Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
I also had other division engineers who would call me and say, "Sam, what are you thinking
about for my new deputy?"
So, concerning your original point, there was a lot of interaction between me and the others.
I'd get called by and talk to all engineer colonels and almost every engineer general in the
Army, plus a whole bunch of others.
I said later on, and I told him this, that one person that I never did meet or dialogue with
during that time was Joe Bratton. He, of course, later became Chief. He made brigadier the
summer that I reported to the Colonels Division and left my "client" list. He was assigned to
SHAPE [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe], and was over there really out of the
realm of dealing with me, so we never had any dealings. So, it was one important exception
to that comment you made.
Q:
It sounds like it's sort of brokerage; there's a lot of input and the people in the Colonels
Division are the central point where this information comes together and gets massaged into
decisions.
A:
I think that's a good term; I think I was doing a lot of brokering. I was the person. It was, to
start off with, almost frightening. Chuck Fiala, my predecessor, told me that in the first four
or five weeks he would wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats and wonder how he
would ever get through the day. In fact, that happened to me. I would just wake up at three or
four in the morning wondering how I was going to come up with the names of those three
folks needed today to nominate to somebody.
Starting out I hadn't started an interaction with anyone. My knowledge base was only as
good as my personnel roster, and I didn't yet really have a feel for it.
In my first week we had an engineer colonel who was kicked out of Vietnam for alcoholism.
He'd only been there 10 days. So, we got a blistering back-channel from General [John E.]
Murray in Vietnam to the Chief of Colonels Division, about three pages long, talking about
how inept we were to submit a name like that--"please don't do any more and send over a
real water walker immediately."
So, here I am wondering how am I going to get a real water walker, so we would at least have
a name to send him in a couple of days, and one that we could break free and send over in
two or three weeks. How was I ever going to do that? I mean, this was two or three days into
the job.
Then, about the third day in the job, I was called down to General Gene Forrester's office--
he was the Director of Officer Personnel. He said General Sid Berry, who was the
commander of the Office of Personnel Operations at the time, was establishing a new thing
called the Military Personnel Center [MILPERCEN] and we were going to move from the
tempos to the Hoffman Buildings. We were going to reorganize into the new command the
next Monday, and General Berry had selected Joe Jansen, the Engineer Branch chief, as his
chief of staff. Would I hurry up and pick the right guy to be the next Engineer Branch chief.
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