My Share of the Task(22)
To address chronic leadership problems that had been exacerbated by the six-month command tours used in Vietnam, in 1974 the Army initiated boards, composed of senior officers, to select battalion and brigade commanders centrally, which improved quality, while command tours were lengthened, providing greater continuity.
Better pay, better recruiting, and a difficult economy all helped improve the quality of the force. While I’d struggled as a young lieutenant in the 82nd to persuade soldiers to reenlist for a second or third tour of duty, by the early 1980s we held boards to select which soldiers in the battalion would be allowed to reenlist.
The conditions were set for a renaissance.
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If the Army was undergoing such a renewal, it wasn’t immediately apparent to me as I arrived at Fort Stewart in coastal Georgia. The post appeared to have at least one foot in a previous century.
And I wasn’t joining the renaissance intentionally. I’d volunteered for Fort Stewart and its 24th Mechanized Infantry Division with the sole objective of making it easier to reach my goal of an assignment to the 1st Ranger Battalion, stationed only thirty miles away at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah. To qualify for the Rangers, I still needed to command a conventional company—my reason for going to Korea, only to find myself diverted to be the operations officer in the Joint Security Area. Because Fort Stewart and the 24th Mech were not traditionally coveted assignments, I assumed I could get company command fairly quickly.
After a short visit with her parents in South Carolina, Annie and I drove down Interstate 95 to Georgia, pulled onto Highway 144 near the small community of Richmond Hill, and passed a sign announcing we’d entered Fort Stewart. There was no gate or military police checkpoint, as became ubiquitous after 9/11, but I slowed down assuming we’d soon enter the main post.
We didn’t. After driving nineteen miles through dark marshy pine forests, we finally pulled into the small center of the installation and found the welcome center that most army posts have for arriving personnel to complete administrative processing and coordinate details like housing—for military families, always a troubling concern. Fort Stewart’s center was in an old wooden World War II–era building, the kind built to be temporary. Now, forty years after FDR’s presidency, it remained in use. In 1982, even the nearby post headquarters was the same construction.
At the welcome center, we checked into the availability of military quarters—small but convenient 1950s-era duplexes. A sergeant working the desk assured Annie and me we’d wait at least twenty months. We ended up renting a small apartment for seven months before the housing office called, and a friend and I moved several pickup truck loads of belongings into a set of two-bedroom quarters.
I’d never been to Fort Stewart but had assumed life there would be much like bustling Fort Bragg. It wasn’t. Established in 1940 and sprawling across a huge expanse of swampy terrain that once held a patchwork of rice plantations, Stewart was used during the war to train soldiers in antiaircraft skills, first on wooden replicas until the accelerating defense production could produce the real metal ones. In subsequent decades, Fort Stewart had experienced a roller-coaster ride of booms and busts. The limited development of the post’s facilities and the neighboring town of Hinesville seemed to anticipate the next bust more than a possible boom.
I reported to the personnel assignment officer, anticipating immediate posting to an infantry battalion. Instead I was told that I had been promised to the Directorate of Plans and Training. The DPT was an installation-level staff responsible for coordinating military schools, ammunition management, and a host of things I wanted no part of. I wanted to lead soldiers, command a company, and then go to the Rangers. I asked the personnel officer to understand. He was sympathetic and said he would try to work something out.
After days of uncertainty while I waited at home, he told me he couldn’t work any alternative to DPT. I was deeply disappointed—first in Korea and now in Fort Stewart, I felt deprived of a chance to command. While my peers from West Point were commanding units, I would sit in a wooden building for who knew how long, working with civilians and a few soldiers—whom most people assumed had been rejected by regular units. At home that night, I talked with Annie about resigning from the Army.