Interview with Phil Mann:
By Mike Moore July 27, 2006
I started in August of 1980. I worked for Jess Westmeir in the carpenter
shop, with Charley Wagner, Bill McDole. I learned carpentry with my father when I was 12 years old.
We built houses in the summer time, we would farm and do construction work. I went to work for different
contractors around when Dad came to work down here. My Father’s name was Emmett Mann.
I came to JPG on a three month appointment in 1980. I believe they called it 700 hours appointment.
I worked down to the day that I told the Post Commander that I finished my appointment and that I was leaving and went
back down to Personnel. The lady came out of Personnel, there were three of us there signing out that day.
The commander came down and said you can stop signing him out, start signing him back in and the two others just continue
to sign out. It got to the last few minutes. I stayed on at the carpenter shop then.
I
worked at the carpenter shop from 1980 until before Jess Westmeir left then they made me a leader. That
lasted a year or so then I was made a foreman. I was the foreman until 89 then I went to the Roads and
Grounds where I was foreman for six years. When we closed in 95The Post Commander said that there was some
things here that needed to be packed up and that I had all the equipment as the Chief of Roads and Grounds. He
said you hang around for about three months he thought to finish loading stuff up and get everything out of here and that
was eleven years ago. (laughter).
I have spent my whole working career at the proving ground, except for the three years I spent in the Corps of Engineers,
US Army. I worked in 92nd Engineers at Fort Stewart, Georgia and 47 engineers at Fort Wainwright
in Alaska. Then I went back to Alaska after I got out of the Army helping a friend build a night club. I
paid my Army time back and it gives me three years to civil service retirement.
Over all those years here I think Maintenance
of the impact fields is the job that I am most proud of. Changing the way maintenance was done was a big
job. We did that without any increase in manpower. When I went to Roads and Grounds
the impact field maintenance was done by demolition at that time. So they told me that I was going to have
to take over field maintenance, and when I asked them how many people was I going to get, they said none. We
did get four wheel drive tractors with the tires filled with foam. They were armored tractors. We bought
all kinds of field equipment to keep the thing going. The breakdowns were tremendous because of hitting
rounds all the time, tearing equipment all the time. We exploded one round only one time. The
round detonated while ZY Conner was leveling the impact field. ZY was driving the tractor when an ICM round
went off. It blew all the tires off the drag that he was pulling, but I don’t think it hurt the tractor
at all. It burned a notch out of the cutting edge of the drag. Most of the breakdowns
were from the big pieces of steel that you would drag up from the buried projectiles. Ty Peters one time
hit a 2,000 pound bomb at 22,000 that broke the cutting edge of the pan that was moving pretty fast. We
were moving dirt from one part of the field to level it. The biggest job was to get the dirt from the high
places to the low places so the field would be dry and you could walk on it and stay out of the mud. You
can not do anything with bushes over you head , or shell holes in the ground.
Was there any on Commander that you related to
or had influence over you?
Oh! Ben Logerquist was a super guy. Ben was the one that hired me. He was really
an extraordinary commander I thought. I got to know several of them. Col Glover, I probably
got to know as well as any. I got along with Glover real well. A lot of people didn’t.
Phil pulls out of his desk an order in Purple. It is a Bite the bullet award.
(Mike I got one because my desk was messy. He would go through the building and put a purple ugly
frowny face on your desk if it was messy.)
He was the one post commander that never went through the chain.
In order to get something done, he would just call down and say I need this done. I got my ass chewed
by my bosses doing things for the post commander that I was not supposed to be doing.
Yes he was sort
of hands on—If he wanted it done, he wanted it done and that was it. MSM
He would call and say he expected that there would
be an electrical storm over at the airport and if the box pile was all pushed up it might burn. So I would
send the guys out with the bulldozers and they would get the boxes piled up (Used Ammo boxes)
and the next morning there would be nothing but ashes. He would tell me that you know I was pretty
good at predicting that weather. Somehow it would catch on fire in the night. An
electrical storm! There would not be an electrical storm anywhere else, but it would hit right at the airport.
