A Trucker's Tale

by Ed Miller

  You might witness this careful operation less frequently these days, due to the presence of more women in military units. In 1968 and 1969, the only females we saw were a few nurses, girls in USO shows, and occasionally Vietnamese women. We never got called out for using the throttles to aid in this endeavor. It was simply one of the things people were more lax about in Vietnam than they would be in the US.

  Vietnam was a lot of things, but dry was not one of them. Cheerful young girls, who were around ten years old, always had an ample supply of beer kept ice-cold in ice-filled holes dug in the sand. I don’t remember the price of a beer, but I do remember getting shit-faced on just a couple dollars. I tried to pace myself on that cheap nectar so I would be in an acceptable condition when it came time to drive, but I can’t say the same for the other drivers. I witnessed many of them drinking while they were running up and down Highway 1. It was quite possible that some of them were already half in the bag when they arrived at the convoy point. And maybe it was simply due to the thousands of Army trucks on the roads, which caused significant overcrowding, but I saw many trucks overturned or run-off into rice paddies, and I’d venture to bet that drinking often had something to do with that.

  Army tank retrievers looked like tanks with attached wrecker booms—tow trucks with the kind of heavy-duty chains and hooks used to secure a vehicle. We didn’t have to drive far before we saw the retrievers in action because they were always busy righting overturned trucks. These tank retrievers also came to the Seabees’s rescue when one of our fully loaded twin-engine Euclid TS-24 scrapers, a tractor used for digging, moving, and leveling ground, got mired in a rice paddy. Some people said the TS-24 operator got pissed off about something and drove into the rice paddy on purpose. However it happened, the scraper was so badly stuck in the mud that the retrieval required the tank retriever plus our other two fully loaded TS-24s. It was quite a sight and quite a sound: the combined forty-five-hundred horsepower engines screaming and struggling to pull that behemoth from the mud.

  I got to know a number of different kinds of trailers in Vietnam that I hadn’t had any experience with at home. Except for driving Obie’s lowboy trailer, the one we used to transport the D6 Caterpillar bulldozer down Black Mountain, all my early trucking experiences were spent driving forty- or forty-five-foot closed vans. There were no closed vans in our battalion’s equipment inventory, so I was relegated to pulling flatbeds, lowboys, or stretch (extendable) trailers. Several flatbeds were equipped with side racks and tarps to be used when something needed protection from the rain or needed to be kept out of sight.

  My first flatbed life lesson was provided by an Army colonel during my first trip to Da Nang. My tractor was hooked to a flatbed and I was waiting in line with several other trucks to load some product for my trip back north to Camp Haines when a petty officer told me to move to a different section of the storage yard. He said they had a small job for me that wouldn’t take much time. I drove over, and was instructed to haul four pieces of flat steel plates to a fabrication building near the Da Nang base. As it was very close and I would be driving very slowly, I didn’t chain the plates down on the trailer bed. It didn’t seem necessary. But just when I was in sight of my destination, I turned right at an intersection and the steel plates decided to go a different direction. They shot right off my trailer and landed in the roadway, just barely missing a jeep carrying the colonel and his driver. It was a close call, and way too close for comfort. One look from the colonel and I felt like Beetle Bailey as he stood ready to catch hell from Sarge.

  I climbed out of my tractor, came to attention, saluted the colonel, and began making my apologies. The colonel must not have had important business elsewhere, because he stayed on the scene while his driver took me to find a forklift so I could load the steel plates back onto my trailer. When I returned, the colonel taught me his proper way of securing steel plates for transport. His way was to use all the chains and binders the flatbed was equipped with, and there were many of them. I hadn’t used any of them, and even though two chains would have sufficiently held the number of plates I was carrying, he made me put on every single chain and binder. When I was finished, he said, “It’s a damned miracle you didn’t kill us, and maybe next time you will think twice about not chaining your load.” It was an awfully good lesson. I’m pretty sure my life would have turned out differently had I flattened the colonel and his driver.

