Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
So, we did have a big battalion. We had a big area of operations and a lot of activities
ongoing. We were later given yet another light equipment company, a dump truck company,
and then a pipeline platoon, the latter because we also built a pipeline along the road from
Vung Ro to Tuy Hoa.
We upgraded our crushers at the Chop Chai quarry operation from 75 tons per hour to 225
tons per hour. We got the extra trucks to haul so we could try to finish up the paving of that
30 kilometers of road and get out of there. Essentially, we did that while I was there over
about the next eight to nine months. When I arrived, I suppose we'd probably paved about a
kilometer and a half of the 30.
The 577th Engineer Battalion quarry operations at Chop Chai
Mountain near Tuy Hoa, South Vietnam, in January 1969.
QL1 was a very interesting project because it was so different in places. We had all kinds of
construction. Down near Vung Ro Bay the road rose up from the deep port through rather
high hills with steep grades. Then we had cuts down through the hills coming back down to
the flatlands, the rice paddies along the coastline. So, we had six to seven kilometers of steep
grades of side hill cuts and switchbacks to deal with.
Then we had 15 kilometers of rice paddy, where the highway was basically a ribbon of road
with rice paddies on either side. Anytime you wanted to construct something, you really had
to muck out a bunch of stuff and then get stabilized material into it.
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