It started with a dare. Ronald Johnson was a kid from the south side of Chicago contemplating a bleak future. But he had to take an ROTC course in high school, and the teacher --a retired military warrant officer named Donald M. Lesch, saw potential that few others did.
"He said, 'son, you ought to think about going to West Point,'" recalled Johnson. "I said guys like me donıt go to West Point. He said, if 'you donıt think you can handle it, you shouldn't try. "It was on, then."
The kid from the Windy City wasnıt about to let anyone think he was afraid.
Getting a Congressional nomination was easy, General Johnson says, because no one from his hardscrabble neighborhood was competing. ³I went to a magnet school and I did well academically,² he says. But if getting into the US Military Academy was relatively easy, staying there was not. The young cadet found it was academically and physically more challenging than high school, by several orders of magnitude.
But, he says, "I couldnıt quit. I could not go back to the block and tell my boys that I couldnıt take it and how hard it was. I knew I had to hit the books and stay focused."
So he tried harder. In his second year he took a solid mechanics course that changed his life. "I was fascinated by the idea of being able to explain or predict the behavior of a structure like a wall or bridge using equations," he said. "It blew me away! Thatıs when I fell for mechanical engineering. I found I had it in my blood."
Johnson also fell in love with tanks, armor, and tactics and quickness of combat. He wanted a command that would allow him to lead across a spectrum of disciplines and the Corps of Engineers offered him just that.
After graduating, Johnson would spend twenty-five out of his 32-year-career in combat engineering units, and serve as commander or senior staff officer at virtually every level of the Army. He has served as assistant math professor at West Point, a senior aide-de-camp to the Secretary of the Army, an executive officer to the Secretary of the Army, commanding general, Gulf Region Division and US deputy director to the program management office, Baghdad. In Iraq, Gen. Johnson supervised an $18 billion reconstruction program.
"Itıs easy to be critical of the US when Iraqi people don't get 24 hours of electricity or oil isn't flowing as it should," he says. "But Saddam Hussein didn't spend a penny on infrastructure between 1991 to 2003. The entire electrical infrastructure had no common equipment. Yet the Iraqis were amazingly creative, I guess they knew if they didnıt make the system work they would die."
His next assignment was as director of the Installation Management Agency, which services the Armyıs worldwide installations. In that role, Gen. Johnson directed the management of 181 Army installations, 75,000 military and civilian personnel, and a budget of $8 billion.
In his current post, Johnson is deputy commanding general of the US Army Corps of Engineers and heads the world's largest public engineering and construction management agency with some 35,000 civilian and military employees.
