Campbell says the goal was to save buildings that are historically significant and useful to the units using the base now, and make them much less vulnerable to effects of climate change.
"The ability to renovate these buildings was taken holistically, not only as an opportunity to bring it up to the current mission set, but also to look at resiliency from the complete spectrum," he says. "Not only storm, climate change, but energy efficiency and building efficiency, and building health as far as indoor air quality."
In practice, that means the surviving Montford Point buildings are being shored up - their wood replaced with waterproof materials, their shingles replaced with wind-resistant metal roofs.
The white, weather-resistant cement-based siding was chosen to look like the original painted wood planks, and metal roofs are colored as close as possible to the original shingles.
And the heating and cooling systems in the buildings have been significantly upgraded to use less energy and prevent mold and wood rot from the area's infamous humidity.
Carroll Braxton, 97, a retired master gunnery sergeant from Virginia, vividly remembers that humidity - and worse.
"It was a swamp right near where we was," Braxton says. "The drill instructors would take us right by that swamp and make us stand at attention. And he would say, 'You N-words, did you eat?' "
"'Well, let them (expletive) mosquitoes eat now!' "
Braxton says the bites were so bad that when he went home on furlough, his mother thought he had smallpox.
The verbal and physical abuse directed at the men seemed endless, he said. Some recruits caught breaking rules about smoking were forced to smoke with buckets on their head and blankets over the buckets. He heard one man was forced to drink his own urine.
"See, we were dogged," Braxton says. "As if we weren't human."
The Marine Corps was the last service to allow Black recruits and didn't do it willingly. It happened only after an order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Melton McLaurin, an emeritus professor of history at UNC-Wilmington, is the author of The Marines of Montford Point, an oral history.
He says the Commandant of the Marine Corps at the time, Major General Thomas Holcomb, made his feelings clear.
"He said if he had a choice between 250,000 Black Marines and 5,000 whites, he would take the whites," McLaurin says. "They didn't want anything to do with African American Marines."