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We want to welcome to Veterans Radio today Colonel Stephen P. Perkins, US Army retired.
We're going to talk a little bit about his service but we're also going to talk with
him about his intersection with Major General Oliver W. Dillard Sr., who's a pretty impressive
figure I think you'll agree by the time we get done with this.
Colonel, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Well, thanks, Jim.
I really appreciate it.
It's been a while since I've seen you.
I guess we first met back in May of 2023 at the VA Clinic dedication and I was really
appreciative of your efforts on that.
Well, again, Major General Dillard is somebody to talk more about and learn more about.
But before we get in there.
You've had a long military career and Army civilian career so that our veteran radio
listeners kind of know you're a guy who knows what he's talking about.
Tell us a little bit about your military and Army civilian career.
Yes, I was commissioned out of Cameron University, which is right there by Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
And immediately after coming out of the Guard for almost two years as an artillery officer,
I became an infantry officer.
Did that for about 10 years, including service with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 25th
Infantry Division, and then made the transition to military intelligence.
I commanded battalion at Fort Stewart and got a chance to go to Iraq in 2006-2007.
But really the biggest thing for me, in addition to doing a bunch of those things in the Army,
was coming out and being a civilian.
And using those skills that I had acquired over the course of 28 years and going into
a civilian service that I didn't know exactly what it was getting into, but it was one of
those things that we immediately made the transition from Fort MacPherson, Georgia,
in the Atlanta area, to Fort Bragg slash Fort Liberty here in North Carolina.
It was during that time period that I first really discovered General Dillard, even though
he was an infantry officer, kind of turned him my officer.
And immediately, you know, my ears perked that, hey, this was an opportunity to do something
for our first G2 here at Force Comm, where forces command.
So I'm going to stop you there on a couple of things, because we've got listeners who
are not as familiar with the lingo.
So tell us what the, you transferred into the Military Intelligence Corps, and I know
there would be plenty of people who would make a joke at this point about that being
an Axi Moran.
But tell us what military intelligence is about.
Yeah, pretty much in my case, it was to be a tactical intelligence officer, meaning that
I would find out about the enemy, analyze it, and give it to my commander as he made
decisions.
In my case, I also became a counterintelligence officer.
And so it was one of those things of, I won't say we're the James Bond's of the military,
but we're people that go out and use information gathered from other sources, like the, about
the adversary, and bring it back to our commanders.
So really, it's just a matter of, in my case, I had a vested knee as an infantry officer,
and I said, well, you know, I probably need a couple of skills before I retire.
And so I went in and I was intrigued by the intelligence field, and they gave me an opportunity
to do that.
Well, I would also point out to our listeners that Colonel Perkins picked up his master's
degree in strategic studies from the US Army War College back in 2001.
So both experience and educated in this general area.
I want to get another thing out of the way here before you go on and tell the story about
General Dillard.
And that is, you mentioned the term G2.
So explain to the listeners, what is the G2 designation in the Army?
Yeah, G2s are essentially go back to the Napoleonic era to where Napoleon had, gave numbers to
the, the various skills or offices that he had on his staff.
So G1s being personnel, G3s being operations, and G4s being logistics.
So G2 is the intel or intelligence and security aspects of a staff.
So that person's actually trained.
Sometimes it's an inherent thing, which is kind of the way it was for General Dillard
in the beginning.
So S2s or G2s, depending upon what level of staff.
So generals get a G2.
The other guys just get S2s.
And that was really General Dillard's first exposure to a staff was he was the S2 for
a battalion in, in Korea.
Well let's go back now and, and transition this to talking about Major General Oliver
Dillard, who was born in 1926 in Alabama.
But tell us about his education and how he found himself in the military.
Well, he's an interesting character in that he comes from a really a poor background,
but not one that didn't appreciate education.
So he came out of high school or really out of high school at about the age of 16 and
went to Tuskegee Institute.
And so around that same time, the war started, and he was really too young.
So he goes to college.
And as he starts to turn 18, well, they start looking at him being drafted.
And so he puts in a deferment and they accept it.
The next year, however, with 1945, he doesn't think he's, he's passed the age of getting
into the, into the military and the draft.
