Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
When we get out to Fort Leonard Wood, we'll have all that as a total entity so that the basic
officer students will be operating in leadership positions in their platoons--platoon leader,
squad leader--but that platoon will be part of a company and part of a battalion. We'll have
the whole hierarchal perspective there, and that platoon leader won't now just be a platoon
leader in a platoon working for part of a company. He'll be a platoon leader working for a
company commander who's totally involved in his training and one of the trainers working
for a battalion commander, who's totally involved in that training. We call that the "unit
context," and that's a major organizational change as well.
Q:
Want to continue with your discussion on looking back at the whole issue of the relocation of
the school to Fort Leonard Wood and go into that?
A:
Well, I arrived in the job, and the decision to relocate had basically been made. I forget when
it was announced, but I think that in February 1985 it was officially announced. So, I didn't
get involved at all in the decision about whether to go or not to go, but I immediately got
caught up in a swell of people that said it was the wrong decision, a terrible thing, and so
forth. I don't feel that way. I think that from the standpoint of training and keeping the
engineer part of the force effective, that Fort Belvoir's just too tight. It's certainly a
wonderful place and it's got a lot of tradition, but the fact is it's just going to be better when
we get officer training and soldier and noncommissioned officer training all out at the same
place so we all start from the same focal point. We're going to be able to do a lot of things
out there we can't do right now here.
From my standpoint, we're also going to get rid of a lot of distractions that I have right now.
Being an installation commander in the National Capital Region has a lot of other things that
go along with it that cause you to sometimes wonder how you can maintain your focus on a
mission like keeping the engineer force prepared for war. For example, the Secretary of the
Army puts out a new smoking policy and all of the national TV networks with Washington
offices come to the closest post wanting to interview soldiers about what they think about the
secretary's policy.
We have a hospital here that serves a very large population that comes in for its share of
public visibility as we do things here that others do. We have 39 different activities on post,
each with its own individual things that require some effort. Yet, of all the major TRADOC
posts, I don't have a brigadier general assistant commandant.
The Secretary of the Army hosted a dinner for all of his civilian aides when they came to
town, some 250, at our officers club last Monday night. So, the post resources are used for a
lot of other different kinds of functions not commensurate with the resources allocated to all
TRADOC posts for the kind of jobs they do. Not only do we do them, but there are certainly
things that cause me to commit time to.
All in all, what I was starting to talk about really was the fact that I think that the move's a
good one and it'll have a lot of benefits, although it'll continue to take some emotional toll
among many folks who don't want to go. At the same time, our real challenge is to maintain
continuity and not to lose institutionally as we cross that transition period. That's always a
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