Ernest Graves
This was quite an engineering job. It was taken on primarily by the 36th Engineer
Battalion, commanded first by [Colonel Richard E.] Rich Leonard and then [Colonel
Vito D.] Vic Stipo. The driving force behind this concept was [Colonel Fletcher H.]
Bud Griffis, who is now the district engineer in New York. He was quite an engineer.
He was a major at the time. He started out in the headquarters in Saigon doing planning
and design work. About half way through his tour, he was reassigned and became the
S3 of the 36th Engineers.
The great disappointment of all this was that we failed by about a hundred feet of
closing this road during the dry season that I was there. We got rained out at the very
end. We had the closing ceremony. [Major General Harold R.] Hal Parfitt, the 20th
Engineer Brigade commander, and I went out there, got on a bulldozer, and pushed
some dirt into the gap. It started pouring rain while we were in the midst of the
ceremony. They never had enough dry days to close the gap that year. They closed it
the next year.
Q:
Did you experience active opposition to this project?
A:
Oh, yes. Of course, in Vietnam, most of the action was at night. We never had anything
happen during the day that I can remember. There may have been some people around
that we didn't approve of. But at night equipment would be sabotaged. We had
casualties from mines that were put in at night. They would come in and mine work
areas with antipersonnel mines. We had some people killed that way.
The 69th Engineer Battalion was building the road from the south. The commander of
their forward company was killed. To secure their equipment out on the job, rather than
moving it back and forth every day, they had built a small area, put up a berm, put their
equipment inside there, and dug some shallow shelters against being mortared--a
frequent occurrence. This particular night the company commander didn't get in his
shelter. He was sleeping in his jeep, the place was mortared, and he was killed.
That was a constant concern in Vietnam. That's an example of the "standards" issue
that we discussed earlier. What standard should be established for security? It was a
difficult issue because if you were going to insist that all these units be bunkered so that
they were highly secure against being mortared at night, that would have consumed a
tremendous amount of effort.
There had to be a judgment made as to how much effort went into security, and how
much effort went into the job. In this particular case, we didn't get it right, and the
result was tragic. This was a constant concern.
Q:
Did you get involved in the revolutionary development program?
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