  I also had to quickly learn the rules of hauling a motorized sheepsfoot soil compactor. A few months into our time in Vietnam, we’d heard a rumor that a brand-new one had been issued to our battalion. Both Baker and I wanted to be the one to haul it north because it was rumored to be one aggravating son of a bitch to transport and each of us enjoyed a challenge. Well, I was the lucky trucker who happened to be in Da Nang on the day the equipment arrived. The thing looked like an enormous wingless insect on steroids. It wasn’t heavy, maybe fifteen to twenty tons before adding water to the reservoirs in each wheel, but it was twelve feet wide and close to twelve feet high. Imagine an asphalt roller, triple its size, and add hundreds of steel appendages, resembling actual sheep’s feet, welded to each roller. The compactor had articulated steering, which meant it had front and rear halves connected by a pivot point, so it was fairly easy to navigate, and it could do some mighty fine dirt packing.

  The sheepsfoot had a very small footprint because only a few of the feet of each roller touched the wooden floor of the lowboy trailer, and I didn’t have a hell of a lot of confidence the thing would stay on the trailer for seventy-five miles. Heeding the aforementioned colonel’s advice, I used every chain and binder I could find on that sucker. I had so many chains holding it down that I don’t think it would have moved if the trailer had flipped upside down. It was such an ungodly looking piece of equipment that the people who viewed it, military or civilian, stopped what they were doing and watched it go by. When I arrived at our camp in it, most everyone came out of their offices, or “hooches” as we called them, to see it. Even the mechanics stopped what they were doing and stood in the shop’s doorways staring at the spectacle.

  One of the equipment operators stationed at our Da Nang base had driven the compactor onto the trailer when I picked it up, so not having a clue how it operated, I stopped at the transportation hooch to ask who would unload the sheepsfoot. The first-class petty officer looked at me and said, “You brought the goddamn thing up here, so you get to unload it!”

  It didn’t take but a few minutes to figure it out, and after backing down the loading ramp, I got the thing in high gear and headed to the shop for them to give it a physical. I went flying past the transportation hooch and the dust cloud I left pissed off the petty officer, which of course was my intention. What was he going to do? Slap my hand and send me off to Vietnam?

  Several weeks later, I was alone while heading northbound from Da Nang with another load of supplies, and as I started down the other side of the mountain, I detected the smell of hot truck brakes somewhere ahead. It was a smell that had been seared into my nostrils and memory when I hauled the D6 down Black Mountain. The farther down the mountain I went, the worse the odor became. After another curve or two, I could see smoke billowing from the red-hot brakes of the responsible tractor and trailer. It was Baker’s rig. He typically tried to haul more freight than everyone else who drove tractor trailers, and his heavy load of steel beams had put his brakes to the test.

  When I got close enough to see through the smoke screen, I saw Baker steering the tractor with his right hand while his left arm held the driver’s side door open. His left foot and most of his body was on the running board, and his right foot was pushing the brake pedal. We were damned nearly at the bottom of the mountain, so I dropped back a short distance to not choke on the smoke. When we hit flat ground, he was able to stop the vehicle on a large, open piece of land, and I came to a stop too. We both got out and I walked to him, but there was so much smoke still billowing out tha
t we had to walk upwind, and quite a way so we could breathe. I asked, “What the hell were you doing coming down the mountain standing on the running board?”

  “I kinda figured my brakes would completely go out,” he said, so I pulled the trailer hand valve all the way down [they used to stay in the down position], then opened the door and stood on the running board prepared to jump off. If the son of a bitch was going over the cliff, I sure as hell wasn’t going with it.”

  Baker had grown up in Montana and some of his family members had been loggers. He told me that a couple of them had done this same thing when their brakes were also put to the test, and although the practice wasn’t exactly safe, the alternative—running off a mountain—made it the best option. This made damned good sense to me, but I’m glad I never had to employ his method.

