MCB came from Denver. He was older than most enlistees...even older than most of the draftees. In the middle sixties, the draft age average was about 21 and six months. Used to be if you were married you could get deferred...but if you got a divorce before age 32, you went back into the hopper and could get drafted. So the two oldest draftees in the platoon were Mac, divorced at age 30, and Tatum, divorced at age 27. The rest of the draftees were in their early twenties and the enlistees were in their late teens, for the most part. MCB was 24...an enlistee. Which almost always meant he had been given a choice between a couple years in jail or a three year hitch in the Army. MCB owed his military experience to a cold day, the peculiarity of air brakes, and an irate judge.
It was a cold day in Denver and MCB didn't want to crawl under his trailer to adjust his brakes. He figured he was good for another day or two. Back in the days before self-adjusting slack adjusters, we had to adjust our brakes at least once a week, more if you lived in mountainous terrain...like Denver. Air brakes are very efficient and work with very tight tolerances. A quarter of an inch in brake travel is a lot. If they are well adjusted (heheheee...brake counselors !!), air brakes will stop an 85000 lb rig in just a little more space than you can stop your car...level ground...dry, level ground. But if they are a little out of adjustment, they don't work as well...and if they are a lot out of adjustment, the shoes will glaze and the drums will get hot and there won't be much stopping going on. Another thing about air brakes...they need air to work. There is a buzzer that sounds off if you drop below 80 lbs of pressure in your air system. The brakes will still work until about 60 lbs when the "maxi" brakes will automatically apply the brakes full on. It is a safety thing. They won't release until you build up past 60 lbs again.
So MCB was out and about the greater Denver area, making his deliveries...more than half of his load was still on the truck, he weighed in the area of 60,000 lbs as he approached a fairly steep hill. He activated his Jake Brake, started rattling down the grade, went for the brake to hold the RPMs to about 1900...nothing happened. As he started pushing harder on the pedal, probably pumping them too much, the air pressure dropped, the maxis popped, and still nothing happened, brake wise. Something unpleasant up ahead did happen...the traffic light about a quarter mile ahead turned red. The next few seconds are the kind of thing truckers really fear...no place to go...nothing you can do...just blow the horn and hope folks get out of the way. Almost all of them did...just the one car didn't. Two dead, two wounded.
I don't know if the term "vehicular homicide" even existed in 1964...I never heard of it back then. Remember, in the sixties you could have a bunch of DUIs and still have a commercial license. In fact, drunk driving tickets were a sort of rite of passage in the Army. But in this case, the judge knew enough about air brakes to ask some embarassing questions. MCB wasn't drunk, he might have been better off if he had been. The judge found him to be responsible and asked if he would like an all expense trip to Germany or a stay in the State House in Canon City. MCB thought he was getting off easy.
So by the time I met him, MCB had had about a year and a half to try and drink the memory of that day out of his head. It apparently didn't work. He told me about it when we were both at the club working independantly on our individual demons, he never talked about it sober. He was screwed up forever. Jackson had to beat him on the head with a combat boot one night because Corky made an off hand crack (hat should have been a part of the normal verbal push and shove in the barracks) and MCB put a choke hold on him. Corky was purple and bug-eyed before MCB let go. He was like that whenever he was sober, never could tell where his trip wires were...he was a fairly nice guy when he was loaded.
My lasting memories of MCB are his big grin, his loud laugh, his playful nature and no matter what was going on, he always looked sad. When he laughed, there was still a shadow there. His lasting memory is the face of the lady driving the car he ran right through, she was looking up at him in total disbelief as she disappeared under the hood.