Alabama Strongwood Log Homes

Rebecca McGee married Hunter Scharn on November 24, 2007.   We just got back from the United States where we attended our daughter’s wedding.  It was a great ceremony on the white sands of Panama City Beach.  The day started sunny, but was cool (just short of being cold).  We went and bought a wrap for our daughter but she didn’t have to wear it.  Now my wife on the other hand wore a sweater over her dress most of the ceremony.  It started at 3:30 and the last of the guests left about 9:30.  We left early the following morning and had to drive from Panama City Beach to Atlanta, where we caught a 7:30 flight to London. We almost missed our bus to Lakenheath because Jackie left her purse on the airplane.  (you can tell we were a bit exhausted)  We were home by about 2:00 PM and have spend the rest of the day relaxing a bit.

After getting married we spent two years in Georgia.  The first year I taught at the Infantry Center on Fort Benning, Georgia, where I taught a section on Scout Dogs.  Jackie finished her degree and got a job as a teacher.  I then started my second year of college.  I was thinking of being a veterinarian but I couldn’t stand the sight of blood.  After a year at Columbus College, we moved to Wisconsin where I finished two more years and got a degree in education.  From there we moved to the wilds of northern Wisconsin. We both had teaching jobs and lived on a small 10 acre farm we made. I was company commander for an US Army Reserve engineer company home based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  On the weekend I played army and during the week, I was a teacher and farrowed a dozen sows and developed a good life.  Part of my being has always been interested in the environment and we felt that living a more “communal” life was the ideal way to live.  We researched log homes and put an advertisement in “Mother Earth News” and that started the next major period of our life.  We created an “Intentional Community” called Wassaya.  Wassaya means “Dawn of Day” in Chippewa Indian.  We bought 200 acres of land and had it divided into parcels of land of about 5 acres and held about 100 acres in common.  We helped each other build our homes and began living a more environmentally thoughtful life.  We grew our own vegetables, raise chickens, goats, pigs and cows.  We heated with wood and in general developed a very small environmental foot print.  We were “Green” before it was fashionable to be Green. It was one of the most dramatic periods of our lives and could take a whole website of its own to tell the story.  Our son, Jonathan, was born in 1979 and our daughter was born in 1983.  We lived a great life on our farm in Wassaya and we wouldn’t have undone those years of or life for anything.  We weren’t rich but we were happy and healthy.  We were environmentally aware and lived healthy. If I had been born 150 years earlier, I would have been a pioneer always staying a head of civilization and so it is not hard to believe that while we had developed a great life, the need to move on, soon developed.   We did the intentional community of Wassaya for 10+ years but the need to see what else was out there in the big world started building in the pit of my stomach and so we rented out our house, took a two year leave of absence and hit the road again.  We were going from self-sufficient living in rural Wisconsin to a small island in the middle of the Arabian Gulf called Bahrain.  The year was 1984 and the middle east was in the middle of the tanker wars.  The little McGee family was on the road again.  We still hadn’t build a log home, but I have been dream and planning and doing plenty of construction. 

I met my wife, Jackie, thirty days before going on leave for Vietnam.  Yep, that was only 720 hours before going into combat.  I was from Wisconsin and so I never ever planning to return to Ft. Benning, Georgia again. (Ft. Benning, Georgia is where we met.)  Well story-book romances do happen.  I met Jackie at a party I put together of for a number of young officers heading to Vietnam.  It was a real Hawaiian Luau complete with a pig roasted over an open spit.   By our third date (that was Friday -party day-, Saturday, Sunday)  we knew it was going to fast.  I wanted to stop seeing Jackie but after some tears and a Kay-Sera-Sera discussion we decide to let fate take a hand.  Well, we were engaged within 30 days and had plans to be married right when I got back from Vietnam.  I was 20 and Jackie was 19.  A lot younger than we might want our kids to be thinking of marriage.   Well I was in Vietnam for 13 months and came back.  We were married within a week of my return.  That was 1969.  Since then we have been poor and lived well.  We have had our ups and downs.  We have raised two children.  Our daughter, a accountant and beautiful girl, is getting married in 15 days at Harpoon Harry’s on Panama City Beach.  Our son, a fine young man and a IT Systems Administrator, lives in Japan with his wife, Masae.  He had serverd four years in the US Navy and saw a lot of the world including the waters off the coast of Iraq and Iran.  Our family has traveled to over 30 countries and lived and worked in the USA, Bahrain, Panama, Japan, and England. My wife and I are still happily married and still say “I love you” every day to each other.  So what does this have to do with log homes?  Simple, I don’t do anything half way.  We review our options and move forward.  We think globally and act locally.  We put our hearts and souls into everything we do. 

