Scouting didn’t shape his life. It saved it.

In 2017, Terry won Fox’s prime-time survival competition Kicking & Screaming as the oldest competitor on the show — outlasting elite military and survival operators half his age in the jungles of Fiji.

He did it representing all of the Boy Scouts of America, in his Scoutmaster uniform, in front of a national audience. Not as a stunt — as a statement. Everything that let him survive out there, he’d first learned in Scouting.

Terry grew up in the poorest city in the United States — McAllen, Texas, on the Mexican border — in a neighborhood with bars on every door and window, where gangs and drugs were a fact of life. At fourteen, he found himself in his own back alley at night, staring down the wrong end of an assault rifle. In high school, his father was killed. Before he died, a neighbor told the family: “Not a single one of your boys will ever grow up to be anything.”

But the Fossums were a Scouting family — his mother a den mother, his father a troop committee chair, all the boys in uniform. And Scouting is what carried them out. One brother went on to become a U.S. Astronaut. Terry became an Air Force officer, a self-made millionaire, a #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and the #2 New TEDx Talk in the World. The neighbor could not have been more wrong.

“If I’m bragging about anything, I’m bragging about Scouting. Scouting changed my life. In fact, Scouting saved my life.”

Terry has been in Scouting, more on than off, for nearly half a century — from a Cub Scout den mascot before he was old enough to join, all the way to council leadership. He earned the rank of Eagle Scout as a youth and, at seventeen, was inducted into the Vigil Honor — the highest honor in the Order of the Arrow, Scouting’s national honor society.

• Eagle Scout · Vigil Honor, Order of the Arrow
• Order of the Arrow Chapter Chief, Lodge Chief, and Section Vice-Chief
• Summer-camp Nature Director, then Program Director — at nineteen
• Scoutmaster, Troop 400 — Spokane Valley, Washington
• Vice President for Programs, Inland Northwest Council
• President, Inland Northwest Council
• President & Chairman of the Endowment, Inland Northwest Council (current)
• Wood Badge staff and course director; National representative for the BSA

It was never about the badges or the rank for their own sake — it was about who a boy becomes on the way to earning them. Terry teaches that a life, like a skyscraper, is built one floor at a time on a solid foundation, each step resting on the one before it. That’s how Scouting does it, every step of the way.

And he’ll tell any room of Scouters that a leader needs a moral compass — and that there has never been a better one than the Scout Law.

• Silver Beaver Award — the BSA’s highest local-council honor for distinguished service to youth
• Distinguished Scouting Service Award
• District Award of Merit
• Vigil Honor, Order of the Arrow
• Arrowman of the Year — named by two different lodges

The proof he’s proudest of isn’t a plaque. Terry helped two of his own sons earn the rank of Eagle Scout — the same rank that changed the trajectory of his life, handed down to the next generation.

Eagle Scout isn’t a line on a résumé for Terry — it’s the operating system. The discipline, the service, the refusal to leave a job half-finished: that started in Scouting and shows up in everything since, from the cockpit to the keynote stage. His Scouting story has been featured repeatedly in local and national press.

Coverage: Fox 13 Memphis · Coeur d’Alene Press