Retired intel officer, Fort Drum employee defines own road to success

FORT DRUM, N.Y. -- Bobbie Jean Gosier is not one for excuses. Although the 66-year-old former Army warrant officer can point to many difficult challenges in her lifetime, including childhood segregation where she grew up in rural Georgia and entrenched prejudices elsewhere, she never quit and continued moving forward.

Today, as the Simulations Branch chief at Fort Drum's Directorate of Plans, Training, Mobilization and Security, she is responsible for more than $4 million worth of state-of-the-art equipment at the Mission Training Complex on post.

Gosier said any barriers in life are more about the person, organization or culture erecting them than the one challenged to break through them.

"I think the biggest thing for me getting where I am today is I always focused on where I wanted to go," Gosier said. "I didn't focus on where I had been, because I knew what that was like, and I didn't want to go back."

SEGREGATION

Gosier was the youngest of seven children born and raised in rural Deep South poverty during the 1950s. She was only 5 when her mother died. She said she knew her father, but rarely saw him. To avoid splitting up the children, her maternal grandmother took over child-rearing duties.

For Gosier and her siblings, life in segregated Unadilla, Ga., often consisted of six-mile walks down filthy country roads to their tiny one-room schoolhouse. When not in school, they spent long days under oppressive heat and humidity picking cotton, pecans and peaches for as little as a penny a pound.

"It was tough, no joke about it -- really tough," she said.

Gosier said she will never forget her favorite childhood teacher, the daughter of the town preacher. At Mount Moriah School, the dedicated Miss Dean was like a one-man band, teaching children of all ages seated in rows separated by grade. Outside of the classroom, she often traveled out of her way to give students in remote areas a lift to school.

"Sometimes, you just didn't go to school," Gosier said. "That was normal."

Also normal was the fact that signs reading "Colored" hung over doctor's offices, public restrooms and even water fountains.

"You knew what fountain to drink out of and which side of the building to sit in," she explained. "That's how we lived."

In their tiny two-bedroom home, Gosier shared a bed with her other sisters. She described "Grandma" as a mythological almost Madea-like figure in Unadilla, ruling with an unapologetic firmness and a fervor that flared up at the sight of misbehaving children.

"Let me tell ya, everybody knew Grandma," she said. "In the South, you are just brought up that way. Grandma was 'Grandma' to everybody."

Her grandmother also carefully steered her grandchildren through the complex, often confusing customs of growing up under Jim Crow laws.

In 1954, the year after Gosier's mother died, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated schooling was "inherently unequal" in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

But Gosier said that in the quiet far-flung town of Unadilla, segregation followed her right through high school -- 12 years after Brown vs. Board and two full years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public accommodations like stores, hotels and restaurants nationwide.

"I know it is kind of mind-boggling," Gosier said. "Nothing was integrated even right through the 1960s."

'I WANT TO BE JUST LIKE HER'

Gosier was one of only two of the seven siblings who finished high school in nearby Vienna, Ga., and she would be the only one to attend college.

She said "Reverend Jones," an African-American pastor from North Carolina, had often visited her church in Georgia. Through the Negro College Fund, he arranged to send her to Knoxville College, a historically black school in Tennessee.

Gosier said the idea of going to college was very foreign to her. After being placed with a white family in Knoxville, she began studying for a degree in history. It was not far into her studies that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on the other side of the state.

Gosier said when rioting broke out, she was stuck at the school because it was too dangerous for the family's father to pick her up.

"They were killing white folks on campus," she said. "There was so much anger and so much madness. I couldn't handle that. So I quit college."

For several years after that, Gosier worked odd jobs, making a living in everything from kitchen and cleanup work at restaurants and hotels to washing windows and folding clothes at laundries.

It wasn't until one day in 1969 that her life took a dramatic turn. She had just finished her shift at a laundry facility when she noticed a large picture out in front of a recruiting station in Charlotte, N.C. It was of a female staff sergeant in her U.S. Army dress uniform.

"I looked up at it and said, 'I want to be just like her,'" Gosier recalled. "That actually was my whole goal in joining the Army. I wanted to be a staff sergeant."

Gosier did that and then some. During her 22-year military career in the intelligence field, she reached senior noncommissioned officer rank, moving between duty stations that included Fort Holabird, Md.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Heidelberg, Germany; and Yongsan, Korea.

