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Ray Wright and the Survey Section
So when we got a new survey officer, he had to start out with nothing but two
aiming circles incapable of measuring angles of less than a mil. The new survey officer,
2nd Lt Raymond J. Wright, was a "ninety-day wonder," freshly graduated from Officer
Candidate School. He was about twenty-five, tall, very slightly round-shouldered, and
quiet - even diffident. When he reported for duty, he was just in time to go out on a
battalion field exercise, and he got the job of survey officer because Don Thomson (Now
1st Lt Thomson) had just departed for a three-month course at Fort Sill.
Wright and I both went on reconnaissance, and when we got to the future
battalion position, I stood by and watched while Col Pierce explained to the hapless
newcomer what he wanted in the way of a survey. My mouth dropped open as I listened,
for it seemed to me like a very detailed and difficult job, over ground rough and cut by
deep gullies, a nightmare for taping distances. Lt Wright listened with a frozen face,
which might have indicated shock and terror, but when Col Pierce finished and asked if
there were any questions, all he said was, "No, sir."
And, to my astonishment, by the time the firing batteries were in position, the
survey was completed and had checked out by closing the traverse with an error of less
than a foot.
From then on, the 915th stopped worrying about surveying. Lt Wright had been a
Survey Sergeant as an enlisted man, and he knew exactly what he was doing. Even better,
he had the instant respect and loyalty of his crew.
When Don Thomson returned from Ft Sill, it did not occur to anyone to make him
survey officer again: we had a survey officer. So Don, who was an overall brilliant
officer, went on to command Battery A for a while, was promoted to captain, then
became Assistant S-3 and the brains of the fire direction center.
Ray Wright, on the other hand, was too efficient for his own good. No one wanted
to move him from a vital job he could do better than anyone else, but the position of
survey officer called for a lieutenant, so he ended the war as a first lieutenant, while less
outstanding officers got promoted to captain. [However, he also ended up alive and
healthy, as he might not if he had been made a liaison officer and promoted.]
On desert maneuvers, he convinced even our new commander, Major Costain, a
talented skeptic about the abilities of his subordinates. On one maneuver near Salome,
Arizona, we were part of the Red Force, which meant that we were scheduled to do a lot
of retreating and would eventually lose. There were no maps of the area that could be of
any use for artillery fire, only a few bench marks established when the original U.S. land
survey had been made some time after the Mexican War.
Ray Wright located one of these and used it as a basis for a continuous survey,
which located each battery position as we leapfrogged backwards for about five days. As
the maneuver ended, he closed the whole system by tying it into another bench mark
some twenty miles from the first one, and it checked to the nearest five yards, or fifteen
feet. Far closer than any rough artillery survey could be expected to be.
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