I did a lot of
recreation here; more hunting than fishing probably, but we always got a lot of enjoyment out of that. I
hunted Deer and squirrels and Turkeys. I never was a bow hunter, my Father and Brother tried that for a
while, but I never tried it. I always figured if a Bow and Arrow would have shot better then the Indians
would have won. (Laughter)
I told you the last time we talked of a special test. There
was a test of how rapid fire would affect a mortar base. If you could set the mortar up on the ground on
its factory made base and rapid fire mortars without the base getting out of whack in the dirt to a tube turning over. So
that the base was actually stable enough to rapid fire mortars from. I think what brought that about was
the reconfiguration of the base from an older design and make one that was lighter and easier to carry. When
they did that they had some problems with it. So the way to test that was to set it up and photograph what
happened to the base during rapid fire. We went out and made different patches of dirt. Some
with gravel, some with sand, some with dirt, some with clay, some packed, some loose, Wendell Rutherford was the mortar gunner
that loaded the gun, fired the mortars.. He was wearing his flak jacket and his crash helmet and he would
go out there and rapid fireas fast as he could drop them down the tube until it moved so far that they were afraid that the
mortar would not go down range. They would record it all on photographs and write down how many would had
to be fired to move the tube out of the proper firing configuration. This was the reason for the test.
What always struck
me funny about it was that Wendell was a person that could set down and be asleep in two or three minutes from the time he
sat down and he was so slow and easy going that you could never imagine rapid firing mortars, but he could put them down that
tube so fast that he would have three or four in the air at the same time.
One dangerous
thing happened to my men downrange replacing a mortar and a round came in and knocked trees down right beside where they were
at. Denny Gossman was grading on Schaped Charge Road from K going north and had centered
the stone with the grader coming back to lay it out and there was a round laying in the road that still
had heat waves coming off of it. So it has just got there. When he
called on the radio and said there was a hot round in the road, the guys on the Range Control said well how do you know it
is hot? He said why I can see heat waves coming off of it. Then Range Control said it
is time for you to leave! You go Away! (Laughter) If it had of been
an HE round and had not functioned properly and it was still hot enough from the firing to cook the explosives, it could go
off.
I
worked on the jobs and shelters at 16,000 East. We worked on a lot of firing shelters when I was in the
Carpenter shop. Higgie was in Range control and he would call us up and tell us to get into the shelter
for awhile. And the rounds would go over our heads. Sometimes you could hear rotation
bands coming loosening from the round as it went overhead. As they go by you do not know where it is going.
Higgie would say that they are going to fire a couple of rounds over your head, and we would hear the rotating bands
go, we were concerned because we did not know where they were going. You could drive up and down the road
and see rotation bands all over the place that came off. Most of the time they come off close to the muzzle
of the cannon, but a few don’t. You can find them 10 or 12 thousand meters from the gun.
I loved the work and had super people to work with.
I always just had plenty of just top notch help available for any job. I hardly ever stayed in the
office. I always had a secretary or summer hire to do the crappy paper work that I always hated.
Were you involved
in putting those pillars in to stop the brush from stopping up the creeks and stuff?
No all that was
contracted out. We had to clean them out. Take the debris out. They would get packed
fill. The creek would go out around them after the accumulators got full of debris. Then
it would wash the road out. Wash the fence out. Take everything out. We
always said after the first one was built on West Perimeter that they saw what a crappy design it was and how poorly it worked
and they put them everywhere then (laughter)
They no longer have them at JPG do they.?
No they took them out. What prompted the entire thing was a provost
marshal that made the installation a restricted area. Once you have to formally consider this a restricted
area then you have to change all the security around the perimeter. It seems to me that the hole in the
fence could not exceed six inches in any direction. So once you do that it changes everything.
The flood gates that we had previously had swing arms and the debris would fill up and they would swing out release
the debris and all we had to do was to go up and close the swing arms. These new ones could not be like
that because the status was changed to a restricted area.
Were they worried about people coming in thru
the flood gates when the swing arm was open?
That Provost Marshall was. He got his pay raise and went on
up the road. He was happy with what he had done. When the next one came (Buttons the
Clown. What was his name?) He was an avid hunter and he found out that if you had the place a restricted
area that no one could hunt. He was not going to have that so he changed back to a closed post. When we
closed, we did not have any equipment to maintain those interceptor posts, the Corps of Engineers changed the design and hired
a contractor to take them out. It cost a million and a half dollars to take them out. I
think it was several million to build them. (laughter) (Government in Action ------MSM).