  Another crucial lesson I learned early on regarded the hauling of one of our most prized commodities. Each week, I made two or three round trips from our camp to the supply depots in Da Nang to haul food, grease, lubricants, and flat and structural steel (well-chained), culverts, and cement. By far the most important load I hauled, which was about once every two weeks, was a load of shrink-wrapped, palletized, double-stacked beer. It wasn’t really necessary to cover the pallets since the beer was already skunked from sitting outside in the sun at the beer yard in Da Nang, but during my first beer load heading north, I realized that tarps were absolutely necessary.

  On this run, I was winding through a hamlet when I noticed the driver in an approaching Army truck blinking his lights and pointing above my truck. I didn’t see anything unusual as I looked into the sky, but my rearview side mirrors revealed several little Vietnamese boys on top the trailer. They were grabbing cans of beer and throwing them as fast as they could to their friends running behind the trailer. I stopped quickly, prepared to get out and holler at them, and the boys skedaddled. When I climbed on top the beer load to assess the damage, I saw that half a dozen cases were missing from one of the pallets. The boys had only thrown one beer at a time, but they’d worked quickly. Practice must have helped them become such proficient beer thieves.

  There was nothing I could do, so I got back in the trailer and got going, but within minutes, I saw beer flying off the trailer again. I don’t know where the boys came from or how they climbed back on the trailer without me seeing them. This time I wasn’t able to pull over quickly, so I grabbed my Colt 45 from its holster, pointed it toward an unattended rice paddy, and fired several rounds. That did the trick. The kids must have thought I was shooting at them because they hightailed it out of sight. For all future beer hauls, I set up the side boards and tarped the beer to hide it, thereby removing the temptation for these little bandits. Interestingly, the ice-cold beer in the sand at the convoy points were the same brands of beer I hauled. I’m sure this was not a coincidence.

  For one of my trips in a stretch trailer, I was hauling 110-foot-long telephone poles, which, like the structural steel I hauled in a stretch trailer, were used as bridge pilings. On this occasion, I loaded ten of them at our barge facility in Huế and set out for a trip to the bridge construction project thirty-five miles north. These loads were over twice the length of a flatbed, or lowboy, so it was best to drive slow and steady with them. In a small hamlet I very slowly rounded a gentle curve and swung wide enough for the trailer to clear a villager’s hut. As the trailer straightened out, I glanced out the passenger-side mirror and saw an old mangy dog whom I’d observed painfully hobbling through this village many times before. As my eyes returned to the road ahead, the dog dashed from behind a bush and ran right in front of the trailer wheels. I didn’t even have time to react. I stopped as quickly as I could, got out of the tractor, and ran back to the scene, where there was already a crush of people gawking at the flattened canine.

  Suddenly realizing that joining the crowd maybe hadn’t been the smartest idea, especially since I had just run over someone’s pet, I started walking back to my tractor. But then it struck me that the crowd wasn’t upset that the dog had been run over; instead, they were arguing over who was going to take the poor guy home for supper. No one seemed to even notice me, so I jumped back into the truck and slowly got the hell out of Viet-Dodge. I felt terrible the rest of the trip to the bridge site. There was no way I could have avoided it, but it still bothered me that I had killed the old guy. I could only hope that someone took him home and had a good meal.

  After the dog incident, I got back on the road and continued on until I reached the bridge staging area. I arrived with just enough time to remove the chains and release the standards that bound my load, drop off the delivery, and make it back to our camp’s gate before sunset—though this required my driving like a bat out of hell and I always just barely made it.

  The next morning, the pile-driving crew arrived at the staging area, only to find that none of the 110-foot-long poles I’d dropped off the day before were there. I was sent back to the site and was interrogated about them. What happened, they wanted to know, to those motherfucking telephone poles? I calmly explained the work I’d done the previous evening, and even showed them where the poles had gouged holes in the dirt when they fell from the trailer. There were no marks indicating the poles had been dragged away, and there was no sawdust, which would have meant someone had cut them into smaller pieces, so, like magic, the poles had simply disappeared.