He doesn't know anything about the draft.
And as a young black or African American student, he's, he's not sure what that whole
thing is in the military.
But he goes through it, even though he's in RTC at Tuskegee.
He goes through the process and the Army says, no, we want you.
And he goes, well, the war's already over in Europe.
And they had other things for him to do like the occupation of Europe after the war.
So he gets in there, sneaks in before 1946, which is really essentially when the war ends
in Europe.
It gets pushed over as a, in an artillery unit in Europe.
So during that time period, he goes through, he gets identified by a white officer and
pushed into OCS.
So that's really the first time that he gets a, so he's got three years of college.
He's in the, in the unit, comes out of OCS, goes through, essentially goes through the
Korean War and then gets a chance to finish his degree.
And he's at Commander General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
And ultimately his education ends formally when he goes through the National War College
in Fort McNair District of Columbia and is currently, is what do you think, dual student,
if you will, at the George Washington University.
And so that's kind of his education background.
And what's really sort of unique and, and here that people ought to make sure they're
catching is he starts out as an enlisted guy.
He does.
His skill set is recognized.
He's encouraged or I think he's had pushed into going to officer candidate school so
that he can move from enlisted to an officer, which normally would have required that degree.
They get him through OCS, they get him through making sure he picks up his degree.
And now he's on a whole different path, isn't he?
He is.
And he's only one of the three black students in the Commander General Staff College immediately
following that he goes to the University of Omaha now in Nebraska, Omaha, and like a special
program for people like him.
Nowadays, we actually don't let him go that deep.
They have to basically get it before their degree before they are captains.
And so he's already a major at that time.
And but he's being recognized as being a fast mover, if you will, at the time.
And this is really he was in a when he went to Korea back in 5051.
He was in the segregated unit.
So now we fast forward to basically the CGSE class of 58.
And he's now one of only three students in that whole class that are lack of a better
term today, a person of color that are making it through that that course.
So the Army is definitely starting to identify him.
And he's a person at that point with a Silver Star and a CIB Combat Infantryman's Badge.
So he is being looked on as being a fast mover, if you will.
But he's in a position where there aren't a lot of black soldiers or officers.
One there aren't a lot of black soldiers, but they're definitely not a lot of black
officers.
And so he's fighting upstream, but being helped along the way because he's showing some potential
and competence.
Well, it's more than potential.
It was right.
I mean, he really was a very competent officer.
And fortunately, you know, the Army recognizes this and tell us about how he moved over to
military intelligence, which brings us back to that's not an oxymoron.
So tell us how that move occurred.
You can't let that one die, can you?
I can't.
Yeah.
It's an interesting thing.
Back in his day, we really didn't have a military intelligence branch.
So you can be an infantry officer, but also be an intel, what we'll call an intelligence
officer just to keep us from having the oxymoron come in.
But you could do both.
And in my day, there were only, when I made the transition, they still had the program
which was kind of like a dual, dual branch, but you could be what was called an 1135,
which is an infantry intel.
And when I came in, they quit doing that.
They had done, they had quit that.
But my first boss, believe it or not, was an infantry officer.
My first intelligence supervisor was an infantry officer with an intel background.
So what really made it so hard was that you had to know all of these things intel-wise,
but you were constantly going back and being an iftremend.
Now the good side to that is that you never quit being an iftremend.
And so you were able to give that perspective of an infantry officer to intel people.
And General Dillard was famous for his view that we need to get people out of the suits
and into the boots.
And he jokingly said that, but he was serious about it, that there were a bunch of people
that believed counterintelligence people just needed to be in suits, walking around, looking
cool and whatever.
And his answer was no, you need to be in these boots and be irrelevant to the tactical soldier.
So not strategic focus, but tactical focus.
And again, he sort of had this unique perspective because he started over on the enlisted side,
artillery in Europe before kind of moving in a different direction.
And one of the sort of, you know, sometimes there's a life's a circle, he ends up as the
first black deputy chief of staff intelligence for the US Army Europe.
But he couldn't have imagined that when he went over there and say 1946 or seven.
Jim, I can't imagine that today that you could take an infantry officer and basically put
him into a two star billet of the of a organization that is in charge of all the land forces
in Europe during the Cold War.
