Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
had bridge design. It was really preparing you for the theater of operations kind of
construction.
It was a lot more engineering than what our course evolved to later, which was the engineers'
contribution to combined arms and the overall theater. We had some of both in the more
recent designed course. There was just no place that I ever learned civil works from the
standpoint of designing dams. You might design buildings, but you wouldn't design dams.
Nor did you talk about the planning process that we have now, or operating locks and dams
in a system, or anything like that.
Q:
I think I've read or heard people talk about there being some of that, but probably not a great
deal, in the '30s, in the advanced course in the '30s. I haven't read directly about that, but I
think that's interesting, an interesting difference that might be explained by the role of civil
works in the Corps in the '30s as opposed to the role in the '60s.
You mentioned several of your classmates were there also in the advanced course?
A:
My West Point classmates in that case, or--
Q:
Yes. Sounds like there were several of you that were a little out of sync.
A:
Yes, Ken Withers, Chris Allaire were both there. Well, you didn't have to go as long as I did.
We had people there with four or five years of service. The big driver at that point, in '65,
was that we were really starting the buildup in Vietnam, and so people were starting to go
and return with the one-year change. So, you might have gone to the advanced course before
you went to Vietnam or you might have been delayed going because you went to Vietnam
and then came back.
Q:
Were you one of the few of your classmates who'd been to Vietnam?
A:
Yes. I was one of the few who had been there.
Q:
So, you must have been consulted about those--
A:
Consulted by a lot of folks who were going there.
Q:
Because it's in the summer or fall '65 that some of the engineer units came through--
A:
That's right, the big buildup was in '65. Before that time it had primarily been an advisory
effort.
Q:
I remember reading in some of the Vietnam engineer books about commanders looking
around Belvoir for refrigerators to take over. They realized that they probably wouldn't go
with enough refrigerators, so they were trying to see if they could find something.
A:
Yes, well, when I was at Bragg later, when the engineering units were forming, or other
units, they would pack all of those kinds of things in addition to the regular TO&E because
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