Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
brought him my concerns first. We had several times discussed different kinds of options,
different approaches. The whole branch concept was out there, but there was a connotation
that this was not combat arms, that it was only for combat service support. So, there was a lot
of emotion about it. Some people felt we had to be in regiments like infantry and artillery.
Others felt we just had to be in something. Everybody else was now starting to wear
regimental insignia and still engineers weren't. We'd get these messages from the field; we
had to do something. So, General Heiberg convened a meeting of some retired senior
officers. I can't recall specifically who was there, but I believe it included Clarke, Morris,
[Frank] Camm, Bachus, and LeTellier.
General Heiberg and I were there, and after he kicked off the meeting I gave a little brief just
to start to get the discussion moving. Our intent was really to get the counsel of these alumni
to help us sort out where we were. We got the same crosscurrent of different thoughts--got
to be like the other combat arms, got to be whole branch; can't we do something--we just
had all kinds of things on the table. I came out of that meeting about as muddled as I went
into it. I sat down just trying to figure it all out and wrote a think piece with some questions
on the subject.
I tried to throw out a question, then answer the question and just let the logic come out. What
I really did was to just put my own thinking to paper, and that brought me around to believe
that we should have a whole branch concept--because our engineer allegiance, most
specifically officer allegiance, is to the Corps as a whole and the history and the heritage of
the Corps. Our noncommissioned officer allegiance, I felt, was to the unit. Because we have
the soldiers and the noncommissioned officers trained at Fort Leonard Wood only coming to
Fort Belvoir when they go to the advanced noncommissioned officers course and officers
trained at Fort Belvoir maybe never going to Fort Leonard Wood, we never brought the two
together. We are going to have that opportunity with the school coming together at Fort
Leonard Wood in 1989. So, for officers, battalions and regiments as regimental focus would
be artificial. I recognized there were general service regiments and regiments in World War
II, but that kind of history is long gone. What I mean is that when we're starting to talk
bonding and all the kind of thoughts that General Wickham was talking about, then we're
talking about a more immediate, personal kind of thing, more allegiance than periodic
adjustment. So, trying to set up put-together regiments, in my mind, was artificial.
I wrote the paper as a think piece, and it just seemed to come out that we ought not to have a
regiment in the infantry regimental scheme of things, but we ought to find a solution that
allowed us to keep the strong bonding that the Corps of Engineers has now to its people and
at the same time emphasize where engineers serve, and that is in battalions. So, the paper
came out that way and I sent it to General Heiberg. He wrote back and said he agreed, and we
proceeded in that way. [See Appendix B.]
Now, there's one other aspect I think will be of particular interest to you about the engineer
regiment. Early on, even before what I've just described, both General Heiberg and I had
discussed, and both of us recognized because we both had served at both the headquarters
and in the field in USACE, that the question comes up, "What about USACE? How does that
fit?" Both of us had the feeling that we already had in USACE one of the strongest bonded
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