CAMP BONDSTEEL, Kosovo--It’s a long way from playing the drums in a South Carolina high school band to giving the keynote address on the Army’s 227th birthday to Camp Bondsteel peacekeepers in Kosovo.
 
That’s the journey the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Project Manager Ken Morris has taken.  Morris, a former Marine Corps officer and 14-year veteran of L.A. District, now devotes his time to the Santa Ana River Mainstream Project.  But for six months this year, until Oct. 1, he donned his silver oak leaves as an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and helped maintain and upgrade the largest U.S. military base  built from the mud up since the Vietnam War.
 
Camp Bondsteel, named after a Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, occupies nearly a thousand acres in southeast Kosovo, the Yugoslavian province that was the site of a bitter 1999 war between NATO and Yugoslav forces.  Like so many other parts of the Balkans, the struggle was sparked by ethnic and religious conflicts between predominantly Christian Serbs and predominantly Muslim Kosovars; the clash in the province was further complicated by political and economic disputes between Serbs and Albanians, with the latter seeking independence, or at least autonomy.
 
KFOR, the multinational peacekeeping force, entered Kosovo after most of the fighting had stopped in June 1999.  Even before the ceasefire, however, U.S. military minds had been planning for what became Camp Bondsteel, near the Macedonian border. As their anti-template, they used the entry of American peacekeepers into Bosnia in 1995, when soldiers hunkered in tents for months.  In Kosovo, conversely, more than 5,000 Yanks would be housed, fed and watered in near-Stateside conditions on four U.S. base camps.
 
Enter the engineers, military and civilian.  Their 1999 efforts led to the construction of more than 25 kilometers of roads and 300-plus buildings, surrounded by seven miles of earthen berms, nearly five times that in concertina wire, watch towers and a chopper landing area.  Bondsteel residents now refer to “downtown, midtown and uptown,” and take advantage of 24/7 gyms, a library, retail shops, a chapel and laundry and dining facilities.

Three years later Morris as the Task Force Falcon/Kosovo Director of Public Works continued the mission:  “Running all construction at the base camp day-to-day.”  As team leader of a seven-man facility engineers group with the Army Reserve, Morris oversaw the infrastructure of the camp.   Under his supervision were built two new PX’s, two MWR (morale, welfare and recreation) facilities, base camp generator systems, utility lines, a hospital complex expansion and more housing. 
 
He worked closely with Brown & Root Services, a Houston-based subsidiary of Halliburton Inc., the Dallas company that has been active in military construction projects since the Vietnam War.  The contractor soon became one of the biggest employers in Kosovo, and Morris estimates that workers on the base earned $900 to $1,500 a month, compared to a province average of $75-$100.  (That’s for those with jobs; unemployment ranges as high as 70%.)  “The military has been a godsend,” Morris says. “People told me, ‘America has brought order and opportunity to our country.’”
 
Morris’s team was “the backbone of my operation,” he says, and it included a senior bridge engineer from Caltrans in San Jose, a construction engineer from the city of Fremont, an engineer technician from Caltrans and a structural engineer from Parsons Engineering in Oakland. His public works staff totaled 22, and included five Corps civilians from several districts in the U.S. and Germany.  “It’s an example of Corps of Engineers partnerships in the States doing the same partnerships overseas on the Kosovo mission. 
 
Morris also employed 10 local nationals—Albanians and Serbs to work in the Directorate of Public Works.  “The fact that we’ve been there, helping an experiment take place, bringing workers to the base camps to work side-by-side, let them see the value of each person as an individual,” Morris says.  “Because of that they could say, ‘We’re different, but we can get along.’”
 
As if these tasks weren’t enough, Morris also served as commanding officer and deputy commanding officer for the Falcon Area Support Group for two months during the deployment.
 
For the first couple of years after KFOR moved in, tension remained high and there were several deadly incidents involving the Kosovo Liberation Army and others.  Morris is pleased to report that things have quieted down a lot.  For example, when he first deployed, he never left his barracks without a helmet and Kevlar vest; by the time he left, he was walking around with a soft cap and no vest.  “We were trying to send a message to the people of Kosovo that things had gotten better,” Morris explains.  Another example:  When he first arrived, American soldiers frequently served as escorts for Serbs going to hospital or shopping; this fall, a lot of those escorts were no longer needed.
 
To help win hearts and minds, the public works people also adopted Osman Mani Elementary School near the base camp.  They regularly visited the primitive structure, provided school supplies and clothing donated from the U.S., and repaired the schoolhouse.  “The kids were very, very happy to see us,” the father of three grown children and a 10-year-old stepdaughter recalls.  “I had tears in my eyes the first time we did it.  As we were driving away, they were standing in the windows, wearing the little hats we gave them.  I almost didn’t want to leave.”\
 
So whither Kosovo?  “I see the glass as half full—with some assistance,” Morris says of the outlook for peace in the province.  “It’s a country that’s coming of age, coming into a new existence.”  What’s needed most now, he adds, is economic aid to install and upgrade such basics as electricity, a water system, better roads and decent housing to replace many that were burned or bombed three years ago.
3-3-3 KOSOVO

Since their return, Morris’s reserve team has gone back to the end of the line in case of any call-up for Iraq or another overseas mission.  “We’ll be coming to the front of the line in two years,” he says, “but that doesn’t prevent them from saying, ‘We need a lieutenant colonel over here.’”
 
Meantime, Morris, who attended college on a music scholarship, and his wife Tiza are preparing for the 33rd reunion of his high school band in Charleston, S.C.  “Knowing what I know now, if I’d wanted to have had a music career back then, I know I could have done it,” he says.
 
Which resembles what he said in that June 14 anniversary speech in Kosovo:  “The American soldier is unbeatable.”