These are some personal notes that describe some of my memories and opinions of the organizations that I served with in an Army career that spanned nearly 30 years. If you find this site by accident through a search engine you are welcome to contact me and share your thoughts. Thanks. My e-mail address is BradenClan@ gmail.com.

I had understood that having the Army send me to school at Purdue would require a second tour of duty in Vietnam to "pay" for the schooling. But the Vietnamese War was about over by the time I finished my masters so I was assigned instructor duties at the U.S. Army Engineer School, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. (The school moved in the 1990s to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.)

When we arrived at Fort Belvoir we learned there would be a year's wait for on-post housing so we looked for an off-base place to live. We found a home that was mostly built in Dale City, a very new town about 20 minutes south of the installation. Because it was unfinished, we did get to select paint and carpeting and those kind of things, and that was nice. And the price was decent because a potential buyer had fallen through. We had a fit with the carpet installers, who kept saying that the carpet would be installed and then not doing what they said. In the meanwhile Bonnie and I were living in a house with plywood floors. It got to the point that I threatened the owner with physical violence (something I'm not proud of and thankful the statue of limitations has expired) but the carpet was installed the next day.

After commuting for about a year, we decided to rent out our Dale City home when my name came up on the housing list for Fort Belvoir. It was a good set of quarters and close to my work. Plus all the base shopping and services were there.

Duty at USAES was good, for a number of reasons. Our hours were 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., which were great as compared to hours with a troop unit. My subject area was "concrete;" the Senior Instructor was David Darwin who soon left the Army and went on to a distinguished career at the University of Kansas. During my time at Fort Belvoir I taught concrete construction principles and practice to Special Forces soldiers, enlisted materials specialists, junior engineer NCOs, senior engineer NCOs, engineer lieutenants, engineer captains, and even some engineer field grade officers. Preparing to teach in terms of really learning the material is hard, but once you get past that teaching is easy - it is also a bit exhilarating. The feedback mechanism for instructors at Fort Belvoir was colossal, with every class being surveyed and then having the numbers cranked and the comments collected. Nothing better than getting back a set of evaluation sheets with good numbers and kind words from the students. The toughest class to teach was the Engineer Officer Advanced Course (EOAC), because the last person a captain wants to hear from is another captain. And this was also a time, with the Vietnam war ended, that the Army was going through a Reduction in Force. Many of the EOAC students were understandably nervous, and there were solemn times when the RIF letters came out. These were good officers who served their country admirably in war. But many didn't have an engineering background and struggled with the technical side of the course.

While on the topic of the Vietnamese War ... We lived in a brick duplex at Fort Belvoir. At one point our neighbor was a captain and his family; he was attending EOAC. Let me call him "Gary." Eventually I was his instructor as his section took the Concrete Construction part of the course. When I was teaching I noted that Gary just sat there; he didn't take notes. This was highly unusual because we provided the notebooks with an outline and it would be crazy not to take notes. Remember that these were the days before PowerPoint or Internet-based learning management systems so students had to get their information from the instructor or off the overhead transparencies. I checked into it and found that Gary had stopped taking notes in all of his classes. Worse, it was to the point that he just sat there and didn't participate at all. This was a formula for academic disaster which was a recipe for ending one's military career. I'm not positive, but I think that's what happened. While all this was in process I visited him next door and asked what was going on. I learned that he was still experiencing - in his mind - things from Vietnam that he couldn't shake. It was only years later that I realized he was probably suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD. But at the time we didn't know much about PTSD so poor Gary was another war casualty. I hope he recovered.

Gong back to my earlier statement about being a captain and the tough job of trying to teach other captains: At this time, virtually all the captains in class were Vietnam veterans. Many with a chest full of combat ribbons and medals. They appreciated the opportunity to be at an assignment that provided family time and not much stress. But they did not want to have some other captain talking above their heads or talking down to them. Or teaching a subject that they knew more about than the instructor. And I respected all that. in that regard I tried to deveop the best possible training aids and present interesting examples regarding the subjects I taught (more on that below). With all that as a prelude, I have to share a brief moment with one of my EOAC classes: I don't recall the subject, but it was one of the more difficult - perhaps concrete mix design. And this was to a class that I had already taught some of other subjects within the concrete construction program of instruction, so perhaps I had built up some credibility. As I was talking and using my training aids, a hand was raised in the back of the class, so I paused. The student said, "You're talking too fast for my note-taking." My reply, "Well, maybe if you didn't take notes in crayon," brought down the house!

