Engineer Memoirs
expression. I remember him. But I didn't have as much direct contact with him.
MacDonnell was my immediate boss for quite a bit of the time.
While I admired Dorland a great deal at first, I didn't admire the way he handled some
of his personnel problems. I thought he could have been more straightforward with us.
I know differently now, but in those days I was kind of dense. The subtle efforts of
these people--they expected you to get the idea--didn't work. If I thought something
ought to be done, I pursued it and wasn't deterred by subtle hints. If they said, "Don't
do this," I wouldn't have done it. But I wasn't steered aside by vague behavior.
The fact that my boss was not enthusiastic about something didn't deter me from
pursuing it. As I got older, though, I learned to read these signals. In those early years,
I didn't do that.
Q:
When you were going to school, did you have a feeling then that this was a critical
time? That your career was going to go in directions that were not--you wanted to be
an Army engineer. You wanted to do military engineering. But getting into this field,
did it seem to you that it was going to take you away from that?
A:
We thought we could do both. We could do both.
Now, let me say this: perhaps it would have taken me away from civil works.
Q:
And it sort of did, didn't it?
A:
It did. But this is another example of something to which I referred earlier. The strength
of the Corps is in having capable people and giving them something to do besides
"squads right."
This was another example of that. This nuclear weapons work was a lot more
challenging intellectually than being a platoon leader or an assistant S3 in an engineer
battalion.
I don't want to short the challenges of troop duty and troop leading. But they don't
develop your larger capabilities. I think you can learn all you need to know at the
various troop levels in a relatively short length of time. Certainly, that was the way my
close associates and I felt.
The Army has changed a little bit. There is more emphasis today on the ramifications
of troop leading, and they are trying to achieve a higher standard.
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