One of the shakiest cargoes you can carry on a flatbed trailer is what we call "rolling stock"...things on wheels...because if they aren't secured properly, they could roll...and that isn't good. So when we got new soldiers into our platoon, we insured that they got a lot of hands on training in securing loads. I had a bad experience with trailers on my trailer one time in Germany, so it was a subject that was near and dear to my heart.
When we loaded something with wheels on our trailer, we used chock blocks against the wheels to keep them from moving. The chock blocks were usually 10X10 or 12X12 s cut into irregular trapazoids. The short angle was pushed up against the wheel and 8 or 10 inch spikes were driven through the longer angle side to secure them. Chocking front and rear of each axle or tandem set would keep them from moving and then a half dozen chains or so were bound from the trailer rails to the sling points on the object being loaded. That made a pretty good tie-down. My platoon took pride in doing a really good job on this. In fact, we had a tractor trailer loaded with a 2 1/2 ton wrecker roll off of a high crown road out in the Nevada desert near Fallon. It rolled over twice and when it came to rest , the wrecker was still firmly tie-down to the trailer...as it should be.
Told you all that so I could tell you this. I was driving one of the platoon trucks and had a new driver with me. I backed up to the loading dock and started to untie the truck that was on our trailer. We had the chains unbound and he was putting them away on the other side of the trailer when I started getting the chock blocks off. There is a quick trick to this. The Army issues every truck a two part lug wrench. The wrench handle is about two and a half feet long, 3/4 inch steel with a slightly flattened tip on one end, to keep the handle from sliding all the way through the wrench part. If you hold the bar up like you are delivering a horizontal butt stroke and smack the chock block with enough force, it will rock it up on one side enough to slide the flattened end under the chock block and a hard pry down with the bar will loosen the block enough to slide the bar in farther and pry the block all the way off. I was deeply into this procedure when I got to the part where the block is rocked up enough to get the bar under it, I did...then with a mighty down ward thrust I expected to get a good gap I could work the bar into...instead, the chock block came all the way off and flew across the trailer...it had not been nailed properly...the bar popped up, pivoting on the trailer rail, and came back and hit me squarely between the eyes, ringing my bell soundly, knocking me to the ground, my hat and glasses flying off in separate directions. I sat up and immediately became aware of blood...a lot of it...in my eyebrows and lashes, dripping onto my nose and running down my face. I picked up my glasses and my hat and walked around the truck to find my rookie. Honestly, there was so much blood I was kind of afraid to put my hand up and explore...and looking into the truck mirror would have entailed climbing, an act I was not sure I could perform. So I went to find my soldier and have him look it over for me. He was bent over the chains when I approached him and I called him by name and asked him, "Hey, how bad does this look?" He stood and looked at me and his eyes got saucer sized, his skin went pale and his knees looked wobbly. I thought, "That bad, huh?" But I grabbed him by the field jacket to keep him from keeling over and having TWO head injuries to explain.
I knew enough about head trauma to distrust my self driving to the aid station, so I propped up my young soldier and we walked over to the medics together. The bleeding seemed to slow down enough that I felt confident I wouldn't bleed out in the two or three blocks we had to go...although we did get a few odd looks, we didn't get any offers of help...go figure.
Smelling salts (acutallly an ammonia capsule) put my young fella back to rights. I was pretty embarrassed, I had two tiny little holes in my forhead...we wore our rank pinned on our ball caps in those days and the bar had smacked my right on my rank pin, driving the backing devices into my forhead. A small bandaid was all it took to cover it...stupid head wounds bleed like a stuck pig....hehehe. The holes healed up before the headache went away.