Engineer Memoirs
So, yes, there was a problem. But again, what I found when I arrived at the group was
that there was not good planning. We would get a construction directive, and the
battalion wouldn't get around to ordering materials. I worked mightily while I was there
to get that squared away. My instructions were, "The minute we get a directive, the
first thing we're going to do is make up the requisitions for the material."
Even so, there were delays. Certainly supplies affected my operation. But whether at
the theater level by that late date there was really a problem, I doubt. I remember
General [Frank T.] Mildren complaining that there were thousands of telephone poles
in the depot--well, they weren't telephone poles. They were piles. They proceeded to
issue them for anything and everything. Of course, in very little time, there weren't
enough piles. This showed that Mildren really knew very little about logistics.
Q:
I remember walking in Saigon port in 1967 and seeing big stacks of plywood rotting
on the docks, not being moved to a depot, not being used. I also think, on a theater
level, even earlier, supplies probably were adequate. They were in the country.
A:
Getting them out to the jobs was a problem. I would argue that Bob Ploger was
speaking a truism when he said that supplies were a problem in war. You show me a
war where supplies weren't a problem and I'll show you something that wasn't really
a war.
Perhaps the problem in Vietnam was that since we did everything on such a lavish scale,
we overloaded the system. If we had tried to do things more austerely, we might not
have had as many problems as we did.
Q:
Nobody was building to your father's standard?
A:
Absolutely not.
Q:
I was going to, in fact, ask you if we shouldn't turn Ploger's observation on its head
and say, profligacy of supplies was a problem.
A:
It may have been. There have been some very excellent books written about what we
did and the mechanics of it. I have yet to see a book that is written about logistics in the
larger context.
Of course, Carroll Dunn wrote a monograph as well.3
Carroll H. Dunn, Base Development in South Vietnam 19651970 (Washington, D.C.: Department of
3
the Army, 1972).
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