Engineer Memoirs
were going to be going after I'd been
there two or three months. What I
was worried about was what I should
do when I got there, that first month?
By going with Resor to Vietnam and
seeing what they were doing, I could
make good use of the month that
intervened between that trip and my
own deployment thinking through
what I was going to do.
Q:
You were in the Mekong Delta the
whole time you were there?
A:
I was in the delta. When I arrived, the
headquarters was at Vung Tau, which
is not really down in the delta, but
then it moved down to Can Tho.
Colonel Graves takes command of the 34th
Q:
And was your major project the 9th
Engineer Group at Vung Tau, Republic of
Infantry Division's headquarters?
Vietnam, from Colonel William G. Stewart.
A:
Dong Tam consumed the most effort, but the other big job was the rebuilding of QL4,
the main highway which winds from Saigon down into the delta, really down to the very
tip of the peninsula. It takes a circuitous route since it will run along the bank of one
of the branches of the Mekong River, and then it will cross and so forth. We were
trying to rebuild that road all the way down, partly as a supply route for ourselves, but
really to encourage commerce, movement by the Vietnamese. That was the more
interesting job from an engineering viewpoint because there was one narrow stretch that
was built beside a canal.
Most of the roads in Vietnam are beside canals because it was the spoil from the
excavation of the canal that provided the fill on which the road rested. But the roads
were very narrow because on part of this fill, people built their houses. You had this fill,
you had the houses, and then between the houses and the canal was a road.
For one stretch, which was about ten kilometers, we decided to abandon the route and
strike out across the rice paddies, build a fill, and use clay-lime stabilization on this fill.
Scientists had found that if you mixed lime with that clay, it would stabilize the clay and
make it strong.
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