Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
the 577th and the 307th, in terms of readiness, training? They were different situations, of
course.
A:
Well, they were absolutely different. In the 307th Engineer Battalion (Airborne), I joined a
battalion that always had a high priority. The 82d Airborne Division always has had a high
priority. The 307th had a very high caliber group of officers.
A lot of noncommissioned officers had been in and out of that battalion for years, so they
really knew what they were doing. The officers were very high caliber, and senior. You
didn't have lieutenant company commanders. In the 307th, we had captains. So, it was just a
higher caliber of folks to begin with.
Second, the 82d works very hard on motivation and the "can-do" thing. We'd just been in the
Dominican Republic and everybody felt good about that operation. We knew how to make
things happen.
By the same token, the jobs we had to do, the training--I mean, there were high standards for
training. You had to do it right. We didn't have to produce things and build things on the
order of what we had to do in Vietnam.
The 577th Engineer Battalion (Construction) was altogether different. It was a battalion with
very lean leadership from the standpoint of experience. We had company commanders who
had less than a year of commissioned service. Even when we replaced them, the
replacements would have less than three years of commissioned service. I would say some of
our commanders in the 307th were in their fourth, fifth, and sixth years of commissioned
service.
So, you had people in the 577th who were very junior. They never had an opportunity to
really find themselves as platoon leaders and company execs before they were thrust into
company command. They had great heart, all well motivated, but they just didn't have
experience and maturity. We didn't have that cohesive drive on motivation that we had in the
82d. We did have the kind of motivation that professionals possess when they want to do a
good job.
We had good noncommissioned officers for construction, and, as I mentioned before, I think
they really knew their job of vertical construction and horizontal construction and that sort of
thing.
Both battalions had maintenance soldiers and leaders who really knew their jobs, but
certainly the job in the 577th was a lot more difficult than the 307th with its small amount of
equipment and the small hand-operated stuff in the 82d. The 82d's standards of having to
meet a roadside vehicle spot check were a lot higher than when we were operational in
Vietnam.
So, there was a big difference, and I think the people that I served with in the 307th, 82d,
could have fallen into the 577th and done a superb job. My commander in the 307th was
Lieutenant Colonel Jack Waggener. He'd come over and was now commanding the 45th
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