With the New Breed

The first critical hurdle in any home rebuild (I’m learning this now) is Debris Removal. In other words, getting rid of the mess that was your house. The way it seems to work is you can hire a private contractor and pay him … or the Army Corps of Engineers will do it for free. (If you have Debris Removal insurance, the Army Corps will be compensated by that.)

Today, Diana and I were up in our neighborhood along with some local friends who were also faced with rebuilding. We met with three officers—two Majors and a Captain—of the Army Corps. They had come to answer our questions and to relieve our concerns and anxieties. Here’s my takeaway:

First, all three were great guys and super-professional. The Army Corps of Engineers is apparently not some vast standing formation; it’s only eight hundred or so full-time military men. The primary work force is civilian contractors and heavy equipment operators hired on a job-by-job basis. These young officers were the core cadre. They organize and oversee the operation.  

Our house—Diana’s and mine—is out in the boonies. Roads are narrow. There are rockslides and mudslides and retaining walls … it’s a hairy drive even in a civilian car, let alone at the controls of a 30-ton excavator that rolls on steel treads—not to mention the set-of-doubles haul trucks that must negotiate the same twists and switchbacks.

A young captain from Tennessee drove with us as we four-wheeled our way to our neighbor Jurgen’s property. I had never been there. It was like the Road to Mandalay, only narrower and steeper. Diana and I both turned to the captain. “Can your guys possibly get in here?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “No problem.”

We asked him how.

“We’ll figure it out. That’s our job.”

If you’ve ever read E.B. Sledge’s classic WWII memoir, With the Old Breed, about the Marines on Peleliu and Okinawa, you know how much the young Eugene respected the vets of the Old Corps.

That’s how I feel about these new guys. I want to have their attitude. I want to be as cool as they are. I want to look at my own work and my own issues and be able to say, as that young captain did today, “We’ll figure it out. That’s our job.”

The post With the New Breed first appeared on Steven Pressfield.