NJ’s Fort Dix keeps mission but gets new name

FORT DIX, N.J. — For 92 years, being sent abroad or brought home by the Army has often meant passing through the New Jersey installation known first as Camp Dix, then Fort Dix.

It was where Elvis Presley was demobilized after his duty in Germany ended in 1960; Hall of Fame Dodgers pitchers Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax had basic training there; even comedian Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford television character talked about kitchen patrol there.

Some 6 million lesser-known soldiers also passed through.

As of Thursday, the name will be gone and the Army will be reduced to a tenant on the land.

Fort Dix is being merged with the neighboring McGuire Air Force Base and Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Station to make the military’s first three-branch base, a 65-square-mile behemoth stretching through farmland and forests and given the clunky moniker Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

And like that, a storied Army spot — current commander Col. Patrick Slowey calls it “one of the big kahunas” — will be a lesser partner in a hyphenated operation.

The merger was a compromise from the 2005 round of military base closures and realignments. The three continue to exist and with essentially the same functions: training and mobilization for the Army, logistics and transport for the Air Force, designing and testing aircraft components for the Navy.

It’s part of a strategy of reorganizing and standardizing the services. Twenty-six bases around the country are to be merged into 12 new joint bases, a move Defense officials say could save $2 billion over 20 years.

In New Jersey, it means the Air Force will take responsibility for basics of the operation at the place that began as Camp Dix in 1917 to mobilize soldiers to fight in World War I.

The bus drivers and food service workers, the day care workers and security operations will all be overseen by the Air Force now.

The biggest change could be for the civilian employees who remain as the military personnel come and go.

One of their major issues was resolved this week when the federal Office of Personnel Management announced they would work under the same pay scale. That means raises for the former Dix and McGuire workers who were paid at the government’s rate from the Philadelphia metro area while their counterparts at Lakehurst were getting higher pay because of a higher cost of living in the New York City region.

Col. Slowey said the change will free him to concentrate on the core Army business rather than logistics like providing food and buses.

“I just got rid of three of my biggest headaches,” he said.

Another change is coming at the museum on base. With no more Fort Dix, the military decided it no longer needed a Fort Dix Museum. Now, curator Daniel Zimmerman is overseeing a renamed Army Reserve Mobilization Museum.

He says he’ll try to tell about how 6 million soldiers passed through the base for training, mobilization, demobilization or as a stopover on the way to Europe-bound ships leaving from New York.

It will portray a base that was lined with fox holes 90 years ago, where a mock Vietnamese village was in place 40 years ago, and where a facsimile of an Iraq outpost was created this decade. It’s where one person died and 13 were hospitalized in a swine flu outbreak during basic training in 1976, that was said to be the target of radical Weathermen who accidentally killed themselves with a bomb they were building in New York in 1970, and was considered as a target by five men convicted last year of plotting to kill soldiers.

More than 77,000 troops have been mobilized there for service in Iraq and Afghanistan and other spots for the Global War on Terror since October 2001.

“It’s kind of a new chapter,” Zimmerman said. “Fort Dix has had a lot of new chapters.”

At a ceremony Wednesday afternoon on the parade grounds known as Infantry Park, five soldiers carried flags and guns toward “The Ultimate Weapon” a 14-foot statue of a World War II infantryman, officially ending the Army’s control of the installation.

Another ceremony is planned for Thursday to convene the joint base.