PD News

By Jack Smiles jsmiles@psdispatch.com
Times Leader Staff Writer

For his next trick Philip Russo will turn 1,200 acres of Afghan desert into a city for 14,000 residents. Oh wait, he’s already done that one.

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Philip Russo holds a little piece of home, a Sunday Dispatch, in Afghanistan where he serves as a civilian employee for the Marines.

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Philip Russo writes: ’This is a photo just after a dust storm. It’s me in front of an MRAP outside my tent. These MRAPs are responsible for saving hundreds/thousands of lives. I look like the invisible man but even with a neck gator around my face the fine dust particles still get in your mouth and you can feel the grit on your teeth.’

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Russo – an erstwhile magician who developed a magic act in high school – grew up in Pittston, went to Pittston Area High School and graduated from Wilkes-Barre Vo-Tech in 1982. Today he is a civilian employee of the Marine Corps as the Base Architect and Master Planner at Camp Leatherneck, a Marine base in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan.

It was a neat trick getting from here to there and magic set him on the road to his career.

Since he was old enough to remember Russo was always interested in magic. In putting together his magic act he had ideas for illusions, but didn’t know how to design them. “I couldn’t afford to buy my own illusions,” he said. “I needed to build the tricks I saw in my head so I took some drafting classes in high school. I took architectural drafting and my Voc-Tech teacher Mr. Ed Shedlock entered me in a drafting competitions and I was the Voc-Tech Pennsylvania state champion for architectural drafting.”

In addition to Shedlock, Bill Gladish, an architect for Geisinger Health Systems and chairman of the Pittston Planning Commission, was also a mentor. Gladish was the president of Pittston Junior Football in the 1980s and hired Russo to perform magic at the football banquets and he encouraged Russo to pursue architecture as a career. “I used to tell him magic is what you need to be an architect,” he said, “you need to pull rabbits out of hats.”

Russo had one more rabbit to pull before he could be an architect: He had to get in a school with a good program.

“I took a Martz bus from Wilkes-Barre to Philadelphia along with several rolls of my drawings, walked from Center City up North Broad Street to Temple University, spoke with the Dean of the Architecture/Engineering program and started the architecture program in the spring of 1984,” he said.

Russo worked two jobs through college, graduating from Temple University in 1989 with a 5-year Bachelor of Architecture degree. He stayed in Philly for several years, working for engineering companies and becoming a licensed architect.

In 1994 he got married and he his wife Victoria moved to Chicago where both were accepted to Loyola University Chicago, he for an MBA and she for a PhD. They had two kids, son Philip in 1998, and daughter Renee in 2000.

Armed with an MBA in Operations, International Business and Business Ethics, he rose to vice-president and Director of China Operations for a global engineering company based in Chicago. In 2005 he and his family moved to China where he managed his firm’s architecture/engineering operations for a year.

Russo gained architectural experience in a list of disciplines including commercial, research and development, education, justice, residential, telecom, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, hospitality, medical, automotive, mining and metals and historic preservation; a resume which made him very marketable to Marine Corps for the Camp Leatherneck project.

Developing the master plan for expanding the camp – it grew from 400 acres in January of 2009 to 1,200 today – was one of his prime responsibilities.

Russo said growing Camp Leatherneck is like building a town from scratch. “Camp Leatherneck has every issue any major US City is faced with and we need to design, import and build every stick of wood, every inch of steel and every yard of concrete,” he said.

Russo said the economy, which has depressed large-scale designing and building projects, was one reason he took the job with the Marines. A sense of adventure and patriotism were two others.

In an email from Afghanistan Russo wrote, “Working in a combat zone was not an easy decision. Working in a private company for the military as an embedded licensed professional, I eat and sleep in the same quarters as the Marines. I spent the past year living in a tent and enduring the same harsh sun, heat and sand storms as the Marines and other service members endure in southern Afghanistan. Loving what you do is critical. I am honored to serve here and be with other civilian experts and military members of my country. I have not seen actual combat and have yet to be shot at (my family likes it this way) but I do feel a special kinship with the soldiers who are assigned to protect me when I do go outside the wire. I am truly honored to be here with my US military and grateful I have the proper skill sets to support the mission and still provide for my family.

“The work here is exciting and interesting, although, right now, I only see my family once every six months, just like the Marines, we all make sacrifices.”

Russo’s varied architectural background was put to the test by the Marines. At Camp Leatherneck he helps design and build air traffic control towers, office buildings, command operations centers, dog kennels for bomb-sniffing dogs, a veterinary clinic, multi-denominational chapels, medical centers, housing, and a power grid and secure in-ground fiber optic network through out the camp.

Lately Russo has been going “outside the wire,” as leaving Leatherneck is called, to help develop schools, markets, police stations, etc. for the Afghans. “This is right down my strike zone,” he wrote. “It does come with more risk. Every time we go outside the wire more risks are introduced but the rewards, if the community accepts what we are doing, will mean a major shift for the Afghan people for generations to come.”

While Camp Leatherneck is constantly being improved, the living is far from home-living. “I normally work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days per week. There’s really not much else to do but work, but the war fighters outside are doing the real heavy lifting and we need to do everything we can here to support them and improve the base camp when they return. I’ve been living in a tent for the past year. We do have power via stand-alone generators and a 10-mega watt electrical plant developed over the past several months. We do technically have running water in the shower tent and LSS (Latrine, Shower & Shave) container, which are served via pumps and a bag of water. Many of the troops down range use bottled water to wash, brush their teeth and cook. We are improving our living conditions daily and trust our efforts on Leatherneck will translate to improved conditions for our war fighters as well as improve the lives of the Afghan people.”

Russo won an award from the Commanding General of the Expeditionary Brigade. It reads in part: “For outstanding achievement in the performance of his duties as architect and base camp planner G-7, Marine Expeditionary Brigade Afghanistan from June 2007 to April 2010 in support for Operation Enduring Freedom. Mr. Russo quickly adapted to the high demands of working in a combat environment.”

Nothing tricky about that.