I do recall one time when that was an EOAC class - well, it was one of the sections - that hated me. It was on a Friday and the subject was airfield pavement design. Big equations, boring stuff. I said my piece and having no more to say let the section out early. This bothered me, so I studied all weekend and on Monday when I taught the other section I was able to fill all the class time with what I though were interesting aspects of airfield pavement design. What I didn't think about was that the first section captains had told their second section buddies that I'd be letting them out early. When this didn't happen they vented all over their evaluation sheets.

For the record I have to note that one of our favorite classes to come through was Special Forces soldiers. They were very smart and probably bored with academics. We taught them in the Concrete Lab, so they all sat on stools around lab tables. I was in one of my first classes with these soldiers, team teaching with Dave, and he told them that for this class we'd be averaging their grades by lab table, so if anyone did poorly in a group it would pull down the group's grade. This was brilliant, there was no one sleeping or goofing off in class because if they did one of their "buddies" would knock them off their stool. It was also a sure thing that when it came time to mix concrete in the 2' x 2' trays we provided, they would mix the concrete with their hands. I guess that trowels were for wimps.

I used a small part of my time at USAES to study for and pass the Professional Engineer examination, a nice qualification for an engineer officer. The PE exam is eight hours long (in the morning pick four questions to answer from a list of about 20 questions and in the afternoon pick four from another list). I was teaching concrete design and had done asphalt design at Purdue so I was counting on getting and passing a question each in concrete and asphalt. It was pretty much a given that one question in each session would be engineering economics, or perhaps better known as time value of money questions. Figuring the present value of an annuity sounds complicated but anyone can make a simple chart to sort out the possible questions and point to the right equation to solve the problem. That was two more. Another reasonable expectation was that there would be a highway design question or two on horizontal or vertical curves in a roadway. Fortunately the instructors in road design at the Engineer School had made some great student workbooks on the subject that would let almost anybody figure out how to do these type problems, so that was one and maybe two more questions. The test was open book and I would be taking in some good engineering reference books and hoped I could pull at least one answer from them. But I still needed another question or two for insurance. I thought about it and decided there might be one or two Sanitation Engineering problems on the test. Of course, today there is no such thing as Sanitary Engineering; it is Environmental Engineering. But in 1972 we were talking about designing waste water treatment plants. I had pretty much skated by this course at Purdue, but had some good notes and thought I could work from them. About half of all my study time was spent in this area. On test day I arrived loaded with about fifty pounds of reference materials and notebooks. Sure enough there were questions on concrete mix design, asphalt mix design, engineering economics (2), and road design (2). I also guessed right on Sanitary Engineering questions, but I couldn't do them because - despite my frantic studying - they looked like Greek to me - the price for skating. I did find one question that could be answered out of an engineering reference book, and I was able to use an old college notebook to do a concrete structural design - whew.

During my time at USAES I met Jim Velezis, who headed the Soils Branch. Jim and I would meet later on in our careers.

Here's something to reflect on: This was about the time that battery-powered hand calculators became somewhat affordable. Probably well over $100 for an instrument that sells today for ten bucks. I had just come from graduate schooling at Purdue and we did all our math on a slide rule to three significant figures. Now we had EOAC students who could get wrong answers to the fifth decimal place.

Training aids for classes. Fort Belvoir had a Training and Audiovisual Support Center, staffed by a professional civilian work force. In those days we didn't have data projectors and Power Point presentations, just overhead projectors. So I'd trek down to the TASC with my set of 30 or so drawings that I'd want made into overheads for my classes and hear that it would take six weeks to get them done. I said okay; and kept taking stuff in. Eventually I had a very nice set of supporting materials.

