Ernest Graves
you imagine having your entire operation dependent on something that wears out every
two or three months and not having a replacement on hand?
Q:
It's ridiculous, of course.
A:
That's what I mean about being tough-minded about things. If you have a job to do, sit
down and figure out what's critical about it and make damn sure that those critical
items are taken care of.
I'll give you another example. When we were working on this QL4 job, we had all
these bulldozers down in the mud. We had terrible troubles with the buildup of this mud
on the machines affecting the cooling of the engines. The front of the dozer, where the
air for cooling reaches the radiator, would get all caked with mud, and then you
wouldn't get cooling. The engines would overheat and you'd have failures, bearings and
everything, and the whole engine would have to be changed out.
The answer was to have a regular drill to clean the radiator screen. That means
somebody has to get off a comfortable seat, get his feet dirty, and get in there with a
shovel and work for half-an-hour to clean away the caked mud.
That's just a question of who's in charge of this operation. We had a lot of trouble with
that. Maybe I was too hard, but my attitude was, the ultimate measure of these
commanders was whether they could get these things done or not.
Q:
That probably wasn't the only special problem in maintenance that the delta imposed
on you.
A:
It was tough going in the mud, particularly the whole problem of working on the
equipment when everything was muddy and dirty. It wasn't cold. I can say that for it.
But other than that, it was a very adverse environment.
Some of the commanders had what it took. Some didn't. When [Lieutenant Colonel
John J.] Jack Plunkett assumed command of the 93d Engineers--
Q:
Was that one of your battalions?
A:
One of my battalions. Things were in a deplorable state. By golly, after he'd been there
two months, he had everything working. He put in a fine maintenance program. He was
living proof that you can do it if you put your mind to it. He was blessed with a
somewhat lighter construction workload. But nevertheless, watching him do this
convinced me, if you're in command of something, you have to decide what's important
and get it done.
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