Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
One other thing that occurred at this time was the thing I mentioned about their other
agendas. We really needed to get some rock on this road. They had a rock crusher in the 20th
Engineer Group. The United States had bought it, the same kind we had in U.S. engineer
units, 75 tons per hour. I wanted that rock crusher down at Cheo Reo to produce rock for the
road. They were producing rock for the road by hiring a contractor who put about 50 women
and children up on the hillside who would chuck the stones down to the base of the hill. Then
they'd squat on them with these little ball peen hammers and break them up into the right
size. So, we'd get enough rock to do a few hundred meters every now and then. My
American can-do approach caused me to figure out how we could do it faster. I wanted to
move the rock crusher and the trucks that the United States government had bought and give
them to this engineer battalion down there to operate and build that road--get it finished and
get out. Mission accomplished.
I was really being stonewalled. So, I tried at the battalion level. I tried at the group level with
Major Chan. It was always, "No." We finally came to the conclusion that the Vietnamese
goal was not to use that rock crusher and wear it out, but to keep it for that day when
Americans might be gone and all they would have left were these things. There also may
have been the goal of, "Let's keep the contractor out to deploy the locals to build the road."
We worked that at every extreme. We had the senior Corps adviser, now Colonel Wilson's
successor, Colonel Hal McCown, who, interestingly enough in your readings of The Damned
Engineers and MacDonald's book, was captured at La Gleize during the Battle of the Bulge
by Joachim Peiper and held as a hostage and taken with him when Peiper pulled out and
abandoned his equipment at La Gleize. Anyway, this Hal McCown was our senior adviser,
and Major General [Nguyen] Khanh arrived to be the II Corps commander. We all knew
things were going to be better because he spoke wonderful English. Later he briefly became
Chief of State, you may recall. Now we really had some folks who spoke wonderful English,
and they were interesting, but they all had their own agendas. Trying to figure out just what
those were and dice them all together was sporty work for those of us who were advisers.
Anyway, I had Colonel McCown working on Khanh to tell my group commander he had to
take that rock crusher to Cheo Reo.
Then we turned to Saigon and the senior advisers there on the engineer side of the house to
work with the ARVN's Chief of Engineers. We tried every way to get that rock crusher down
to Cheo Reo and never did succeed. The senior Corps engineer had changed about halfway
through my tour, about the time that I went to the 20th Group. Major Casper Bisping came in
to be the senior engineer adviser, a fine gentleman and good officer. He was one of those that
I was appealing to for help and he was very helpful in trying to make all these things happen.
So, my final delivery to him, as I walked out of the Five Oceans BOQ in Saigon to come
home, was a six- or seven-page missive on why Major Chan was not supportive of the war
effort and should be relieved. That was the American viewpoint; that wasn't necessarily the
Vietnamese viewpoint.
Q:
I know there was a variety of attitudes, but how would you characterize the attitude of the
Vietnamese officers and the soldiers you encountered? Had they seen it before with the
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