Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
the case of the engineers--to find new, creative ways to fix things, get it right for
warfighting. My responsibility was to ensure the engineer system on the battlefield was right.
Well, from my long background in divisions, I knew that it wasn't right in Europe and knew
what the answer was. We'd almost surfaced it in our REFORGER '77 FTX when I was VII
Corps engineer and 7th Engineer Brigade commander in Germany. It was premature at the
time, and so we worked then on mechanizing Corps engineers, getting APCs [Armored
Personnel Carriers] for them, and doing other system things.
In my first year at Fort Belvoir, one of the things I put down was to fix all the engineer force
structure while I was there. We were already under way in fixing and changing the combat
heavy battalion. By the way, Bob Herndon, who had just finished commanding a combat
heavy engineer battalion in Korea, was back, and for three or four months we used him to
head the team to redesign the combat heavy battalion.
General Kem (second from right) with members of the Headquarters, U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers staff, including Charles Schroer (third from left),
Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Wynn, Commander of the Honolulu District
(fourth from left), and Brigadier General Clair F. Gill, Commander of the
Pacific Ocean Division (right).
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