________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
everything, and that enthusiasm drifted down through the ranks. General [Frederick] Kroesen
was the VII Corps commander, later to be the Army Vice Chief of Staff and come back as the
USAREUR commander. They had people oriented back to making things better, making
them right, establishing good order and discipline, getting people into the field so we could
train. Money and resources were coming so people were back in field training, learning their
combat tasks and working as teams. They were addressing the personnel problems, trying to
put money into the housing so that families were happier, thus the soldiers with families were
happier; trying to get rid of the malcontents, isolate the druggie from the good folks, and all
of that.
So, there was certainly a positive command structure and climate that had started things on
the up trend, and we were emerging from the post-Vietnam doldrums. I don't think it was
there yet. We continued on beyond that to improve to the point of a kind of ebullience you
have about the Army of DESERT STORM. We were just then a few years into the all-volunteer
force, and we were starting out and had not yet got to the great recruiting years of "Be all you
can be" that started about 1980. I mean, this was still pre-'80. You recognize in 1980 still
only 54 percent of the recruits were high school graduates, later to rise in '93'94 to over 90
percent.
This period I'm talking about, 1976, still had us recruiting a lot of category4s. We still had
noncommissioned officers that had not gone through the kind of training and improvements
that we had later when we recruited the more positive folks of the early '80s, took them
through basic leadership training and made them noncommissioned officers of a bunch of
other high-quality recruits. So, I guess that would be my comments as to the general climate.
We were back into training. We were going to the field, and REFORGER [Return of Forces
to Germany] exercises were happening regularly, and there was an orientation that--well,
General Blanchard had it throughout the command, but I'm really speaking of VII Corps. I
mean, there was that feeling that you wanted to be training combined arms and that you
wanted to be in the field with infantry, armor, engineers, artillery, and doing things to
improve our combat readiness. The things that service in Europe has always provided, back
when I was a lieutenant, and then now in this particular period when I returned--the fact that
we had a real mission. I mean, there was the Warsaw Pact across the border. The Cav always
was doing border patrols. We fell out and had alerts. There was always the significance that
you knew you were there in a forward deployed posture and you had a real mission.
Therefore you went out and trained the mission. So, we were spending many days in the
field.
As for the state of combat readiness, I think, for its time, it was pretty good. It was certainly
better later when all of the positive things after the pullout from post-Vietnam came
together--that is, the better recruits, the new items of equipment, better facilities, and the
resources for training. Considering the equipment we had at the time and the people, we went
out and trained and I think we did a great job.
The 7th Engineer Brigade had a lot of deficiencies that were really based on the fact that the
engineer force had remained basically unfixed since World War II--that is, we were still a
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