I mentioned during the Cold War, so we're ready to go to war at any time.
This is not Vietnam's done.
And we now the whole focus of the US Army is on Europe.
And he is the lead intel guy.
I can't even imagine how tough that is.
And the scrutiny that he's being put under because he's not a true blood.
Am I officer?
Yeah, well, and again, and this is so much of life in general, just not the Army.
But you know, he didn't go to West Point, it's not a ring knocker, right?
He's African American.
So he doesn't fit in in that regards.
He went to Tuskegee Institute, which has a huge reputation in more more in the Air Force
side, the Army Air Corps were side, than it does in the regular Army side.
So just a whole lot of different pathways that got him to into all of these first, do
you want to talk to us about some of the first that he's kind of broke the broke the glass
on?
Well, I'm not sure I can remember all the first that he did.
I will say this, he was only the fifth general officer when he penned on his star.
So there's not a lot of precedence for this, and you hit on a key point that he wasn't
the typical guy and and we taught you, you talked about not being a ring knocker.
He's not even that he's a mustang or what some call this thing, which is an OCS guy.
So most of the OCS guys don't get an opportunity to make it as far as he did.
And I'm trying to I guess the biggest thing that he was the first on was he was the first
officer to attend the National War College in in DC.
And that was problem and go ahead.
Well I have from his introduction to the Michigan Military and Veterans Hall of Honor, another
little paragraph I'll read which says, General Dillard served as the first black general
officer in the office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the last J2 for
the US military assistance command Vietnam, the first US Army forces command Deputy Chief
of Staff Intelligence, and the first black Deputy Chief of Staff Intelligence for the
US Army Europe prior all that prior to obviously to his retirement from the Army in 1980.
I mean, along the way, there are a whole lot of firsts aren't there?
You know, they really are.
The funny thing is, as I was researching even more into General Dillard, you brought up
the point of where he's the final military assistance command Vietnam J2, meaning the
joint staff general officer command.
The guys are in charge of all of Vietnam.
He didn't go there during that tour to be the intel officer.
He had gone back to being the infantry guy again.
And so he was the the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Cords program, which is basically
the civilian advisory and development program in Vietnam.
It was only to the point of we were about to get out of Vietnam.
And so the J2, he left.
The war is not even over and this guy leaves.
And so they're going, OK, well, we need a strong intel guy.
Didn't Ollie?
What in the intel guy?
Yeah, we give it to him.
And so they walked over and said, hey, Ollie, do you want to do this?
And he thinks about a little bit and remembering that some of the he's got about, I think,
four things that he tries to think of in life.
Part of it, one of his final ones is seize opportunities when you have the ability to
seize opportunities.
Wow.
Isn't that a pearl of wisdom that needs to be passed down to everybody?
This isn't a job he was looking for.
Not even sure it was a job that he wanted, but it was an opportunity and you kind of
have to grab the bull by the horns, don't you?
You do.
And beyond even that, Jim, you have to be ready to do that.
So he's preparing, he's thinking about these things all during that time period.
So he's already had a two year tour being a provincial military advisor up there in
Can Thun province with General Nguyen, Nguyen Hop Dwan is the guy's name, the last mayor
of Saigon.
And these guys have gotten along really well and he's really made his name, Ollie's made
his name up there in that province of how they have, his advisory team has really done
a good job of working with the people.
And he's got those kind of tentacles, if you will, that he can kind of pull from, but big
time that he recognized opportunity.
Well, you have to be ready for the opportunity.
You have to have the skill set, the communication, the analytical thinking.
He's demonstrated all of that at that point.
And we're talking to Colonel Stephen Perkins, US Army retired.
He helped a Major General Oliver Dillard write his book, Little Old War Stories, and
Steve has authored a number of articles on General Dillard's career, including the Forgotten
Sable Officer, which was published in the Military Intelligence and Professional Journal.
You are, if you will, Steve, and the family views you this way as sort of the official
biographer for Major General Oliver Dillard.
How did you find yourself in that role?
Well, it was because him being the first General Officer or the first intel guy, G2, at Forces
Command.
