Phillip Ceasar, son of a National Guardsman who served in the south Pacific during World War II, moved to Scarborough 43 years ago and joined the Maine National Guard three years later. 

 “I’m still considered ‘from away,’” he laughed. “I don’t really know why I joined [the Maine National Guard]. I try not to remember that far back.”

Ceasar said it was only natural for him to begin working full time with a construction crew for the Department of Defense, Veterans and Emergency Management. 

“My father was a home builder, I kind of grew up around it,” he said. “Our guys do repairs and construction projects, whether it’s earth work or rebuilding armories.”

Over 39 years, Ceasar worked his way up the organization’s ladder and is now the construction supervisor for the Directorate of Facilities engineering at Camp Keyes in Augusta. After overseeing military, municipal and civilian construction projects throughout the state and the world, was selected as the 2008 Manager of the Year for the department. 

“My crew consists of guys who have retired after 20 years or some that are still in the Guard,” he said. “I have to interview all the new guys and not only say ‘OK, this is what I expect you to do,’ but make sure they’re aware of all the other benefits as well. The retirement benefits alone are amazing, and sometimes I don’t think the kids get that. It’s too far off for them.”

Being a good manager means more than sitting at a desk talking with new recruits; Ceasar said he stays away from his office in Augusta “just as much as possible.” Being on call 24-hours a day helps to get hands-on with projects, most recently the restoration of an armory building in Waterville. He said restorations are often extensive, including everything from plumbing to drywall work, which can take a significant amount of time and money. It took more than $1.5 million to restore an armory in Brewer “from one end to the other,” he said. 

“The place was a dump, they probably should have just let it fall down,” he said. “Now it’s state-of-the-art.”

 Ceasar said the biggest threat to vacant armories like the one in South Portland are contractors and engineers who aren’t familiar with the heavy-duty construction techniques employed by the military. 

“We don’t have anything to do with [the South Portland Armory] anymore, we sold it. But for somebody to say it’s falling down doesn’t seem right,” he said. “What we build lasts.”

Sometimes the National Guard receives contracts because they can complete projects to help communities at a lower cost than outside constractors, Ceasar said. 

Several years ago, he estimated his crew could install a security fence around South Portland’s Long Creek Youth Development Center for more than $300,000 less than an independent contractor’s quote.

“We actually came in under that and saved close to $1 million,” he said. “We’ve moved it two times since and actually sent a section to a youth center in Charleston, which saved them money too.”

The Maine National Guard has not seen an increase in construction requests during the economic downturn, something Ceasar said wasn’t surprising since their schedule quickly fills up with more than local construction projects.

“If we’re getting deployed we have a year-long training period, then we’re out there for sometimes up to a year,” he said. “Figure a year of readjustment when we get back before we can tackle another project.”

Ceasar said he has been deployed “a handful of times” during his time with the Maine National Guard, an experience that has changed during times of war and peace. 

“For a while it was a big culture shock to send [National Guardsmen] overseas,” he said. “The opportunity to go to war has always been there. I think kids nowadays are more attuned to that.”

Ceasar said he spent six months in Guatemala – one of his two deployments to South America – and worked with a “bunch of guys from New York” on rebuilding what was considered by locals to be a “major roadway.”

“It was a goat path up the side of the mountain,” he said. “We were going to make it a 4.2 mile  one-lane road with turnoffs every so often.”

During a preliminary visit to the path site, Ceasar and his crew discovered a number of locals who were gathered around a horse that had fallen off the path and broken it’s back, he said. Although medical experts embedded in Ceasar’s unit couldn’t save the horse, he said the locals led him and his men to a small village near a location where his crew had planed to construct a bridge for the new road.

“A bunch of kids came running out of a mud hut, it was probably 14 feet by 18 feet with a straw roof,” he said. “Turns out that was their school.”

One of the locals asked Ceasar if they could borrow two bags of cement so they could repair the walls of the building, he said. 

“We had a thousand bags sitting in a field not a hundred yards from that village,” Ceasar said. “They could have stolen two and no one would have known.”

Ceasar’s commanding officer initially told him to “stop thinking with [his] heart and think with [his] head,” when he asked if the unit could build a new school for the village. Ceasar said the officer, a former schoolteacher, changed his mind when the pair “happened” to visit the village a few days later.

“Those kids came out and you could see him melt into a puddle,” Ceasar said.

Three months later, congress accepted a list of supplies and a construction plan Ceasar had prepared in anticipation of the project. Not long after, he attended the school’s opening ceremony.

“There was this tarp at the end of the building, I couldn’t figure out why,” he said. “They pulled the tarp off and I saw they had named the school after me.”

While proud of his work in South America, Ceasar said his greatest success so far has been bringing back all 138 members of the 133 Engineer Battalion from a 12-month tour in Iraq in 2004. The battalion is scheduled to be deployed for a second time in 2010, a date Ceasar said can’t come soon enough. 

“I’ve been begging to be sent back,” he said. “I think it’s just the right thing to do.”