A Trucker's Tale – Hauling Freight In Vietnam

Aug 21, 2024 - one year ago

I was headed northbound from Danang with another load of supplies, and as I started down the other side of the mountain, I detected the smell of hot truck and or, trailer brakes.

A Trucker's Tale - Hauling Freight in Vietnam — *The actual photo of Baker’s smoking brakes (although most of the smoke had dissipated by the time I got my camera). Ed Miller photo.*

(I remember the smell being seared into my nostrils when I hauled the D-6 down Black Mountain.) The farther down the mountain I went the worse the odor became. After another curve or two, there was smoke to accompany the odor. A few miles from the bottom, I saw that Baker’s rig was the offending party, as both his tractor and trailer brakes were hot and smoking like a house-a-fire. Baker typically tried to haul more freight than everyone else, and this heavy load of steel beams was certainly putting his brakes to the test.

When I finally got close enough to see through the smokescreen, I saw Baker steering the tractor with his right hand while he stood on the running board, and he was holding the driver’s-side door open with his left hand. (No, he wasn’t taking a leak this time.) His left foot was on the running board; his right foot was pushing the brake pedal. We were damned-nearly at the bottom of the mountain, so I dropped back a bit so I wouldn’t choke on the smoke.

We both pulled over when we were on flat ground. I walked-up to talk with him, but there was so much smoke that we had to walk up-wind quite a way just so we could breathe. I asked, “What the hell were you doing coming down the mountain standing on the running board?” Baker replied, “I kinda figured my brakes would completely go out, so I pulled the trailer hand-valve all the way down, (they used to stay down) then opened the door and stood on the running board. If the son-of-a-bitch was going over the cliff, I sure as hell wasn’t going with it!” He told me that he grew-up in Montana and that some of his family had been loggers. Some of these log haulers had done this same thing, and although the practice wasn’t really safe, the alternative—running off a mountain—made it the best option. This made damned-good sense to me, and I am glad I never had to employ his method.

We used our stretch trailers in Vietnam to haul either structural steel or 110’ long telephone poles, both of which were used as bridge pilings. My two most vivid memories of this type of trailer occurred on the same trip. I had loaded ten poles at our barge facility in Hue and was hauling them to a bridge construction project some 35 miles north. These loads were over twice the length of a flatbed or lowboy, so slow-and-steady was always the best way to drive. I remember traveling very slowly through a small hamlet. As I rounded a gentle curve, I swung wide enough for the trailer to clear someone’s hut. Just as the trailer straightened-out, I looked out the right-side mirror to see an old mangy dog, which I had seen many times before, come from behind a bush and walk right under the trailer wheels. I did not even have time to react. As quickly as I could stop, I got out of the tractor and ran back to the scene where there was already a crush of people.

Suddenly realizing that joining the crowd maybe hadn’t been a very smart idea, as I had just run-over someone’s dog, I started to go back to the truck when I was shocked to observe the crowd arguing over who was going to take the poor thing home for supper! No one seemed to even notice me, so I jumped back into the truck and slowly got the hell out of Viet-Dodge.

I felt terrible the rest of the trip to the bridge site. Damn! I had just run over a dog! Thinking back, there was really no way I could have avoided it, but it still bothered me that I had killed the old thing. (At least I hope someone got several good meals out of him.)

Highway 1 was closed every day from sunup to sunset, and I arrived at the bridge staging area with just enough time to remove the chains, and then release the standards, which allowed the poles to roll off onto the ground. I drove like a bat-out-of-hell and just made it into our camp’s gate before sunset.

The next morning, the pile-driving crew arrived at the staging area, only to find none of the 110’ long poles. I was sent to the site to explain what I had done with those “! #*! telephone poles!” I explained what I had done the previous evening. I even showed them where the poles had gouged holes in the dirt when they fell from the trailer. There were no drag marks and no sawdust. Like magic, the poles had simply disappeared!

Several days later, the mystery was solved. The crime had been committed by the entire population of the closest village to the job site. The villagers had assembled enough bodies to lift the poles onto their shoulders, and then they performed the “Vietnamese Shuffle” as they carried-away these long, heavy poles. For the next several weeks, we watched these poles transformed into planks for building their huts. Men would sit astride these poles and saw for hours with their cross-cut saws. I can only imagine how excruciatingly painful their legs and asses became after sitting on creosote for several days. The villagers also must have also become tolerant of the nasty creosote odor, because damned-near every hut sported newly sawed creosote siding.

After that incident, we hauled the poles from Hue to a storage yard at our camp. As the poles were needed at a job site, each driver would load his own trailer using a large Pettibone forklift. These 110’ long poles were tapered from approximately 36 inches in diameter on the big end, to about 18 inches on the other end. Of course, that meant the big end weighed considerably more that the smaller end, so each forklift operator had to place the forks closer toward the heavy end. The forks were about eight feet long, and when spread wide, they were probably eight or ten feet apart. The length and weight made it impossible to load more than one pole at a time, so it took quite a while to load your own load.

Being young’uns, we had contests to see who could run under and place his forks under a pole and balance it on the first try. There were also contests to see who could most quickly load 10 poles on their trailer. Anything to break the monotony!

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.