Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Thus, there was a staff that addressed those kinds of things and also a community
commander who was responsible for both the tactical side and the support, community side. I
couldn't say, "That's another's responsibility, go do it." I had the responsibility to get it done
and make sure it was done for both sides of the house.
Q:
Well, I want to talk about some particular subissues that you've been talking about, but
obviously a lot of those issues had to be handled by your staff. What sort of issues reached
your desk? What sort in that two-year time period?
A:
From the community side of the house?
Q:
From the community side that occupied more of your attention than others.
A:
Well, just the whole host of things pertinent to a city. There were the streets that weren't
getting fixed; the budget issues--trying to figure out where we needed things. For instance,
we had a theater that only had a men's room, didn't have a women's room. So, we had to
work that through the facility engineer to try to get that accomplished--so that was a
facilities kind of thing.
There were traffic issues. The Germans wanted to change a highway and change
access/egress to our facilities. There were many problems in the school. We had a big
concern about drugs and drug availability around the high school. Although I didn't have a
provost marshal working directly for me--the provost marshal worked for the greater
community--nevertheless, the provost marshal always had people out in my community
area. We had one plainclothes policeman who worked around the school. He would report in
to me as the community commander involved as well as make his normal reports for the
blotter back to the provost marshal. That didn't go to the community commander, General
Ott, except as reported by the provost marshal, but every day it came to me so that I could do
something about it. General Ott's expectation was that I would do something about the
incidents.
There were a lot of issues that were morale and discipline issues. Families would play loud
music. Families were inconsiderate of others. Families had children who were truants, who
ran away from school, or who would pick on other people. When you live in such close
proximity as we did over there, there are a lot of those family kinds of issues. There was a
staff structure to try to deal with those at a low level, but ultimately some of them came to
me. Through our procedures they might come to me with a recommendation that the family
be sent home--that extreme--or the family would be denied certain privileges.
There were all kinds of dealings with the local mayors and governing officials. Oftentimes,
they were meetings--their staff and ours--so we understood each other better, talked with
each other. There was a lot of that kind of activity, and we would always invite the local
officials to our changes of command and receptions, and we would get invited over there.
Each side was trying to keep a dialogue going so that when the sticky things came up, such as
a bunch of soldier hoodlums who damaged some cars downtown and got thrown in jail, that
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