Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
He also found a rock crusher down at Vung
Ro Bay that he said we'd abandoned and left
there. That also wasn't true because we had
turned it in to a log command property
disposal company. This rock crusher was
about 200 meters from the DeLong pier
where we brought in all the ships. The idea
was leave it there. They inspected it. They
took it off our books. Then they were going
to make the arrangements to put it on
whatever ship was going to take it away.
The trouble was, they deactivated that
property disposal outfit about six months
later, after we already left the area and before
they shipped out the crusher. When General
Morris came up, he saw this rock crusher
there, saw the 577th's numbers on it, and
said, "Find out who left this here." He then
ordered the 577th, by then commanded by
Lieutenant Colonel Kem (left) with
Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Edgar, to send a
Brigadier General John W. Morris,
detail north to clean up the mess they
Commander of the 18th Engineer
supposedly left in Phu Yen Province.
Brigade, at Don Duong, South
Vietnam, in May 1969.
Q:
So, you and General Edgar did interact quite
a number of times.
A:
Ernie Edgar and I have interacted a lot. General Morris and I have interacted a lot. Now,
that's the other side of the story, as Paul Harvey would put it. [Laughter]
Q:
Let me ask you a couple of things before we move south. What about the equipment that you
had there? Obviously, with the attachments, you had a lot of equipment. Was it pretty much
appropriate to the job? Did you have any trouble maintaining it, keeping it going, spare parts,
problems along those lines?
A:
Yes. I have to talk about it from several different aspects. First of all, when I arrived, our
quarry operation really wasn't doing well at all. We had a few wheel-mounted drills, and we
could not drill fast enough to provide the blast rock in quantities to feed the crushers. We
badly needed crawler drills that we could move around on the slopes and really keep up
We were borrowing drills from the Air Force and then having to give them rock. It was fairly
torturous, but finally, through some support from my group and brigade headquarters, we got
the right kinds of drills so we could really up the production of rock. That helped
immeasurably.
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