Thursday, Mar 03, 2016 at 11:33
No, never drove tunzaguts, but I must have driven nearly everything else! Qualified on motor scrapers and dozers, but I drove loaders, forklifts, graders, rollers, water trucks, dump trucks, and virtually anything with an engine in it - as
well as scrapers and dozers.
Built heaps of roads and a few bridges, operated quarries and crushers - hauled sand off
the beach at Long Hai - whilst watching the U.S. Phantoms bomb the VC only a couple of kays away in the hills!
Licencing didn't matter in 'Nam, if you could show you knew how to drive it, you got a job driving it!
Of course, I'd been driving most equipment before I was called up, the Green Machine training was just refresher stuff.
As you can see, I was with the Land
Clearing Team with 4 x D8's. Spent 3 mths with them.
What a mongrel of a job. Mud and dust - massive bomb craters that just swallowed D8's - scorpions, centipedes a foot long, monkeys, snakes, rats - they all joined you in the cab!
I once had a monstrous rat fall out of the canopy and run along the bonnet towards me - then it jumped straight off the bonnet, into my lap! Did some fancy dancing about then, I can tell you!
Then there were the mortars, the RPG's and the mines to contend with, as
well.
We had one lucky escape when the VC dropped mortars on us - one hit the rounded top of an oxy-acetylene bottle, and bounced off and fell flat in the mud alongside the oxy bottle, without going off!
Best job I had was unloading the
Jeparit in Vung Tau. The Vietnamese semis were so broken down, we had to push them up the
hill into the yard at Vungers with the Case W7 forklifts!
The Cases were terrors, they had the hydraulic tank mounted right in front of the operator.
Work them hard on a hot day and the hydraulic oil would heat up and expand and blow out the tank breather, and cover you with oil! Oh, those fun days!
Wish I'd taken more photos!
Cheers, Ron.
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