Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
We were also rebuilding four smaller bridges along QL1. By that I mean two span bridges
of about 35 feet of span. It made a pretty good bridge project, but smaller than the Ban Thach
bridge.
We had really upgraded by now. We got the new 225-tons-per-hour rock crushers in, so we
were really producing aggregate. We now had the dump truck company, so we were really
hauling aggregate down to our Barber Green asphalt plant, to our concrete plant, and for the
base course throughout the area.
Our plan for completing operations was to finish the area through the sand in the north. First
of all, that was the easiest to do.
All three parts of this operation were quite different, as I mentioned. In the north, in the sand,
we were using tractor-scrapers to maintain high production, to shape the subgrade and
confine it. We would put on the base course, then come in and pave.
In the middle, through the rice paddy area, there was an existing laterite road that we had to
widen. There, it was a matter of excavating out paddy bottom to the side of the road and then
bring in lateritic kind of soil.
We had a mountain in the area that we had opened as a laterite borrow pit right next to the
road. So, we didn't have to haul the sand way down that far, which would have been a real
problem because the Ban Thach bridge divided the sand area from the paddy area. The
complicator was that the heavily loaded tractor-scrapers would fail the existing road. We
would then have to come back in and shovel out vertical chunks of existing road, bring it
back up with rock, and stabilize it before we finished.
In the south, the cuts through the mountains were primarily dozer work.
So, we had tractor-scrapers in the sand. We had tractor-scrapers doing the haul in the lateritic
center part, plus cranes and draglines mucking stuff out. Down in the hilly sections we had
dozers working. Of course, we had graders working throughout.
We found a great opportunity to use Bangalore torpedoes while we were there to great
advantage. When we were given the initial mission for clearance of the Vung Ro Bay jungle
areas, we took Bangalores in there and set them off. They would strip through the jungle
vines and cut them just like they would barbed wire. They left a very distinguishable area
cleared. We also used chain saws, doing it by hand. You really couldn't get a dozer into most
of the Vung Ro area because of the steepness of the hillside.
The problem was the hillsides around Vung Ro were shaped in concave fashion, and so the
sound and shock waves focused toward the middle. Thus, using Bangalores we would rattle
the shelves in the small post exchange and dump the merchandise into the aisle. So, that
couldn't go on. Bangalores could only be used in a few places. Anyway, that experience
sparked our interest in Bangalores.
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