Robert Schafer, Adrian Meyer, Roy Payne and Greg Noble might be deployed overseas from Fort Bragg at any time to be civilian liaisons for the United States Army.
These four men spent a week in Marshall, attending a meeting of the Marshall Alderman, and discussing local government, infrastructure and leadership with public officials and town leaders, including school superintendant Ron Wilcox and Emergency Management Services Director Gordon Randolph.
Why Marshall? The men were said they looking for a remote, mountainous area within driving distance of Fort Bragg, but not too close by – somewhere as much like rural, tribal Iraq or Afghanistan as possible.
“We’re basically keeping our skills sharp,” Meyer said.
The men don’t know where they’re preparing to go. They could be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, or they could go assist in a natural disaster like the earthquake in Haiti last year.
“Anything that pops up, we need to be ready for,” Meyer said.
It’s a little bit hard to explain what it is they do.
Schafer said they would be “providing a liaison between the civil population and the military commanders.”
“We interface with the civilians in an area where combat operations are going on,” Schafer said.
The News-Record & Sentinel asked the men if in Afghanistan or wherever they go, they might be setting up the infrastructure they are talking to people in Marshall about – schools, for example.
It’s not that. It’s more like they would be finding leaders to set up the schools.
They identify a community’s needs, according to Schafer, and then they find leaders already existing in the community who can fill in those needs.
If this sounds all a little vague, it could be because these men haven’t yet put the theory into practice.
“We’re a new concept in the army,” Schafer said.
They’ve just been thrown together and are still “jelling up as a team,” according to Meyer.
The News-Record & Sentinel met with the Fort Bragg men while they were having coffee at Zuma’s with Marshall First Baptist Church pastor Steve Loftis and Mayor Lawrence Ponder.
Loftis was giving the men a bit of an explanation about economic development efforts in the town of Marshall and some leadership advice.
“It’s a slow process,” Loftis said, citing by example how the men may find themselves coming into a community wanting to make a lot of changes. Sometimes many minor changes are more effective than a big change, according to Loftis, who compared managing change in a congregation to moving pegs on a board attached to rubber bands.
Loftis talked about ways the French Broad Fridays events like the Drover’s Road event were designed to honor the town’s past, to cope with a perception that the events were being run by “a bunch of hippies” from outside the region.
And Loftis discussed the way community leadership is not always governmental, whether in congregations or in small towns.
“You end up with elected leaders, and you end up with people in charge,” Loftis said, explaining that sometimes someone in the back of a room can have as much influence on decisions as the people in power.
Source: News-Record & Sentinel
