FORT LEWIS, Wash. (AP) - Alan Archambault, a historian and artist who has been director of the Fort Lewis Military Museum for 21 years, looks forward to overseeing museums at military installations around the country.

Archambault, 57, of Lakewood, a native of Rhode Island, long expected to be returning to the East Coast day. He and his wife have a daughter in the final year of her medical residency at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

In his new post Archambault will be working to improve about 10 museums at U.S. Armed Forces Command installations, including the one at Fort Lewis.

"My colleagues said, `Hey, we'd really like you to take it,"' he said. "I've been dragged behind every kind of chariot there is over the years, so I sort of know the ropes. It was nice that people said Would you consider it?"'

He said he didn't expect to be at the post south of Tacoma so long.

"I love it here. Fort Lewis has been really good to me," he said. "I never intended to stay this long, but there's always been challenges, new things coming up that have kept it fresh.

"But I was getting to the point that if I was going to go back East, I'd need to do it soon."

Tom Morgan, a historian and retired Army officer from Steilacoom and vice president of Friends of the Fort Lewis Military Museum, said Archambault rehabilitated the museum at the historic Red Shield Inn in 1987-88 soon after he arrived.

The Salvation Army built the three-story wooden lodge in 1918 as housing for soldiers and their families. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it's due for a $5 million renovation that is expected to begin next year.

Archambault also has been praised for insisting on strict historical accuracy for the uniforms and equipment on the statues of Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Sgt. John Ordway at the Fort Lewis main gate.

Archambault has published several children's books on military history and, for Arcadia Publishing's "Images of America" series, drew on the museum's collection of photographs to produce a Fort Lewis history that is now in its third printing.

Under Archambault's direction, the museum has become as a center for Army history in the Pacific Northwest and a working repository for troops at Fort Lewis to learn about those who preceded them.

His family's roots in America date from the 1700s, and three ancestors from upstate New York fought for the Union army in the Civil War.

After joining the Army, Archambault was a construction draftsman from 1969 to 1972, mostly in Okinawa. Then he returned home, went to college and got a job as a freelance artist with The Providence (R.I.) Journal, doing paintings to accompany coverage of the U.S. Bicentennial.

He said he often thinks of his ancestors when he's talking to today's soldiers.

"We always tell them `You're just as important as any soldier who ever served,"' Archambault said. "'I don't believe in that `Greatest Generation' stuff. World War II was a great generation, but today's generation is just the same.

"`You are the same kind of people as the ones who answered the call in the Revolutionary War, in World War II,"' he tells the troops. "I always joke with them that someday, 100 years from now, some descendant of yours is going to be researching your military service."