The second thing we did at the 39th Scout Dogs that I felt was innovative, was how we used our excess dogs.  Since we weren’t loosing either men or dogs (I only lost one dog in the 13 months) we had more dogs than we had handlers.   Hmmmm … The dogs were getting fat and lazy.  We didn’t have enough trained handlers so what would you do.   Yep… we went to the S3 and put a call out to the battalions.  We offered any company commander that wanted to a scout dog permanently assigned to their unit, to provide me with a man.  I would provide the man with a week of solid training.  Then I would send the dog and handler back to the company where they would become a permanent asset to the unit.  In return, all I asked was that the company commander send the dog and handler back for one week out of every four for training and an opportunity to check on the health of the dog.    This was a win-win situation for everyone.  The infantry company had a permanent member of its unit with a nose hundreds of times more sensitive than a man’s.  Both of these innovations we used, working dogs off leash and training handlers and assigning them directly to companies, were probably used by other units.  The one thing I can say is these were things that we developed independently to meet problems we had.  As for how this effects my getting into the log home business, it should show that I problem solve.  I think things through and in the end, I come up with good decisions.  I did my homework when choosing a log home company but I will tell you more about that in future blogs. 

Baron was KIA on April 7, 1969, when the platoon he was supported was over run by the NVA.  His handler was wounded but not killed. 
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As I was saying yesterday, while I was commander of the 39th Scout Dogs we had the  enviable (or lucky) record of 13 months of combat without a casualty.  I need to say that the 13 months run from July 1968 - August 1969 for the 39th did loose men and dogs to this war.  During the period I commanded the 39th, the first credit for the great record must go to the men and the dogs.  They did a superb job.  After that, we must give credit to commanders of the respective companies and battalions of the 173rd that we supported.  They used our teams properly and that made all the difference in the world.  I don’t want to give all the credit to others as we had the responsibility to train the S3 and the commanders in how to use our support and we also needed to think proactively about how to do our jobs better.  In that regard, I have two innovative things that we did while I was commander.  The first one came as a suggestion from one of the handlers.  That was we allowed for and allowed the training our men and dogs to work off leash.   The idea was, you could train a hunting dog to run 20 meters in front of your to hunt for birds, why not train dogs to run 20 meters in front of us to hunt for an enemy, an enemy that shoot back.  That sounds good but we couldn’t really train the dog to go 20 meters in front because, in a jungle, they would be totally out of sight.  Out of sight of the handler means out of control.  What we really did was, for handlers willing to do this, we allowed them to train their dogs to move forward but to stay within SIGHT of the handler.  This put additional distance between the enemy, the scout dog and the men it was protecting.  This proved quite effective as a leash is only about a meter long.  For each meter you put the dog farther forward, you give the troops that much more time to react.  Tomorrow I will talk about the second innovation we used that I feel helped save lives.  Information on the men and dogs of the 39th can be found here. 

I met my future wife, Jackie, at a party only 30 days before going on leave.  I didn’t have time for a romance (do you realize how short thirty days is) but we fell in love anyway.  I went off to Vietnam where I was the commander of the 39th Scout Dog Platoon attached to the 173rd Airborne Brigade.  I was there for 13 months.  I got there right after the Tet Offensive, July 1968.  In those thirteen months, with men walking point ever day, we did not have a single man killed.  I am very very proud of that record.  We did have a tracker dog team, attached to us for support, that lost a whole team.  Our scout dogs and their handlers had the job job of alerting the unit to problems before the men confronted the enemy.  The tracker dogs team, on the other had, had to mission of regaining contact with the enemy.  They were to run a head of the advancing unit and find the enemy.  A very risky business.  We all owe them a debt of gratitude.  As for my own men, as I said, I was very proud of the men of them.  They did a superb job of saving lives.  Tomorrow, I will share a bit on what we did in within the 39th Scout Dogs to gain such an enviable record of thirteen months of combat with out the loss of a single man. 

So how did I get into the business of helping people build log homes?  This has been quite a journey.  I probably all started when I was a kid.  I always wanted to live in a log home.  Before joining the army in 1966, I drove from Wisconsin to Alaska with the intention of eventually going to live in Alaska when I got out of the military.  I had always dreamed of a log home on a quiet river with the mountains in the background.  Well, after getting out of the army I got married and, oddly enough, my new wife did not share my desire to go live in a log home in Alaska.  Okay… they say compromise.  Well we did just that.  We had been living in Georgia (that is where she grew up) and moved to Wisconsin.  Well we were closer to Alaska and it was a lot colder but not quite all the way to Alaska.  Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing how we made this journey into Log Home sales and why we ended up choosing Strongwood Log Home company as our parent company.