________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
Belvoir now, not company command. You've been selected for major, so don't worry about
it." So, I went on to Belvoir.
Then, at the advanced course, Engineer Branch came down and my assignment officer said,
"You're never going to Leavenworth because you've never had company command."
I said, "Wait a minute. Let's do a little math. We send 50 percent of our officers to
Leavenworth and I got selected at below the zone, which is a 5 percent selection. Doesn't
that really say that I probably will go?"
He said, "No, that's it. You're not going to Leavenworth."
So, luckily, I did.
Q:
Well, I asked this before about the basic course and I'll ask it again, to compare your
experience in the advanced course down at Belvoir with what you were familiar with later
when you were commandant at the Engineer School. It was longer, I think, to start with,
wasn't it? A longer course?
A:
Yes. I really enjoyed the advanced course at Belvoir. It was a nice time with my family. We
lived in Fairfax Village. There were a bunch of our friends there, folks we would see time
and time again, like the Ken Withers, the Bunkers who lived next door, the Barneys. I mean,
here was a great bunch of peers, all there at the same time. Chris Allaire sat next to me in
class. There was a whole bunch of folks we knew that were all there, so it was a very
enjoyable six months. We had two children now and it was an enjoyable time with them.
The course was not overly rigorous, but the course was very good, I thought. I learned some
things. I also learned to play golf there. Chris Allaire got me on the golf course, and it was
the first place I really took to golf because we had afternoons to be able to do that sort of
thing. It didn't have the rigor of the course that was there later when I was commandant.
When I was commandant, Jim Ellis had just been commandant and they'd just gone through
this whole revamping of the advanced course. He put a lot of effort into it with a lot of
people, like "Stretch" Dunn, and really created a dynamic but not easy course that challenged
folks--because they said they really wanted to be challenged.
The course that Jim Ellis had developed was in place and I just provided a little fine-tuning
and add-ons. We completed the execution that was well under way when I arrived as
commandant. It was a much better course than the one I took in 1965. But, once again, I
learned a lot of things from that advanced course. The pace was more leisurely; it might even
have been more enjoyable.
Q:
Did the course at that time include material on the civil works mission of the Corps? Or was
it mostly or entirely military?
A:
The course at that time included a lot of engineering--I mean drainage, how you design
things for drainage. Now it would be TO&E [table of organization and equipment] kind of
construction, you know, construction for the theater of operations and that kind of thing. It
89
Previous Page
