Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
time or you're cheating on strength, energy, and capability of our operators. So, we changed
to operate more like a construction firm, where we would bring our tractor-scrapers, for
example, in at night after being run all day. Then nighttime maintenance teams would service
them all. When that operator had a good night's sleep and came out the next morning, he
could hop on his mechanic-maintained tractor-scraper, head out, and operate.
So, we modified by getting teams of mechanics who pored over the equipment every night.
We maintained on the night shift, and we operated during the day shift. That was our
accommodation for that kind of equipment and that kind of operation.
I guess that addresses most of the types of special actions we took.
Q:
Did you find the training of the engineer soldiers pretty good, your operators and others? Did
you have a lot of turnover--well, you did, I guess, while you were there.
A:
We had a lot of turnover. I thought we had skilled noncommissioned officers who really
knew what they were doing. The maintenance ones were very good. The people in the asphalt
platoon were very good, really knew their stuff.
The people that came with the concrete detachment didn't know anything. The Army just
formed the detachments, assigned lieutenants and folks to it, and sent it. Those detachments
don't exist in the peacetime Army. We also used tech reps, civilians hired by USARV [U.S.
Army, Vietnam] engineers to come out and help train folks. We had a tech rep who assisted
us well on the concrete batch plant and the precast panel operations. He spent six weeks with
us getting that operation going. We had tech reps for other things as well here and there, who
would help out.
I thought our soldiers with basic training and advanced skill training, such as the equipment
operators, knew the rudiments and got a lot better once they'd been operating for a little time.
Except for dozing up in the pass near Vung Ro Bay, most of the terrain was flat, so they got
to operating pretty well.
Q:
What about discipline and morale in the '68, '69 period. Any particular problems?
A:
Well, it was before the big problems, but we had some incidents. We had a terrible incident
about three weeks after I arrived. In the asphalt platoon, one of our people who was on drugs
was out on the perimeter one night, and his noncommissioned officers and his officers had
been giving him some grief over time. We were sitting there that night watching movies in
the officers rec area when we heard a burst of M16 fire within our compound. This one
soldier had just gone over the top; he had come back into the compound and was after his
company leadership.
It was really tragic. He killed his platoon sergeant, the one person in the battalion who really
knew asphalt and the one that we really were counting on. He maimed his company
commander, the A Company commander, who eventually lost his hand from the gunfire and
was never back to duty with us. He was medevacked right from there. The platoon leader
escaped by ducking down between some sandbags and got away. Basically, this soldier holed
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