Vernon K.
Wall's when they made the big changes and reorganization under Joe
was a major
reshaping of the whole directorate.
A ..
Joe
was one, I think, that was pushing for the engineering to be all one
organization, not have an engineering, Civil Works, and engineering, military. He wanted
it all in one.
Q ..
More like a division or a district structure?
A ..
Yes, he wasn't in favor of the two different engineering groups.
Q ..
Well, I know he told me one time that Gianelli got him very early on and said, "You guys
are the Corps of Engineers, you don't even have a division of engineering as a major
component of your headquarters. It's down in Civil Works. I guess from that point on
he was looking for some way to.
A ..
But then when it come time to make the swap, Gianelli didn't want it all to go together.
Q.
Well, he's a politician.
l
A ..
He was the one who didn't want to put it all together. He was arguing with
that
he should have it all together, and then when it came time to do it he was the one that was
the fly in the ointment to keep it from being a full engineering division.
But one of the things that kind of happened, I think, was when they put it all together was
that Civil Works kind of lost out on that, too, because the military had such a strong
budget. There was so much going on in military work that there wasn't enough time
hardly to look at Civil Works.
Q ..
During that period of about the early `82 or `83 when Civil Works had no new starts and
no budgets?
There was a lot of work going on. So the Chief's administrators in the engineering side
A
of the house were spending their time on military things so that you couldn't hardly get
time to talk to them. They were so busy that there wasn't anything they could do about
it. They just had to spend more time on military than they did on Civil Works. That was