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Officer and conducted himself in a reasonable, professional manner. He respected the experienced troops of which he was now the Commander of. This was an ‘ironic’ situation since Capt. Lee had been an adversary of Capt. Tolleson since the Battalion had formed in Aug. 1964 ( Lee referred to this in his book 17@ ) The transition of Company Commanders produced little disruption in our daily operations. We continued to run squad and platoon patrols in our TAOR and we conducted Company sized operations and sweeps in coordination with Battalion orders.
As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that ( as I recall ) our Company never formed up once we landed in Qui Nhon—we basically operated as independent platoons with our own TAOR’s—the same is true with our Battalion—we never formed up as a Battalion once we landed in Qui Nhon—right up until E Co. was ‘mixmastered’ to 1/4 in Nov. 1965—after the Battalion relocated to Chu Lai to join the rest of the Seventh Marine Regiment. The only times we saw Marines from other companies would be on occasion when we happened to rotate back to the Battalion perimeter for recharging. I can’t speak for other Marines in E Co. or the Marines from other companies in our Battalion but for the life of me it was hard to see the ‘unity’ of our battalion when the only time we had contact was from a radio transmission or a written memo read to our platoon by a Battalion or Company representative. I often wondered why we didn’t have a Battalion formation in a secure area near the airport to hear and see our Commanding officer—whom I recall meeting only once since we left San Diego. The only time
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