DETROIT -- The Army helped welcome more than 4,000 Michigan students to Education Day at the 2017 North American International Auto Show Jan. 18 with a band performance and a career-based presentation.
Sonic Fusion, a popular-music ensemble from the U.S. Army Materiel Command Band at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, took the stage around 8:30 a.m. to get the students fired up for the day's activities. Event organizers planned tours hosted by experts in students' fields of interest, hands-on activities and career-based presentations.
The band was followed by Brig. Gen. Donna Martin, U.S. Army Recruiting Command deputy commanding general for operations, for the first presentation of the day.
Staff Sgt. Richard Scarlett, operations NCO and lead vocalist for Sonic Fusion, said he enjoyed showing people a different face of the Army than they are used to seeing. "We're excited to be here and play some good music," he said. "Music is kind of the bridge between everybody -- it's the universal language. We bridge that gap between the military world and the civilian world."
Martin bridged another gap by telling the students how she went from being a high school student like many of them to graduating from college debt free through the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corp.
"I went into ROTC because, really, I was looking for something. I was looking to belong to a group of people, and that really is what happened," she said.
She talked about making choices in life and having perseverance to achieve personal goals.
"Success is a choice," she said. "We can either accept conditions as they exist or assume the responsibility to change them. But whether we want them to or not, circumstances increasingly force us to stand on life's forked road and lean toward fear or fate."
To illustrate perseverance, Martin mentioned how Walt Disney was fired from one of his first jobs, at a newspaper, because "he had no good ideas." She also cited failures by "Sesame Street," Thomas Edison and Michael Jordan before they became successful, and described how humans running a mile in under 4 minutes was thought to be physically impossible until Roger Bannister of England did it in 1954.
"He proved everyone wrong, training tirelessly and believing what he could do," she said of Bannister. Since then, more than 20,000 people have run a sub-4-minute mile, including a few high schoolers, she added.
"Perseverance has inspired generations to change their perspectives on what is possible. Some people just want to focus on the problem, but perseverance causes us to change our perspective, and if we change our perspective it allows us to change the whole conversation," she said.
Before leaving the stage, Martin told the students that she was encouraged by what she saw in them. "I absolutely love what I see in you. We need your talent and your creativity to help us tackle some of the toughest challenges facing our nation and our world."
Before leaving Detroit, Sonic Fusion held hands-on master class sessions for band members at nearby Renaissance, Martin Luther King, and Cass Technical high schools in addition to the Detroit School of the Performing Arts.
Sonic Fusion is one of AMC's four music performing teams that also help comprise the command's marching, concert and ceremonial bands. The AMC Band supports Soldiers and civilians stationed at more than 153 command locations worldwide with about 400 performances per year.
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