Sometime in the early 80's, the accident statistics in USAREUR (US Army Europe) involving fuel truck drivers got to the point where the 4 star in Heidelberg wrote to the 4star in TRADOC (Training and Doctrine) and said in effect, "It is your problem...train it out". TRADOC contacted the Transportation Corps in Ft Eustis in Virginia asking if they could train fuel handlers to be truck drivers after they finished fuel school. Not a problem, says TC school...here are the prerequisites...send 'em and we'll train 'em.

4 star to 4 star and down to school...solution...fixed it. Now fuel handlers would leave their primary school learning how to do what they do with gas and diesel and grease and all that and go to Ft Lost in the Woods Misery to become proficient on the trucks they would carry their fuel in. And on paper, the solution looked great.

Here is how it worked in the real world. At the last week before graduating from fuel school, the selection was made for who would go the truck school. The prerequisites included having a valid driver's license from one of our 50 states. To go to truck school, you had to have a drivers license. So at the last minute about a third of the graduating fuel hadlers found out that instead of moving on to their waiting units somewhere, they were going to start all over again in another school and be trainees for a while longer. News that created more than a few bad attitudes. They came to Misery, trained right in with the fresh from basic trucker candidates (it is important to know that for entry level soldiers, the guy with two weeks in lords it over the guy with one week in. Right out of basic was still gross rookie...the fuel handlers had been to 8 or 9 weeks of training already so they really resented being lumped in with the low life truckers who only had basic behind them.) And created some real discipline and morale problems. They got their training including an extra week on fuel tankers at the end of the truck school which meant they left for their new assignments in the real army with minimal skills as a driver and practically totally forgot their fuel handling skills.

But the real story is that the fuel handlers who didn't have a driver's license and left without the truck driver training went to Germany and other places and were given military licenses and put into fuel tankers and went out into the countryside rolling trucks over on their backs and spewing fuel all over the fatherland. The accident statistics actually went up in USAREUR the first year of the program...

My first action as the new platoon sergeant of the support platoon of 2/68 Armor in Baumholder was to travel to Wildflecken to oversee the investigation of one of my fuel tankers that was lying on it's back on the infamous curve just off of A7. Sure enough, the driver had never had a license in his life and when he got to Baumholder he got one week familiarization then sent on tne road in a 2500 gallon HEMMT tanker. It took him three weeks to roll it.

In the words of the old cadence song, "...9 to the front...six to the rear...that's the way we do it here"