Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Some years before--I came over in '87, and so I'd say that would be in about '85 probably--
it was decided that it was probably in the best interests of everyone if they brought their own
furniture over. Rather than having this big inventory of government furniture to issue people,
traded in and out, and having to have a maintenance activity and a refurbishing activity and
that sort of thing, it was probably more economical to go ahead and let people bring their
own things.
It had been tried at certain higher grade levels: senior sergeant and major and above, who
then had the ability to bring the full complement of furniture over, and they called that "full
JTR" [joint travel regulations].
Then it was decided to expand full JTR to everyone, not just the senior people. A briefing
was prepared and taken to General Thurman proposing that that policy be approved.
He not only disapproved it at that time but decided that the people who had previously been
able to bring their furniture over--the senior sergeants, the majors, and above--would no
longer be permitted to bring their furniture over, and they would go back to the other policy,
which had the acronym of "limited JTR."
I was one of those impacted by that change of policy in that, whereas I thought when I was
assigned as DCSENGR I was going to take all my furniture over, I had to go over with my
limited JTR allowance of 2,000 pounds and get government furniture. I found when I got
there that the government furniture wasn't available, and some of it was ratty, and it took an
awful long time to get it.
I was the DCSENGR responsible for the whole program, so I figured if that's the kind of
action I was getting, it must be not too good throughout the command. So, I looked around
and found out it wasn't very good: a lot of complaints and a lot of unhappy wives and
families.
It was very limiting. I mean, you could have only two end tables. You were really limited to
what you could do. You couldn't bring your own over.
So, General Otis said, "Well, why don't we do something about it? Why don't we go back?"
We did the numbers and found it was still more economical to do it the full JTR way.
Besides, now the Department of the Army was reneging on the program amounts of money
that they had put in the program to buy the furniture to support giving everybody furniture
rather than having them bring their own. So, on the one hand, they were reneging on the
money available, and on the other hand, the policy had caused a lot of complaints and really
lessened the quality of life for soldiers and their families.
We started doing the numbers, and we got some help from the analytic capability available in
the headquarters to do a study and figure out what it should be. What we proposed was that
we have a "flexible JTR," and that is, people could bring what they wanted, and we would
fill in the gaps around that.
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