Engineer Memoirs
then. It was a big area between Inchon and Seoul, which the Army had built into a large
depot area. The 44th Compound was there.
Q:
Was your whole battalion there?
A:
No, some companies were out. Company C was up in the direction of Chunchon, where
the whole battalion had been and had built the cantonment for the 4th Missile
Command. They had worked all the preceding winter on this.
I arrived in September. Soon after that Company B went down at Osan, south of Seoul.
One of the major airfields is there.
Habitually the 44th had people spread out. Shortly after I arrived there, because of the
personnel shortages, they inactivated C Company. Most of the time that I was the
commander, the battalion had only Headquarters and Service Company and A and B
Companies.
I didn't have that hard a time getting a grip on things in the 44th. However, I learned
a very important lesson there, from a captain named Pat Conboy who had been a
policeman in the Los Angeles or the Long Beach police force before he had come back
on active duty in the Army for the Korean War. He had been in World War II, had been
out, and then had come back.
As you do when you are commander, I would go around and see everybody. After I had
been doing this a couple of weeks, Conboy said that I was being too tough on the men,
that I was not giving them enough credit for what they were doing well, and that morale
was sagging because I didn't seem to appreciate all the good work that the battalion
had done. Most of my remarks were critical.
He told me this in a very good way, and I saw immediately that he was right. Maybe I
should have known this before, but I didn't appreciate it enough. I made a concerted
effort when I went on a job to be upbeat with the people. Of course, you shouldn't
correct people in public either, or if you do offer advice in public, you do it in a way
that doesn't find personal fault.
So I learned a lot there in those first couple of months about how to deal with my
subordinate commanders and the soldiers in the battalion, and that paid off in terms of
doing things right.
But I also did a lot about getting things organized, particularly in the administrative area
and in the area of maintenance. We achieved a tremendous improvement.
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