing would end up being. It’s because we partnered with people with a lot of imagination and creativity that this thing turned out to be so incredible.”

One of Camp’s principal and most challenging duties, as is always the case with a nonprofit, is fundraising. He recalled an early appeal to former Ledger-Enquirer Publisher John Greenman (author, as it happens, of today’s centerpiece feature in this section) about Knight Foundation grant funding. It was a long shot, but “through happenstance,” Camp said, “a 1945 obituary for John Knight’s son, killed in World War II, was pulled out of a safe deposit box.” (The elder Knight, founder of the Knight Foundation, was himself a World War I veteran.)

“We gave it to Beverly Blake, handling Knight Foundation grants, and she took it to the board, and we got a million dollars in no time flat. So we try to find organizations and entities that have those kinds of linkages, that understand it’s part of their heritage.”

Camp’s greatest satisfaction, he said, “is to see it doing what we all hoped: It honors this legacy of valor and sacrifice. Proud families come here for soldiers’ graduation. Students from Aaron Cohn Middle School have come here and learned not just about military sacrifice, but about Judge Cohn’s own life and service, and his experience liberating the concentration camps.”

One travel writer called the National Infantry Museum “the Smithsonian of the Army,” and Camp said comments like that are commonplace and gratifying … in a sense.

“We often hear some variation on that theme: This museum belongs on the Mall in D.C., or some place in Washington. We’re flattered by that, but this is exactly where it belongs. This is the Home of the Infantry, and this museum is supported and encouraged by citizens of Columbus who love the Infantry.”

It’s not just Columbus, of course. The selection of the National Infantry Museum by USA Today readers as the nation’s best free museum is a point of justifiable pride as well.

“Of all the accolades we’ve gotten,” Camp said, “that’s one we appreciate the most. It’s a validation not by some organization, but by millions of people across the country.”

Greg Camp, who spent almost three decades of his life in service to country and the last 15 helping build up an organization that honors others’ service to country, said that even in retirement, “I’m going to stay involved.” Of that there’s little doubt.

This story was originally published November 17, 2017 at 5:27 PM with the headline "Greg Camp has served National Infantry Museum Foundation long and well."