Rick Meredith: Teacher, Mentor, Friend

Flag and nameplate outside Rick Meredith's cubicle

Today was his funeral.  A friend whom I've known for only three years died this week.  Taken suddenly ill just the week before, he died Monday afternoon.  He passed away within minutes after I got back to the office from a completing a trip he had assigned to me last month.  It was almost like he wanted to be sure that I got back with no problems.  Last night was the receiving of friends at the funeral home and this afternoon was his funeral.


Read his obituary here.

Actually, it was longer than three years ago, three and a half, four, or maybe five.  Rick Meredith came to see someone else in the office where I was working at the time and as he was leaving he included me in the conversation, like he always did with everybody.  We weren't introduced that day, I suppose, because everyone in the room presumed that we all knew each other.  While that's true of most people who work at Fort Gordon, it wasn't true of me--and it's still not.  So, Rick left and I went back to work.

But it was almost exactly three years ago when Rick picked up the phone and called a mutual friend to ask how to reach me about interviewing for a job.  Rick Meredith was a Department of the Army civilian in charge of developing Signal Regiment doctrine.  He also had an additional duty as a contracting officer's representative.  His office, the Concepts and Doctrine Branch of a larger division within an even larger directorate within the US Army Signal Center, had a contract with a company that furnished writers to draft field manuals and other literature for which the Signal Center was the proponent command.  That contract suddenly had an open slot.  And Rick, being a very smart man and a keen observer of talent, knew that I could write, so he called our mutual friend, whom I had worked for for a couple of years until out contract expired.  So the call was made and an appointment was set and I went up to see him--thinking all the while that he was somebody else because, remember, we had never actually been introduced.  Because, like I was saying, I don't know everyone that works on Fort Gordon, like some people.  Rick Meredith, for example.

He was working away at his computer in his old cubicle in Signal Towers with his back to the door.  This, I would learn, was about the way he spend about sixty percent of his time on a typical day.  (I hid my surprise when he turned to face me).  About forty percent of his time he typically spent on the phone.  People were always calling him!  The rest of the the time, he was in meetings, formal and informal, or in conversation, serious and not so serious, with the people he worked for and with.  That makes more than one hundred percent, I realize, but nice even numbers like that could never capture someone like Rick .  So I walked in and introduced myself--thinking, "so you're Rick Meredith, but I could say that out loud because I didn't want him to think that I'd been working at Fort Gordon for (five years, at the time) and didn't know everyone else, not to mention not knowing him, the man who was about to hook me up with a job.

Right away two things happened.  For one, Rick made a call to the contractor and told their big boss that he had found the man he wanted to fill the open slot (and not only that, but he wanted the contractor to sub-contract the position to the company owned by our mutual friend--thereby helping two people at once.  Typical Rick.  He had it arranged by the end of the day and I started the first of the very next month, three years ago, almost.

The second thing was that I immediately liked the man.  I was captivated by his conversation.  He had a way of speaking that uniquely blended serious and not-so-serious dialog.  His intellect was razor sharp, but he was so down to Earth; deeply experienced, but almost acting as if this were his first day, too.  I discovered that I was going to learn a lot about the Army, about Army doctrine, about Army people and Army history, and so much more, from just this one man.  And in just three short years.

Three years ago the Army was still in the midst of a major transformation.  I had retired from active duty only a couple years before, but it seemed like the whole Army was different.  All the terminology had changed--Uex's and Uey's for brigades and divisions, organization were different, too, and so many other things.  Rick turned a chair around backwards late one afternoon when he noticed that I was about to drown trying to read up on everything and explained the whole transformation thing to me.  Right off the top of his head.  Names, people, units, decisions made, everything.

Of course, it took me more than one afternoon's conversation to get all that stuff down.  Many more days (and some days dozens of times) found me knocking on the door of Rick's cube with a question.  Sometimes his answer was just a word or two, or a sentence.  Sometimes his answer was more involved and I would have to sit down for a while while he reasoned it out--between phone calls and other people sticking their heads in to ask their own questions.  Rick always had a white board on his wall and a lot of times my question and his answer would necessitate the use that board.  (By the way, Rick taught me that Easy Off oven cleaner works well on worn-out messy white boards that are hard to erase).

Rick always said that it took a new person about six months just to feel comfortable with all the information we dealt with in a given day (I'm not sure I've reached that point yet after three years).  He put me to reading current field manuals, regulations, conceptual documents, PowerPoint presentations, e-mail traffic, everything I could get my hands on.  A lot of times my questions would trigger his memory and he'd come up with yet more things for me to read.  He had me read the other writers' drafts, too.  And very soon, he had me start writing my own stuff.

He started me on the Satellite Communications manual.  So I studied SATCOM and tried to organize a decent outline and develop some content.  I had worked on it for a few months when Rick took it away from me and assigned it to another writer who had just come on board.  He then put me to writing a larger FM that would consolidate about eight smaller ones.  He called it FM 6-02.60.  I called it something else.

Evidently, all that was just for training; for Rick had me hand that one off as well.  In its place, he gave me all sorts of smaller, more time-sensitive assignments, taskings from TRADOC, white papers for concepts, content input to briefings.  He assigned me to work groups, sent me on trips, demanded thorough trip reports.  He was a great teacher, patient, smart as a whip, and enjoyable to work with.  Last summer, he assigned me the writing of the Signal Regiment's keystone field manual, FM 6-02 Signal Operations.  We worked together on it for a year.  We were the "writing team."  He told me what to write and I wrote it.  Well, not exactly.  That was part of it.   But there were also parts that I wrote myself and took to him for review.  He liked most everything I wrote.  Even though he usually made corrections.  His used a red pen to make notes on the printout.  If I could read them, I would then make the appropriate edits.  If our Colonel was that easy to satisfy, the FM would be published by now.  Instead, it became over the course the past year a mixture of tribulation and labor of love that Rick and I shared.  Unfortunately, with the events of the past couple of weeks, the writing team has been reduced to just me.

I'm going to ask for permission to include a brief dedicatory, to the memory of Richard Lee Meredith, in the front of the manual before it's published.  I can't think of a good reason why that request would be denied.  It would be a fitting tribute--not just to Rick Meredith, but also to Army doctrine.