________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
The 75-tons-per-hour crushers were often down. They were old, and they didn't produce
enough. Once we got the drilling up to feed them, they weren't producing enough to do the
job that needed to be done down the road.
This need had been well known by theater engineers already, and so they were already
procuring the 225-tons-per-hour crushers. I was fortunate enough to be there when they came
in. That greatly increased capability and production. That was a godsend from the standpoint
of getting the job done.
The Barber Green asphalt plant was yet another story. When I arrived, it had a history of
always breaking down. So, I took it on myself to try to flag attention to get it fixed. We had
about 4 percent of the replacement parts on hand. After fighting that problem for eight
months, we left and left the Barber Green plant there when we went down to Don Duong.
When we left, we still only had about 4 percent of the replacement parts on hand. So, the
parts system never changed and never accommodated the needs for getting the Barber Green
taken care of.
The huge main drive shaft, in fact, was about four to five inches in diameter and about 30
inches long. It would break after about 26 hours of operation.
So, the way that we fixed that problem was to go over to the Air Force and give them C
rations. They then would let our machinists work with their bar stock through the night shift.
They worked the day shift; they didn't want to work the night shift. They'd let our guy work
the night shift, and he'd turn out another shaft. He could turn one out in about 12 hours.
So, we basically just kept even. You figure 24 hours of operation, having to work only night
shifts to rebuild. So, we had a guy who was continually building a new shaft so when it failed
somebody else could install it, and he was making another. We tried to stay one shaft ahead.
We spent the whole eight months that way on the Barber Green plant. We brought in tech
reps to look and advise. We brought in mechanics to work the problem, but it was never
solved. We just kept trading off Crations for time on the Air Force's machinery.
The other engineer equipment we had was all right. We could keep it operating. I'm talking
now the basic tractors, scrapers, dozers, graders, cranes, the rest of that. People worked hard
on maintenance, but we had to change our mode of operations. The old operator morning
maintenance followed by during-operations maintenance followed by end-of-operations
maintenance, with quarterlies and manuals and hourly periodic maintenance by mechanics as
they became due, didn't work.
It didn't work because we only had a limited number of hours to work when we were in a
hostile area. Base camp at night, full days on the job. We didn't work in the dark in those
hostile areas strung out and vulnerable along the road. When we worked that way, it meant
we had to take advantage of all of the daylight hours to operate. When you put an operator
out there and bang him around all day, he's not going to be too fit to do the after-operation
maintenance in the evening. He needs to be fit to start off the next day. We were cheating on
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