Oregon City High School JROTC Gets Special Color Guard Assignment

OREGON CITY, OR — The Color Guard members of the Oregon City High School Junior ROTC are used to performing at school events, basketball games and marching in hometown parades, but on June 14, they got to do their job at a higher level – they conducted the presentation of colors at a national cybersecurity conference held in Portland by the U.S. Department of Energy

"Well, we knew we were going to a conference of some kind, a cybersecurity conference," OCHS JROTC Assistant Instructor Rob Aguilar, Sergeant First Class (ret) told Patch. "We understood it to be just some local/regional get together being put on on by something like just the Pacific Northwest area DOE folks or the Oregon offices of the DOE or something like that.

"It was probably just in some larger classroom or something, that we were being asked to provide a color guard for which we've done at various events in the area a thousand times."

Aguilar told Patch that it was only when the students arrived that they discovered what they thought would be a small classroom-type meeting was actually the United States Department of energy's national "Cybersecurity and Technology Innovation Conference" being held in the Hilton Downtown Portland hotel.

"There were 1,400 people from all over the country," Aguilar said. "There were cabinet-level people, people from the White House. We had no idea of the size or magnitude of the event."

Aguilar said that the kids were not phased by the size of the conference.

"They did great," he told Patch.