Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
After the Vietnam War, with a reduced number of commands, it was felt that the Army ought
to pick officers who were the best they had to command troops and not count on the old boy
net to arrange whom our troops were going to be commanded by. The old boy net sometimes
seemed to go on personal likes and dislikes, as opposed to what the record said. Not that the
records were always 100 percent. When you got something as strong as officer efficiency
reports that talked about a person's inability to command troops, you don't share efficiency
reports with people, and thus you could have abuses like that. So, that was one great reason
for centralized command selection.
Q:
Were there some of your counterparts on the staff who didn't seem suited to this sort of job
or didn't like it? It strikes me that this takes a particular type of individual for this sort of job.
Is it something people would adapt to and work towards?
A:
Well, everybody was pretty well hand picked; they were all recommended by somebody. Lou
Tixier, however he did it, went out and checked everybody's pedigree, not just from a file,
but how they interacted with people and the rest of it. So, I think that it was pretty well done.
I'm sure there were one or two who didn't like it so well. We had one who left after a year. I
don't remember his ever really voicing dislike for what was going on, or maybe he just had
another opportunity. I don't know. Basically, we were a pretty congenial group. We'd go
down to lunch together and lament our various problems of the moment and question how
we were ever going to come up with so and so, and that sort of thing.
One difference in duties was managing requirements. In Colonels Division we tracked
colonel requirements, and we had three or four officers who had smaller branches, who
would be the requirements person for TRADOC, for instance. TRADOC would say, "We
need an officer." This officer would have the TRADOC books, and he would know how
many they were authorized to fill, and he would say, "Yeah, that is a valid requirement; send
it to me." It might be a branch-immaterial position, and he, the TRADOC guy, would send it
to four or five assignment officers and say, "This seems suitable to anybody in a branch on an
immaterial basis. Please provide me a person if you have a name."
We would fill it. Sometimes those queries would be from Tixier: "You must nominate a
name." I would sit there and question, "Is this a good kind of position for an engineer to fill?
Is it going to be enhancing for one of my people to do, or is it really not going to be
enhancing and I'd really rather save the officer for another position?" Oftentimes we'd throw
four or five names to the Chief of Assignments, who then would pick one to be the nominee
for the division.
Q:
Maybe this would be a good time to talk about the paper on colonels' assignments that you
had during this period.
A:
Well, OPMS was very new, as I mentioned. It became effective 1 July 1972. Now it had been
approved, I don't even know when--probably the previous November or December. So,
folks had been working on the principles and all the rest of it for some time. However, on
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