One of the courses I taught was the Materials Quality Specialist Course (called at that time a Soils Analyst Course). The enlisted men taking this course as part of Advanced Individual Training were generally very bright young soldiers, many with some college, who were to be trained on performing quality control tests for construction projects in the areas of drainage, asphalt, soils, and concrete. They were smart, and good at cranking numbers. Most could - at the end of instruction - do a concrete or asphalt design better than our engineer officer students. They could whip out specifications right off the tables. I enjoyed teaching them, and they probably liked me - up until the final test. A large part of the test where they were given a big sample of sand that I got somewhere and asked, "Can this sand be used for concrete? Why or why not?" I thought this was the situation most like the field, where they don't go down to the local sand pit and specify their aggregate, but just like military operations where they had to use what they had. Of course the sand was not to the specified gradation, and it had organic material, and it had too many fines, but the school answer was that it would work in most cases with some caveats. Oh, they hated a test where there were gray areas - but there is a world of gray.

Within the Engineer School, I taught for the Construction Division that included instruction on materials such as concrete, asphalt, and soils, as well as road and bridge construction. Our Branch Chief, a major, was an old Alabama boy who was not that much into academics. We would get technical papers that had come through his office, and he'd invariably write on them, "If you understand this you're too damn smart."

The most difficult subject in our branch was Soils; important - but hard to learn. Important because soil is the foundation for roads, bridges, buildings ... and if the foundation is bad, the road, bridge or building will likely fail. Students had to learn to make their way through numerous charts and graphs to ensure the base materials did not have too much clay, since clay compresses and that leads to bad things. One of the instructors, however, had a suggestion for reducing something like 30 hours of soils instruction for Engineer Lieutenents into 15 minutes. Tell them, "Sticky dirt (clay) is bad dirt; non-sticky dirt (mixed sand and gravel) is good dirt. If you are not sure, go ask your Platoon Sergeant if the material you have to work with is sticky dirt or non-sticky dirt. If your Platoon Sergeant with his 15 years of engineer experience isn't sure and you with your college degree are not sure, then just make a decision one way or another and look decisive."

In the same building there were instructors to teach Construction Management, which included subjects such as the Critical Path Management, a process for scheduling a project from start to finish and for determining the time required from project start to finish. That department had a somewhat older Captain whose name, as I recall, was Jack Stackhouse. Jack went to his department head, a colonel, and said that he did not believe in. teaching CPM, and respectfully requested a transfer to the Combat Engineering Division. Well, that happened, and soon Jack was in the Demolitions Branch happily teaching students how to blow things up. But there was more: As part of the testing system for lieutenants going through the Engineer Officer Basic Course, they had to undergo field testing where they would go to various stations where they would be given scenarios requiring them to perform some task or tasks within a fixed period of time for a grade. Evidently when lieutenants would reach Captain Stackhouse’s station he would point to a small and nearby bridge and say something like,“Enemy forces will be here in ten minutes and that bridge has to be destroyed to stop its advance. Tell me how much C-4 explosive you’ll use to do the job.” And the lieutenants would run off to the bridge to do things like measure the span lengths and girders and trusses and abutments so they could plug the information into their pocket size handbook of charts and graphs to get the required amount. Unfortunately there was no way that measurements could be made and the data analyzed in ten minutes so the lieutenants would be late in getting back with their answer (and let’s say the correct answer was that with proper placement of the explosives the bridge could be brought down with 22 pounds of C-4) so Jack would flunk them right there. As the shocked lieutenants would get their papers stamped with an “F” Captain Stackhouse would tell them that they should have been smart enough to know there was no way they could get the job done “by the book” in ten minutes so they should have simply taken a quick look at the structure and come back with an answer of something like 100 pounds of C-4. Yes that would have been maybe four times the explosive than needed, but no enemy would have crossed that bridge. Hey, another instructor introducing students to the gray areas of military service.

Lenny and Guy Donaldson were also at Fort Belvoir, and they were our best friends. We did lots of things together.

When I arrived at the Engineer School, the Concrete Section had about five instructors. Then there were four. Then three. Then we lost an officer but gained an NCO. After about 20 months it was down to the NCO and me. I talked to Bonnie and then made a phone call to my assignment officer at the Army's Military Personnel Center. About two weeks later I went to my boss with some papers in my hand and said, "Look, I've come down on orders for Germany."

By the time I left the Engineer School, I had taught a number of engineer soldiers and officers; and it was nice to meet people in other assignments who said they remembered me.