We had just taken over and we had a new building at Fort Liberty, Fort Bragg.
And so we started naming conference rooms.
We had about three conference rooms that we were going to try to name after people.
And so as we did that, they said, well, you can't name after people.
I went, okay.
There's a rule.
Right.
And so I said, that's fine.
And then I thought to myself, well, what campaigns, because you had to name them after campaigns.
I said, what campaigns was General Dillard in?
So the first one, which is really when he made the transition, was the UN Defensive
Campaign of the Crea More.
And so that's what we did was we named the conference room after him.
And I immediately started thinking, what are the things that I can do?
And the reason that I called the first article that we had in the Military Intelligence Professional
Bulletin or MIPB, the reason I wrote about it and it's entitled The Sable Officer is
I had pulled from a guy, his PhD thesis was talking about general officers that had made
something of themselves.
And he talks about the reason he chooses instead of black is he goes with Sable.
And the reason is that he says, well, people come in all kinds of colors.
And Sable is it has multi-colors.
And so that was how he did it.
And I went after the title and I said, you know, he is to me, he was the alt from an
MI standpoint, an intelligence standpoint.
He was the quintessential perfect person to show how people have grown since 1951, 53,
probably is when they really got rid of segregation, but how we had really grown as a military
and had taken a look, had kind of grown as an organization or as an institution.
And so he was the first.
And so I decided that he was going to be the guy that I was going to put a lot of time
and effort into.
Well, he certainly deserves it because his career is phenomenal, the more you look into
it, the more you recognize it.
But it's been recognized by others.
He was awarded the Military Intelligence Corps Association's Lieutenant Colonel Nolton Award
for Excellence in Intelligence.
He was inducted into the Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame, the Army Military Intelligence
Hall of Fame, the Alabama Military Hall of Honor, the Michigan Military and Veterans
Hall of Honor, most recently.
The VA named its community clinic in Canton, Michigan in his honor.
What was also put into the Army's Military Intelligence Hall of Fame?
I mean, these are all outside recognitions of what a tremendous man he was, officer,
leader, crossed a whole variety of times and circumstances.
As we close out here, Colonel Perkins, give us your kind of overall thoughts of how Colonel
or Major General Dillard's life should be remembered.
He's really a guy that took on a lot of challenges.
I used this, the dedication of the Canton facility, I used that he was our hero.
He put a lot of effort into being an honorable person with humility.
He always pushed himself and others to be excellent in what he did.
Many say that you can't lead unless people know that you care.
And he spent a lot of time gaining their respect.
But more importantly, because that is really important, right?
He seized opportunities, but he was able to really push the envelope on those opportunities
because he was competent and ready to do the mission that people are going to offer to
him.
And again, I just think that as a former Buffalo soldier, and I actually, I'm not sure if this
res made with you or not, but there was another.
Although you mentioned like five or six other first, I'm going to give you another first.
Some believe that he was that his platoon in Korea was the first American victory on
the peninsula during that war.
The Battle of Yechon in South Korea.
And his platoon went in and he was very humble as he described it.
That his company commander, it was a Buffalo soldier and a paratrooper during World War
II, Black Paratrooper during World War II with the Triple Nickel Regiment.
He was, there was an article on this battle written for Infantry Magazine, I believe,
where he describes all the goodness that Oliver Diller did.
And part of that eventually led to earning the Silver Star.
So definitely still my hero.
And I hope it's everybody else will read about him and understand he's got Wikipedia page,
which he was very proud of.
And yeah, this is this is why we tell these stories is so that we wet your appetite.
You go do some more reading or research on them and learn more and see the attributes,
the talents, the pearls of wisdom in his life and apply it to yours.
And Colonel Stephen Perkins, US Army retired official biographer, if you will, for Major
General Oliver Diller.
I don't think there's any pay that goes with that, but at least it's a title, Steve.
I'm cleaning.
I want to I want to thank you for the time that you've given us today on Veterans Radio.
Well, thanks, Jim.
I really appreciate everybody else listening to it and you specifically of pulling out
all even more that I know of, but may not have been able to articulate earlier than
that.
So thank you again for your assistance in getting me to open up even more about my hero.
We enjoyed it.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fawcone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at
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