A Trucker's Tale – Flatbeds and Lowboys

Apr 25, 2024 - one year ago

Except for the lowboy, with which I had pulled the D-6 down Black Mountain, all my early trucking years were spent hooked to 40’ or 45’ closed vans, and by my 18th birthday, I could back these vans into tighter places better than most professional drivers.

A Trucker's Tale - Flatbeds & Lowboys — *One of the lowboy trailers Ed used to haul.*

This was possible because of the lack of room in the yard of our furniture warehouse. I had to get “good at it” or my dad wouldn’t have let me move the trailers in and out of the truck dock. I learned that practice does make perfect, and all that practice certainly did help several years later as I delivered furniture in the tight confines of Chicago and Detroit.

There were no closed vans in our battalion’s equipment inventory, so I was relegated to pulling flatbeds, lowboys, or stretch (extendable) trailers. Several flatbeds were equipped with side racks and tarps, when something needed either protection from the rain, or when it was necessary to keep the contents out of sight.

My first flatbed life lesson was delivered by an Army colonel on my first trip to Danang. Before I loaded my return load back north to our Camp Haines, (adjacent to the Army’s Camp Evans), I was instructed to haul several pieces of flat steel plates to a fabrication building a short distance across the base. As it was just a very short distance, and also because I would be driving very slowly, I did not chain down the plates. (You can guess where this is going, can’t you?)

Within sight of my destination, I turned right at an intersection, but the steel plates continued going straight. The steel plates landed in the roadway, just barely missing a Jeep carrying the Colonel and his driver, and the look on the Colonel’s face made me feel like Beetle Bailey ready to catch hell from Sarge!

I climbed out of my tractor, came to attention, saluted the Colonel, and began making my apologies. The Colonel must not have had important business elsewhere, because he stayed on the scene, while his driver took me to find a forklift, so I could reload the steel plates back onto my trailer. When I loaded the plates, the Colonel taught me HIS proper way of securing steel plates for transport. Although I hadn’t used them, I do remember the flatbed being equipped with many chains and binders, even though two chains would have sufficiently held the few steel plates. The Colonel made me put every single chain and binder on the plates. When I was finished, he told me, “It’s a damned miracle you didn’t kill us, and maybe next time you will think twice about not chaining your load.” It was an “awfully” good lesson, and I’m pretty sure my life might have turned out differently if I had flattened the Colonel and his driver.

Sorry to get off-track for a minute, but I’m not the only person who had to learn a lesson the hard way. In the early 1990s, I brokered a load of used corrugated cardboard cutting knives to a large flatbed carrier based in Alabama. The carrier dispatched the load to one of its owner operators, who picked-up the two knives in Ohio on Thursday and delivery was scheduled for 0800 the following morning in Arkansas.

The driver arrived at his destination around dawn the next morning, removed his tarps, chains, and binders, and was ready to be unloaded when the company opened at 0800. When the receiving clerk arrived at 0700, he informed the driver that the knives had to be unloaded at the rear of the building. As the driver climbed into his tractor to drive around to the back, the receiver walked-up to the cab and he informed the driver of a slight incline on the side of the building. He recommended that the driver throw a couple of chains back on the machinery.

The driver replied, “I’ve hauled more machinery in my years than you can imagine, and I know what I’m doing!” Well, upon reaching the slight incline, both pieces of machinery quickly became scrap steel when they fell off the trailer and hit the ground.

To this day, I still remember being impressed with the professionalism and promptness of the carrier’s handling of the claim. Within just one week, the customer had secured two more used knives, and a week later, the carrier had issued the customer a check for $70,000. Wonder if the driver learned his lesson?

Anyway, back to trucking in South Vietnam. Each week, I made two or three roundtrips from our camp to the supply depots in Danang, hauling food, grease and lubricants, flat and structural steel (well chained), culverts, cement, and by far the most important load I hauled about once every two weeks was a load of palletized, double-stacked beer. It really wasn’t necessary to tarp the beer, since the beer sat outside in the sun at the beer yard in Danang, but during my first beer load, I realized the absolute need for tarps.

While hauling my first beer load, I was slowly traveling through a hamlet when I noticed an approaching Army truck blinking his lights and pointing above my truck. I didn’t see anything as I looked into the sky, but the rear-view side mirrors revealed several little Vietnamese boys on top of the trailer. They were throwing cans of beer, as fast as they could, to their friends running behind the trailer. I stopped quickly and the boys skedaddled. When I climbed up on the load, I noticed half a dozen cases missing from a pallet. The boys had worked quickly as they threw one-beer-at-a-time. Practice must have also helped them become very proficient beer stealers.

I don’t know from where the boys came, or how they climbed back on the trailer without me seeing them, but it didn’t take but a few minutes before I saw beer flying off the trailer once again. Not being able to quickly pull-over, I pulled my Colt 45 out of its holster, pointed it toward an unattended rice paddy, and fired-off several rounds. The kids must have thought I was shooting at them, as that did the trick, and I watched them hightail it out of sight! I set up the side boards and tarped all future beer loads to hide the beer, thereby removing the temptation to these little entrepreneurs. (It just so happened that the ice-cold beer in the sand at the convoy points were the same brands of beer I hauled. Coincidence, you think)?

Ed Miller ([email protected]) has more than 40 years of management and ownership experience in the trucking industry. Today, he is a part-time tour bus driver, published author of “A Trucker’s Tale”, and regular contributor to Supply Post. He is a father of three and a grandfather of two, and lives with his wife in Rising Sun, Maryland.