BATTLE CREEK, Mich. –
It’s a Friday afternoon at Luke Air Force Base, just outside Phoenix, January 1974. The Defense Property Disposal Service is still a relatively new organization, created just two years prior to centralize and provide tighter accountability of the Defense Department’s surplus property operations.
Oscar Montiel, a 23-year-old father, husband, sometime furniture salesman and seasoned farmer from Casa Grande, Arizona, comes into the office to present both himself and his short resume. Plusses: he started working the fields at age 7 alongside his father, and he knows what constitutes a solid day’s work. Minuses: he doesn’t know anything about property disposal, which is actually not too big of a deal, because nearly no one does. At his wife’s encouraging, he’s looking for something more sustainable than the long, impossibly hot days of Arizona farm labor.
The site leader looks him over, sizes him up and asks when he can start. He says, “Today.”
48 years later and he’s still at it. In early January, he was recognized for 50 years of federal service – all but two of those serving with what is now known as Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services.
“It’s been a heck of a ride and I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly,” Montiel said. “I like what I do. When you stay at a place as long as I have, you really have to.”
Montiel was drafted into service by the U.S. Army in 1971. He’d been trying his hand at sales for a Phoenix furniture store while supporting a new wife and even newer child when his draft lottery number was called.
“I knew [the draft] was a possibility, but I hadn’t thought about it much,” he said. But when the baby arrived in February and the draft notification arrived a month later, “I just said, ‘wow.’”
The Army snatched him up, trained him as an artilleryman and sent him off to Germany, where he finished two years of required service. When he returned to his family, he said he was doing “hard farm jobs with long hours.”
His wife watched him toil and said, “’You just got out of the Army. Go to Luke Air Force Base and apply; maybe they’ll give you a job.’”
His lucky break and place among the DLA workforce almost came to an end after just three weeks of duty as a temporary wage-grade materials examiner and identifier. As he was walking through the yard’s main gate on a Friday morning, the boss wanted to talk.
“He said, ‘I’ve got some bad news,’” Montiel said. “’I’ve been told I’ve got to terminate all the temporary employees.’ I thought, ‘there goes my hope and all the things I’d been getting excited about.’”
He called his wife, who told him not to worry. She and her mother would pray about it over lunch, and things would work out. After lunch, a similar scene played out – the boss flagged him down at the gate and said “‘I’ve got some good news. I was able to convert you to a full-time employee.’”
After that, there was no looking back. From Luke AFB, he was promoted to run a one-man disposal site at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms near San Bernadino, California. A couple years there and he moved on as property receipt supervisor at what was once called Naval Air Station Moffett Field near San Francisco. A few years in the Bay Area and then back to the deserts of Yuma, Arizona. Then a longer stop, in West Texas’ Fort Bliss, where he was the DRMO Chief from 1991 until 2001.
He said that if there was a steady thread through his decades of handling used property, it was the constant improvement in technology and processes and the efficiencies they created for property disposal specialists in their day-to-day work.
“When I began, we used card punch machines that were already old … there were stacks and stacks of little cards everywhere,” he said. “They were old machines, so outdated, always breaking down. Now, instead of working one DTID or DODAAC at a time, we can do things more quickly and accurately. Our processes have all improved. Even when we’re going through changes, and some people may complain, you have to say, after the fact, ‘yeah, it did improve things, not just for us, but for the generators.’ It has just improved progressively since way back when.”
The organization faced major personnel cuts in the late 90s and early 2000s partly due to those property processing efficiencies that technology had created. The workforce was essentially halved. Because of operation downsizing at Fort Bliss, what was by then known as Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service, or DRMS, offered Montiel the opportunity to return close to home as the demilitarization center chief in Tucson, where he has spent the balance of his career holding various roles, including a directed stint acting as area manager.
Montiel’s wife would like to see him retire and rest. He agrees that “50 years is enough,” and he credits her support as the primary reason he’s still around, but he doesn’t plan on ending his career for another year or two.
“I feel great,” he said. “Obviously, I’m old, but I feel strong and healthy. Even when I do leave here, I’m not going to be idle. If I stop working, I might croak.”
He said job security, steady pay and good benefits helped keep him around. After getting a taste of the physical difficulty of farming work early in life, he said that the demands of a warehouse role were very manageable.
“Our business has peaks and valleys. We’re not slammed 365 days a year, like in some private industry roles,” he said. “Plus, I like to work. I like to help the soldiers, the airmen, the Marines, all the customers we deal with. I’ll miss the satisfaction of helping get them what they need. And I’ve made a lot of good friends and acquaintances. They’re another part of the reason why I still hang around.”
Among the many fond memories of a lengthy career, he said time spent in Hawaii and on a pair of deployments to the Middle East still stood out to him. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Montiel was the lone specialist from the field to deploy to Kuwait with the agency’s initial Operation Iraqi Freedom property disposal support team. He returned to Iraq in 2006 to serve as the property disposal site manager in Balad. He traveled quite a bit throughout the country, moving via Blackhawk or Stryker convoys to visit with Iraqi leadership to try and help them understand and emulate DLA’s property disposal methodologies.
“I felt like we accomplished a lot while I was there,” he said. “It was really rewarding.”
DLA Disposition Services is celebrating its 50th Anniversary by reflecting on its mission, culture, and workforce. This series is highlighting leadership and employees throughout the agency, across the globe. Visit the historical page to learn more about the MSC and its history.