________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
up then for the next hour in the barracks until he was talked out by a couple of his friends and
surrendered.
That was rather shocking to everyone. It was probably our first knowledge that there were
drugs around and they were to be a problem. Drugs were not a major thing, like they came to
be a couple of years later. There were very few drug incidents.
We got some captains in, as I mentioned, and put them into company command positions in
places where discipline was a little ragged. For instance, we put Captain Sam Champi in as
company commander of C Company. He had been an all-East lineman for Army--West
Point. He was a huge guy; I mean, he was just intimidating to look at.
Captains Kurt Rhymers, Dave Pierce, and Bob Lowry came in, also class of '66, and some
others, and so we got stronger leadership. Once the summer changeover finished up, when
we got those other people in, I put the more senior ones in the company commands. We had a
battalion executive officer and S3, both majors. Dick Copeland came in to be the S3. Pat
Cummings moved up to be the executive officer.
We got a new command sergeant major but he didn't work out and, after three or four
months, I took the B Company first sergeant, First Sergeant Benini, and made him the
command sergeant major, and he was superb. So, we applied a lot of leadership by
assignment and by the sergeant major's and my getting around often to the various units in
the battalion.
When we moved down to the Don Duong area, we moved into the three locations that I
mentioned. Previously in Phu Yen we had been splintered, with some people living at Vung
Ro Bay, some people living halfway down Route 1, some people living at the airfield at Tuy
Hoa, and most of us working south.
So, we worked at it, but didn't have major problems, other than that one bad incident.
Q:
That's an important function of a battalion commander, isn't it, to take his personnel, his
officers, and assign them where they're needed to correct problems.
A:
Absolutely. You've got to really know your people, and pick people to go to the right place,
and change them when necessary. I relieved the concrete detachment commander while he
was there because he just wasn't functioning; he just didn't have what it takes.
We had to work at it. It was such a big battalion, 1,400-some folks with all of the extra
companies. When the second engineer light equipment company came in, they were from the
Vermont National Guard. We kept them for a couple of months while they worked, trained,
and acclimatized in-country. Then they moved off to Ban Me Thuot to join the 70th Engineer
Battalion for the upcoming work there just as we were moving on down to the south to work
on QL21A.
That assignment of the Vermont National Guard brought its own particular problems. There
were people who'd left civilian jobs who weren't sure they knew why they were in Vietnam
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