Who Fights Our Wars? CSM Donald C. Cubbison, 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division

In the fall of 1977, 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division got a new Command Sergeant's Major.  Donald C. Cubbison, veteran of the Vietnam War with 23 years of service became the top enlisted man of the 4,000-soldier mechanized brigade where I was a tank commander.

Like most career soldiers, he hated journalists, especially Army journalists.  But he gave me the chance to be an Army journalist, then a civilian journalist.  More on that soon.

When Cubbison came to our base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, we had a weekly brigade run, sometimes more than two thousand soldiers formed up by company and battalion and ran the perimeter of the former airfield, now a parking lot for tanks and other tracked vehicles.

At the time I was 24 years old.  When we heard about this new hard-ass CSM coming to the base, everyone was saying he was 52 years old, even older than our Korean-War veteran First Sergeant, Robert V. Baker.  So we expected this ancient sergeant's major would just watch his troops run the airstrip.  We were wrong. First run he grabbed the brigade flag and led the formation.  Anyone who dropped out of that formation caught Hell.  "You can't keep up with a guy who's THAT old!!"

Clearly, Cubbison was not one of those people who everyone says looks young for their age.  A week ago, I found a brief article about Cubbison and an obituary.  He was 42 years old, not 52 when he became sergeant's major of 4th Brigade.

After he made clear that the fitness program would be continuing with him at the front, Cubbison had an NCO meeting in the base theater just before Christmas.  He told the nearly one thousand sergeants in the brigade his priorities.  The Tennessee native talked about leadership, readiness and other topics on the NCO to-do list.

Then at the end he said he wanted a Combat Arms sergeant to volunteer to get his brigade into the newspapers. He wanted us in Stars and Stripes, in the Air-Force run base newspaper, "and every place else that writes about soldiers." Then he repeated the volunteer has to be infantry, armor or artillery. "I don't want a raggedy-ass Army journalist that doesn't know one end of his rifle from the other."

With that he dismissed us.  I saw that he wrote with a blue marker pen on yellow pads.  I went straight to the PX, bought the pen and paper he preferred, then ran to the airstrip.  There was a German and an American squad practicing together to be the honor guard at a friendship event on Christmas Eve.

I wrote the story and went to Cubbison's office in Brigade Headquarters an hour after the NCO meeting ended.  The other sergeants who auditioned for the job showed up later in the day or the next day.

I got the job.  By the first week in January, I was re-assigned to Brigade and on my way to becoming a journalist.  I got 4th Brigade in the base newspaper almost every week and in the Stars and Stripes enough that Cubbison told me, quite proudly, that Col. John Riscassi, the brigade commander, got a call from Division HQ asking, "Why the Hell is it always 4th Brigade I'm seeing in the newspaper."

In 1979, Cubbison went on to be the top sergeant of 3rd Infantry Division, then the sergeant's major of a rapid reaction force formed within US Army Europe. He passed away in 2015 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

When Cubbison moved up, I moved out. I left active duty in 1979 and went to college. While I studied, I had a part-time job as a newswriter at the Elizabethtown (Pa.) Chronicle.  Cubbison made my new career possible.