Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Domingo, not far from the military academy. It was probably an 8- to 10-kilometer drive
from the academy to the Trujillo villa. It was a pretty nice building with a fountain in front.
We put some plywood around the fountain and it became the shower for the troops. There
was a small swimming pool on the second floor. It had a huge master bedroom that became
the operations center, with a couple of walk-in closets off that where the S3 and assistant S
3 kept their bunks. It made a really nice command post for the battalion headquarters.
As assistant division engineer, I lived down at the military academy with the rest of the 82d
headquarters staff.
My point was there still were hostilities, and 32 lives were lost during the fighting.
Consequently, company commanders were changing their command posts constantly. After
all, U.S. doctrine says you've got to change command posts routinely, daily, so you don't
take artillery fire. So, the way it worked was the company commander of A Company, 2d
Battalion, 325th Infantry, would decide he needed an apartment. He would roust the
occupants out and he'd take it over and he'd occupy it for two or three days. He'd call the
coordinates into the brigade and on up to the division. We reported it to the Jacksonville
District, and the district would go over and pay the claim when it was all over with. Now,
that was a sort of a hell of a way to run a railroad. So, I got the division commander to put
out the edict that, although it was still a hostile period, we really weren't having artillery fire
and most folks were probably in command posts that didn't have to move every couple of
days to avoid rounds.
The division and engineer battalion were transitioning then. While I was there we had an
operation one morning to clear the hostile downtown area. We pulled down our wire,
marched our folks forward all the way to the sea, restored all the no man's land, and restored
the town to a single whole instead of two sides. With that the 82d started to pull out, leaving
the 1st Brigade and our 307th Engineer Battalion A Company. Captain Howard Graves, now
assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the A Company commander.
Lieutenant Colonel John G. Waggener was the battalion commander. We then left the A
Company with the brigade, and deployed back to Fort Bragg. So, I was down there about
three months.
Q:
Were things pretty much--you referred to this, most of the fighting had stopped?
A:
That's right. There was still a period of hostilities but actual fire fights--there'd be reports of
fire at night and that sort of thing--most of the action, maneuver and fire, had ceased. There
was a lot of patrolling around the various areas where Colonel [Francisco] Caamao [Deo]
was located. This was a time when Lieutenant General Bruce Palmer, XVIII Airborne Corps
commander, was trying, with Ambassador [Elsworth] Bunker, to bring a rightful government
into power.
Q:
There were troops from other Latin American countries there too?
A:
Some.
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