Engineer Memoirs
This required the contractor to have an intensive training program for the Vietnamese
equipment operators and
However, the failure to replace experienced service
construction units, after the first round, continued to be a major problem.
Q ..
Would you agree with General Raymond's observation that troops were better
equipped for road and airfield construction, whereas civilians were better suited to build
ports and utilities?
A ..
No question about that, both by training and equipment. We had some Army port units
that did a reasonably good job on small projects, but they simply weren't capable of
taking on major efforts, such as the construction of the Newport facility in the Saigon
River.
Q ..
How about the whole question of construction standards? Wasn't that a problem, and
an issue of controversy?
A
Here again, there were several problems. While our forces were in Vietnam as advisers,
there was a tendency to fix things up reasonably well for the long haul and for people
to be reasonably comfortable in a debilitating climate, to say the least. As the
requirements increased and the number of troops increased, it was physically impossible
to maintain the same standards. This made it necessary to establish new standards-but
with considerable
both in changing from one standard to another and in
convincing the contractor that there was a change.
There were also interservice rivalries as to requirements. For instance, the Air Force
insisted that they had to have a higher degree of comfort for their pilots so that they
would be rested and ready to go. The pilots tended to stay in one place so it was a little
easier to justify building to a higher standard than it was for a cantonment out in the
jungle when you didn't know how long the unit would occupy it.
So there were problems both in establishing and in maintaining standards, and certainly
there were gross deficiencies. However, I think these standards were established fairly
early in the game, and a reasonable job was done in hewing to them. Although there is
no question that this was the war where we took the comforts of home to the battlefield
to a much higher degree than I had ever seen in World War II or Korea, including
having hot meals on the front line and ice cream and reconstituted milk and PX facilities
and cold drinks. I fought 11 months in World War II and never saw a Coke or its
equivalent; yet these were readily available in Vietnam.
Other things such as fresh meat and fresh vegetables and refrigerated storage in a very
hot and humid climate are items you just hadn't thought about in previous wars. This
standard of living added materially to the construction requirements and to the support
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