The 508th Maintenance Detachment at Fort Lewis, Washington, was preparing to sing its swan song, so to speak. In other words, the unit was preparing for an inactivation. After I had received the inactivation order from the area support group headquarters, I was instructed to prepare all MTOE (Modification Table of Organization and Equipment) equipment for inspection and lateral transfer to a newly formed maintenance company. The inspection and inventory of the MTOE equipment was coordinated and performed by personnel from the Installation Supply and Support Division (ISSD) at Fort Lewis. After all of the MTOE equipment had been transferred to the newly formed maintenance company, I was instructed by the group headquarters to start drawing down the detachment headcount. The guidance I received from the group headquarters concerning headcount was that I could maintain a minimum essential staff to continue detachment operations until the detachment was completely inactivated. I was instructed to provide the group headquarters with a list of names of essential personnel required to conduct detachment operations, and I was further instructed not to pad the list with “fluff” or “fat” whatever that meant. I had a pretty good idea what that meant but I wasn’t going to tell them that. Basically, the powers that be over at the “head shed” had a certain number of people in mind that they thought was reasonable. If I went one person higher than the number that they thought was reasonable, they would consider any extra person over that fluff. God forbid I should put two or three names over their magic number. That would just be considered a heinous violation of some sort. Cuz those extra two or three bodies would be fat. Don’t you see. And well, you just can’t have fat. You’ve got to be a lean, mean fighting machine, even though you were not going to have any weapons. That’s right. No weapons. Cuz we had to turn in our weapons too. The weapons were part of our accountable property, so there would be no fighting for us. But we still had to be the lean, mean fighting machine. Drawing down the personnel was easy at first. I got together with my First Sergeant and my Operations Sergeant and told them to prepare a list of all of the sick, lame, and lazy’s that we needed to get rid of to the other units. What you need to understand is that my detachment didn’t really have any actual “problem child” soldiers. Most of my soldiers were Junior NCOs or senior enlisted personnel on promotion lists for promotion to noncommissioned officer. Thus, we didn’t have a lot of disciplinary problems. We did, however, have a few motivational issues. Those were the weeds that we kind of had to cull from the garden, so to speak. Plus, there were other units that were crying for people. I was more than willing to be their Santa Claus. Merry Christmas. On every transfer order, I had my operations Sergeant print “all sales final, no returns,” in the fine print. We had decided internally that we were going to keep ten (10) personnel. I got the deputy group commander to approve my list of minimum essential staff, which consisted of those ten (10) names. Once I had the list of minimum essential staff approved, and we had drawn down the number of personnel by transferring all of our least desirable soldiers. You know. The sick, lame and lazies. The next step was to ask for volunteers to be reassigned to other units. I figured, if soldiers actually wanted to leave and go to another unit, they might fare well, if we gave them a letter of recommendation. I thought perhaps we might be able to influence where their follow-on assignments would be. Well, I sold that line of bullshit really well. My soldiers bought the whole story hook, line, and sinker. The problem is nobody else did. The maximum effective range of our recommendations was zero meters. It turned out that my line of bullshit was exactly that, a line of bullshit. It was piled high and deep. We had to get a front-end loader to shovel us out of the shit. Some of my soldiers thought that I had sold them down the river. I guess it kinda looked that way when they wound up assigned to the Ninth Infantry Division. But I really didn’t sell them down the river. And I couldn’t keep them from being assigned to the division. But it wasn’t all bad. They did get assigned to the Main Support Battalion. But try to convince them of that. They weren’t hearing it. They were convinced that I had sold them down the river. My bad. Well, I had tried my best to protect my people throughout my tenure in command. And when some of my people got assigned to the Main Support Battalion (MSB) in the division, I went over to the MSB to call in a couple of favors. I knew the shop officer in the MSB and the commander of the MSB. In the end, when I was asked to draw down my team at the 508th Maintenance Detachment, I formed a dream team of minimum essential personnel while trying to protect my other personnel during their reassignments to other units. In some cases, that didn’t always work out as well as I would have liked it to, but my soldiers always drew decent assignments. In the final analysis, unit inactivations and all the associated activities involved with those inactivations are monumental exercises in futility.
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