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The man who jump-started the Army National Guard’s transformation to an operational force has passed away.
Retired Lt. Gen. Herbert R. Temple Jr., the director of the Army Guard from 1982 to 1986 and the chief of the National Guard Bureau from 1986 to 1990, died Dec. 29 at his home in Palm Desert, California. He was 96.
As Army Guard director, Temple raised training and professional military education requirements.
He also sent Army Guard units to major exercises in Europe, Africa and Central America for the first time. And he convinced the Army to work Guard formations into the schedule at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California.
In addition, Temple was the driving force behind the construction of the Army Guard headquarters building in Arlington, Virginia.
The Army — and even the adjutants general — sometimes chafed at the pace and amount of change.
But Temple was undeterred. He believed the Army Guard would be needed early and often in any future conflict, and the force had to be ready.
He also did not want another Soldier to endure what he had experienced as a young, enlisted troop in the Korean War.
Temple and the rest of his California Army Guard unit deployed unprepared for combat. Nonetheless, he was sent to the front, first as a replacement rifleman and then as squad leader in the 5th Regimental Combat Team.
He suffered from malaria and was finally pulled from the line for good because of frostbitten feet.
Temple made a vow after surviving the Korean Peninsula's extreme conditions.
"I said that if I was ever in a position to prevent what happened to me and a lot of other Soldiers who went into Korea with little or no training, that I would do that," he recalled in an oral history recorded in 1998 for the Army’s Military History Institute. "My time in combat became the motivation for many of my activities as director of the Army Guard."
Temple honored his pledge, altering what it means to be an Army Guard Soldier.
"General Temple is the father of the modern Army National Guard," said retired Maj. Gen. John D’Araujo, a Vietnam veteran who worked for Temple at NGB and served as Army Guard director from 1993 to 1995. "He is the most transformational leader I’ve seen in the Guard in my lifetime."
Subsequent senior Guard leaders have echoed that praise, including retired Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, who was NGB chief from 2003 to 2008, a period of high Guard OPTEMPO worldwide.
"Had those tough decisions not been made early," Blum said in 2014, "the successes that followed with the commitment and the magnificent contributions the Guard has made in the Balkans, the Sinai, for the combatant commands around the world and particularly on the battlefields for more than the last decade would not have been possible."
On Dec. 19, current and former Guard leaders dedicated a display in honor of Temple in the Army Guard headquarters building that now bears his name.
"He was a trailblazer, a real force of nature," said Lt. Gen. Jonathan Stubbs, the current Army Guard director. "He set this great organization on a path to future success for which his successors are certainly grateful. I know I am."
— By John Goheen
