TURK’S DELIGHT: RESERVE OFFICER RETURNS TO DISTRICT TROUBLESHOOTING ROLE AFTER YEAR IN EUROPEAN THEATER

Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump or the ‘60s radio spoof Chickenman (“He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere!”), LTC David Turk sure pops up in a lot of places.

Currently, he’s a program manager for the District’s PPMD, working directly for Brian Moore. His duties vary, from backfilling for branch chiefs to providing direction on project review board issues. With extensive experience and expertise in the Army Reserves, Turk also assumes the mission of developing citizen soldier resources available to the District. His checkerboard civilian and military careers have found him hopscotching from job to job, mission to mission, business suit to camo, coast to coast. “I work wherever I’m needed,” he says. “I fill in just about anywhere.”

Turk recently returned to the District from Wiesbaden, Germany, where he spent a year with the Corps Europe District. He led a group of reservists mobilized to support the District’s contingency activities for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Noble Eagle, which protects American skies.

He also participated, he says cryptically, “in contingency planning for future operations where the Corps will be an active player.” He was the Corps liaison to European Command in Stuttgart, as well as dealing with major component commands, including the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines in Europe.

For antiterrorism missions, for example, he oversaw the surveys, analysis and security proposals affecting all Corps offices in the theater. “We have to look out for Corps employees,” he explains, “regardless of where they are or who owns the building.”

Before 9/11 Turk was an Army reservist on temporary duty in the District. After the attacks, he was mobilized to active duty and assigned his slot in Europe District. Before the European assignment, he’d spent time the L.A. District’s Emergency Operations Center as deputy chief of operations, helping out during earthquakes, floods and training of District team members. He participated as part of the Corps response to natural disasters elsewhere in the U.S.. He was also a program manager on the L.A. Unified School District E-rate project.

Turk spent most of the ‘80s in the private sector, working for some of America’s bluest-chip companies: Procter & Gamble (“I made Pampers Diapers”), Pepsi Cola Co., Baskin-Robbins and Aramark Uniformed Services. Those jobs took him from New York to Georgia, back to New York and finally to Southern California. During that span, he was also an Army reservist assigned to the Corps in Jacksonville, Fla., and Savannah, Ga.

His first experience in the military came as an Army enlisted man in 1972. He became a member of the military police and, later that year, was almost sure he and his unit would be posted to Vietnam (where an older brother had served earlier as an Air Force medic). But geopolitics intervened, the American side of the war wound down and Turk got out as a sergeant.

Using the GI bill, he returned to Georgia Tech to study industrial engineering. Somewhere along the way, he decided that the ol’ Army life hadn’t been too bad after all, so he joined Army ROTC at the school. He earned one of the few Regular Army engineer commissions handed out at the time to non-West Point cadets and stayed in a little more than three years.

He regards his civilian work experience as a valuable supplement to being a green-suiter in the District. “You’re all civilians here,” he observes. “The fact that I worked with and managed civilians made for an easy transition.” Here, he applies some of the same management techniques that he acquired at such corporate icons as Procter & Gamble: “Be firm but fair and always put yourself in the other person’s shoes. For civilians, ranks are not important, they want to be given an opportunity and they don’t want to be left in the dark. The boss in ‘Dilbert’ is a classic example of what not to do. That’s not the way you lead or inspire confidence.”

Turk comes by his peripatetic ways naturally. Both his father and mother were in the military during World War II, and afterwards his father’s social agency work with the blind took the family up and down the East Coast.

Nowadays Turk and his wife are empty-nesting in Valencia, while their two sons attend UC Santa Barbara and San Diego State University. His mandatory retirement date from the Reserves is in two and a half years.

Till then, the man who moves with ease between military and civilian worlds is content to be the District’s troubleshooter.