Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
As part of the QL1 upgrade, a very major project was constructing an 840-foot bridge over
the Ban Thach River. Design and planning were under way, and the first piles had just been
driven in the week or so before I arrived. So, that project was just getting started.
So, that was the 577th's mission there. Things from the past--Lieutenant Colonel Tom Lane
had been killed in a recon of that part of QL1 south of the bridge toward Vung Ro Bay
earlier. I think he was the commander of the 39th Engineer Battalion at the time. He was
flying along in a helicopter and took a round in the chest from the hillside when they were
making their low-level recon.
Phu Hiep was a well-developed compound. We had built Southeast Asia huts for almost
everyone. We had built a very large hospital there, which had quite a number of facilities and
heliports where they could medevac folks into, and all the barracks where all the doctors,
corpsmen, and nurses lived.
Tuy Hoa Air Force Base was about three kilometers away and located at the site of the
former air strip that I mentioned earlier in the anecdote about when General Harkins and
Chief of Naval Operations [George W., Jr.] Anderson had landed and buried their Caribou's
nose wheel into the sand. On my earlier tour there was nothing there but the runway. Nobody
secured it. Nobody occupied it. Now it was a full-fledged Air Force base with wire around it,
operational facilities, officers club, pilots in white scarves there on Saturday night at the bar.
A going concern in every way.
That was the layout of things at Tuy Hoa. It was a relatively mature buildup of the logistical
base and Air Force base.
Q:
That's a pretty big mission for a battalion, the things you were talking about there. It's a long
list of responsibilities.
A:
Well, it was. It was a big battalion. We had attached to it a float bridge company because
while we were building the Ban Thach bridge we were also operating and maintaining an
M4T6 float bridge over the Ban Thach River that had been in there a couple of years. So, the
553d Float Bridge Company (M4T6) was attached to the 577th.
We had attached an engineer light equipment company. We also had attached a concrete
detachment and an asphalt platoon with its own Barber Green asphalt plant because we were
to asphalt pave the highway we were constructing. That operation had started as well. So, we
had about 30 kilometers of national highway QL1 to build. We had a major quarry
operation up at Chop Chai Mountain, north of the big Tuy Hoa bridge.
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