Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
replacing one, it's hard to have overlaps. So, I always appreciated those comments by Carroll
LeTellier. Thereafter, as I rotated into different positions I would try to convey that same
thought to personnel assignment folks too. I was really interested in a quality kind of person
that could do the job. If that meant waiting some period of time, let's talk because I was not
insistent on the overlap but, rather, a tradeoff and a little time to get the quality.
Q:
Well, along those lines, this is really the beginning of the time period at the end of the
Vietnam War when the size of the Army went down, I believe, and the size of the officer
Corps decreased, so that must have placed additional pressures on you to match the man with
the job.
Was there a shortage of colonels? Were there more positions than colonels available, or did it
stay pretty much in sync?
A:
I think the colonel level stayed fairly well in sync; we didn't have a shortage of positions nor
a shortage of colonels. It seemed to be fairly well in balance. We had the normal people
leaving through the retirement system.
This was unlike in the company grades, where we were going through a reduction in force in
that same time frame, especially year groups '66'67. The branches were dealing with those
reductions but we in Colonels Division weren't dealing with those. We still had turbulence,
but the turbulence was starting to abate; we were trying to get back to leaving people in place
longer. And, of course, everybody wanted to be left in place longer because we had had such
turbulence.
Q:
From looking at the other people working in the branch, did you have a different relationship
with the Chief's office than--well, the Chief being one of the few branch chiefs left, that
makes it a little different. Did you work differently than your infantry counterpart or your
artillery counterpart?
A:
Yes, I think so from that standpoint. Then there were other places, too, such as the
intelligence assignment officer who was certainly tied to the Deputy Chief of Staff,
Intelligence, and talked the same kind of way. It was different from infantry and armor and
artillery, but it wasn't singular. Ordnance, transportation, and quartermaster assignment
officers got help from the AMC community, the DCSLOG [Deputy Chief of Staff for
Logistics] and so forth.
Now I would say that has changed somewhat. Of course, I was at the other end of that
scheme later with the advent of TRADOC and the school commandants being the proponent
for their branch. So, now the branch school commandant is a person who plays in
assignments quite considerably. Whereas when I was assigning engineer colonels, the school
commandant was contacted for his own assignments, but we didn't interact for others.
Later I became the commandant and Engineer Branch "proponent." I then participated in the
dialogue on which troop commands folks go to, and with the Chief of Engineers on district
engineer assignments.
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