Today I mailed the Sep-Oct 2006 finished edition of Army Engineer Magazine to the printers in Rolla Missouri. If all goes well, I'll have a color proof to review next week, and then a week or so after that, it will be mailed to AEA Members from the AEA's Fort Leonard Wood office.
The new issue has some great stuff in it, which I hope you will like. The major theme involves reconstruction in Iraq and Afghasnistan, but I also included an original article involving Army Engineer OCS in 1966-1967, when it was located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. I was a part of the cadre back then (two assignments) so had some background, and a lot of memories and photos to share. If you are a grad of that era Engineer OCS, you'll be transported back in time.
I would have liked to be more specific in the article concerning all the stuff Tactical Officers put candidates through at the time, but felt I ought to leave that out, other than to mention there were some good and bad "correctional measures" taken by sometimes overly creative TACs.
I did not include the following in the article, but I remember one time when two of the TACs assigned to the company I commanded, decided, after they caught their class had secretly ordered and received a stack of pizzas late one night, to eat said pizzas INSIDE a garbage dumpster container located behind the company mess hall. Not everyone in the platoon could fit into the dumpster, so the TACS make them line up and take their turn. To make it worse, the TACS poured water on top of the candidates as they entered the dumpster. There were apparently lots of laughs, and the TACS got their point across, but when I found out about it the next day, I had to sit them down and have a talk about being less "creative". This was but one incident, in one company, and there were four battalions worth of companies in the Officer Candidate Regiment at the time, each with their own TAC creativity.
Maybe some of you reading this have some OCS stories to share.
