And experience. Do you have any
comments on this?
A:
No question that this was a vital
thing. When the first Army engineer
units went over, they were quite well
trained, and had capable officers and
n o n c o m m i s s i o n e d officers They
could do what a construction
battalion was supposed to do. But,
because of the one-year rotation
policy, after the first rotation, the
command had lost all the best trained
and most experienced NCOs and
officers.
As a result, a unit that arrived there,
say, in the fall of 1965, and did an
outstanding job for the
year,
became a totally new unit when the
leadership all rotated out at the same
Maj. Gen. Carroll Dunn, J-4, Military
time. The lack of a call-up of the
Assistance Command, Vietnam, 1966.
Reserves or National Guard removed
the ability to feed experienced
personnel into the system. With a continued rotation, every year there was, in effect,
a new unit that did not have the capabilities of the unit that had been there, even though
it carried the same number. It was composed totally of new personnel without the
experience of the previous people.
As we began to get draftees and lost the experienced Regular Army personnel, there
was a major adverse effect on the capability of troop units to execute construction. This
didn't mean they didn't keep trying, but it certainly limited their effectiveness until they
experienced very rapid on-the-job training simply by being forced to take on the work,
Q:
This forced you to rely more on civilians, did it not?
Yes. It meant that we did rely heavily on the civilian contractor, So far as I know, this
A:
was the first time that the U.S. had ever used a civilian contractor in an active theater
of war. There were times when the civilian contractor-the combine of Raymond
International, Morrison-Knudsen, Brown and Root, and J. A. Jones-had as many as
50,000 Vietnamese working in their construction forces under the supervision of
several thousand Americans.
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