  Several days later, the mystery was solved by all who drove Highway 1 north of our camp. The poles had been stolen, and the crime committed by the entire population of the closest village to the jobsite. The villagers had assembled enough bodies to lift the long, heavy poles onto their shoulders, and, using what I call the “Vietnamese shuffle,” carried them away. (I use the term “shuffle” to describe the way I observed the manner in which most Vietnamese walked. They didn’t walk loudly and take long strides like Americans, but quietly shuffled their feet, seemingly taking smaller steps.)

  For the next several weeks, we watched the poles be transformed into planks for building huts, as men sat astride them and sawed back and forth with their crosscut saws. I can only imagine how excruciatingly painful their legs and asses must have been after sitting on poles covered in creosote, a tar-derived substance known to swell, irritate, and burn the skin. Since it took weeks to saw these poles, their long periods of exposure most likely caused their skin to develop sores and become sensitive to sunlight. The other villagers must also have suffered problems after breathing the nasty creosote odor, because damned near every hut sported newly sawed creosote siding.

  After that incident, we hauled the poles from Huế to a fenced-in area at our camp’s storage yard. When the poles were needed at a jobsite, each truck driver would load his trailer using a large Pettibone forklift. The one thousand pound, 110-foot-long poles were tapered from approximately thirty-six inches in diameter on one end to about eighteen inches on the other end, and the big end weighed considerably more than the smaller end. This meant that when picking up a pole, each forklift operator had to place the forks closer to the heavy end. The forks were about eight feet long and when spread to maximum width were probably eight or ten feet apart. Because of the height and weight of each pole, it was impossible to load more than one at a time, so it took quite a while to pull and load your trailer. Being young’uns, we had contests to see who could drive his forklift and place his forks under a pole and balance it on the first try, and also which of the two drivers—there were usually two drivers hauling poles to a jobsite—could load the maximum ten poles on their trailer the quickest. We would do anything, really, to break the monotony.

  Just as we learned not to leave poles lying around, we also learned to bring all our equipment back to camp each evening. Every good truck driver knows that it’s always best to make as few trips as possible—unless he’s paid according to the number of loads he hauls—so each afternoon, we loaded as much equipment as possible onto our lowboys. We weren’t too concerned by height, weigh
t, and width—if we could chain it to the trailer, we hauled it. You would see loads that would never be legal in the US. It wasn’t unusual for us to load two D6 dozers on the same trailer, or two mini-dozers and one backhoe, or one rubber-tired crane and a backhoe. It didn’t matter if equipment stuck out over the top of the tractor, as the boom of a rubber-tired crane did, nor did it matter if equipment protruded far past the end of a trailer, as a backhoe’s bucket or rubber-tired crane did. We certainly improved on the meaning of “full utilization,” and, surprisingly, none of us were ever called down for overloading our trailers.

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  All Seabee truck drivers and equipment operators carried holstered Colt 45 handguns and M16 assault rifles. Thankfully, none of us ever fired them during combat, even though we worked in hostile territory almost every day. We didn’t have to fire our weapons because the times that we were required to perform construction projects in areas of ongoing enemy activity, or while working at night (to minimize traffic disruption) when replacing highway drainage culverts, we were guarded by either Army or Marine troops. Both groups had our backs, and we will always be indebted to those soldiers.

  When an opportunity arose to thank the Army soldiers for providing security, we took it. We’d heard some of them saying they wished they had some of their own dump trucks, like we did, so they could stockpile sand, which would enable them to fill the sandbags needed to build stronger bunkers. Their desire for this was completely understandable since their Camp Evans, which sat adjacent to the Seabees’s Camp Haines, was frequently under fire from enemy rockets and mortars. This was likely due to the fact that Camp Evans was an operating base for Cobra attack helicopters, which the enemy wanted to destroy. Understandably, the nightly rocket attacks scared the soldiers. Hell, they scared us too, and the incoming warning sirens also sent us to our bunkers.