But her journey was not without some rough patches. Although the military was at the forefront of racial integration in the U.S. since desegregating the forces in 1948, Gosier said embedded prejudice among some in its ranks reared its ugly head at times.

Yet even when she felt mistreated or worried whether race played a part in her promotion potential, Gosier said she worked hard and tried to see everything as a learning opportunity.

"I did hit barriers," she said. "I sometimes figured, 'I'm never going to make it here,' wherever I was. But I didn't know whether it was them or me. So I improved my own self. I always looked at what I haven't done first before I called it a barrier."

FORT DRUM

In the early 1980s at Fort Ord, Calif., Gosier received her appointment to warrant officer. Her first assignment as an intelligence officer was with U.S. Central Command in Florida. After 18 months there, and three years in Hawaii, she was assigned in 1987 to the recently stood up 10th Mountain Division (LI).

During her first winter at Fort Drum, Gosier met her second husband at a local ski area that offered $19.95 "Never Ever Skied Before" specials to newcomers. She married Dale Gosier in 1990.

In addition to marrying a North Country man, Gosier remained in the area so that her daughter Theresa could finish high school here.

After her retirement as a chief warrant officer two in 1991, she landed a civilian job working as an information management officer on post a few years later. She took over the Simulation Branch in the late 1990s and helped design the new Mission Training Complex before moving into it in 2003.

Gosier now manages all flight simulation equipment on the airfield, virtual battlefield simulation systems on South Post and mission command "constructive" simulations at the MTC in which Soldiers on laptops maneuver computer-generated forces through various digital scenarios.

"We play games on the computers, for lack of a better term," said Gosier, who manages more than 70 contractors and technical staff at the MTC. "It's all of the systems Soldiers take to war. Commanders tell us what they want, we build and inject the scenarios, and we give the Soldiers their objectives."

Over the past decade of war, tens of thousands of Soldiers have trained at the MTC ahead of Iraq and Afghanistan deployments. As the person in charge of the Directorate of Plans, Training, Mobilization and Security, Eric Wagenaar said he couldn't be more pleased with Gosier's performance.

"On a daily basis, Bobbie and the MTC team provide training support at every level of operations in our Army, from joint operations down to the infantry squad level, ensuring each organization has the ability to train on their assigned combat mission in a controlled, yet highly demanding and realistic environment," said Wagenaar, DPTMS director.

Her first-line supervisor, Joe Wood, DPTMS Training Division chief, said Gosier has guided the transition of the Simulation Branch's mission command training program through a decade of incredible innovation and modernization. He said her work not only supports the high demands of a 21st century Army, but she also demonstrates an "exceptional dedication and concern" for the Soldiers and Civilians of Fort Drum.

"(Her) untiring drive, initiative and determination is instrumental in Fort Drum leading the way in providing exceptional mission command and simulation training support to the 10th Mountain Division and the U.S. Army," he said.

'YOU CAN DO THIS'

When people look at her race or gender and ask Bobbie Gosier how she got where she is today, her response is incredulous: "Umm, because I'm qualified?"

On a personal level, Wagenaar, who witnessed de facto segregation in the South during the 1970s, said he is extremely impressed with the hurdles Gosier overcame in life to reach her position today.

"I'm very moved by Bobbie's personal success story," he said. "(She) grew up in rural Georgia during a period in our country that provided very few opportunities."

Gosier, who now has two grandchildren of her own, attributes any successes in life to her grandmother -- the "backbone" of the family throughout her childhood. She said it was her love and support that helped her reach for the stars once she left Georgia.

Since joining the Army, Gosier has earned two associate degrees and a bachelor's in computer science from Rochester Institute of Technology. She also has certifications in data communications, voice communications and telecommunications network management.

She proudly shared that her daughter, Theresa, who also served in the Army during the 1990s, is now a 39-year-old project manager studying for a doctorate.

For all of the doors that opened, and even the ones that closed over the years, Gosier said she is grateful.

"There's been so much opportunity," she said. "And I had some very good Army leaders who told me: 'You can do this. You're smart. I know you can do it.'

"You can overcome a lot of things on your own in life by just keeping your mouth shut, doing what you are told and being on time," she added. "That's always been my philosophy. You do those three things, you're pretty much good."