I was very new to the 513th Trans in Coleman Barracks, just outside Mannheim in the town of Sandhofen. My platoon sergeant, Dave, came and got me out of the motor pool and told me to get ready to be gone a day or two. He said the jeep driver would pick me up at the barracks in a few minutes. One of our platoon's drivers had been in a bad accident on Pirm Hill. I was the designated the NCO to do the accident report and had to get there before everything had been moved and the mess cleaned up. I didn't mention that 1) I had no idea where "Pirm Hill" was, 2) I couldn't imagine an accident scene that wouldn't be cleared away before we could get there, and 3) fillling out the accident report was the driver's responsibility. But it was a road trip and I was happy to get out of the barracks for a couple days.

It turns out that "Pirm Hill" was a steep hill between Kaiserslautern and Pirmasens. A winding, switchbacked, narrow road. I went back there several years later and found they had put in a new road that straightened it out a lot and gentled down the angle. But in the sixities, Pirm Hill was a genuine challenge even for experienced drivers. We arrived there just after noon to find the accident site still "intact" with German Polizei, American MPs and some French MPs, to boot. The trailer was the first thing we saw. It was on its side, half on the road and half off; there was a just enough of a shoulder to keep the trailer in place, then a very long drop-off. The trailer had an APC (Armored Personnel Carrier, sort of a mini tank for taking soldier into battle) strapped to it. The APC was part-way off the trailer and was apparently what was keeping the trailer from going all the way over. As we got up to the accident site, identified ourselves, and got inside the cone-zone, we could see the front of the trailer and the tractor. The whole rig was torqued and twisted and the cab was all the way over on its top.

Army tactical trucks are almost all "convertibles". The cab is hard steel up to the level of the top of the doors. Above that there is a windshield frame in front, that folds down to reduce the trucks profile for shipping, and the rest of the top is canvas stretched over a metal frame. This truck had gone over with enough force to collapse the windshield frame and crunch down all the top supports; it was laying flat on the pavement, wheels up, top down. The truck rolled over and collapsed on itself, the driver had been thrown half out of the cab and was pinned with his hips and legs out and upper torso and the rest inside. The MPs immediately informed me that our driver was dead and we should stay clear while the wrecker crew was lifting the truck to recover the body.

The German Polizei had put up a screen to cut down on "lookie-loos", but the crash scene had left barely enough room for one lane of traffic to go by , and every passing car and truck had to go slowly, so there was lots of "lookie-ing" . Sam, my jeep driver, was looking at the wreck while I was getting a briefing from the lead MP. I heard the distinctive sound of retching and glanced down hill to find Sam bent over at the waste blowing out everything he had eaten recently...or not so recently. Sam wobbled up the hill toward our jeep and plopped down in the shotgun seat. I hollered at him to see if he was all right...he just pointed. The wrecker had lifted the cab off the ground enough for the rest of the recovery people to pull the driver out. Sam hadn't been prepared was all. When the medics and mechanics started pulling the arms of the driver out from under the cab, the hips and legs stayed put...they were no longer connected.

The cause of the crash was pretty easy to determine. The MPs in Pirm saw this kind of accident a few times a year; not always fatal, but often the same cause. Almost all of the Army's equipment is set up to be transported, either by air or sea, rail or flat-bed truck. The M-113 APC that was on the trailer had four tie-down points, what the Air Force calls "hard points". They were equipped with shackles and pins so you could run chains or tie-down wire through them and tie them down to the trailer. There are whole books written on how to do this correctly, what angles to use, how many wraps of wire, what gauge chains, and all that to secure your load so it won't get wobbly on you. The Army is fussy about stuff like that. I have seen civilian truckers drive off with a D-8 dozer on their trailer and only two chains to secure it, believing the weight of the dozer is enough to hold it in place. Makes me shudder. Another important part of the program is using opposing forces to secure things. On the APC, you tie the right side to the left side of the trailer and vice versa so the wires in front and back form an "X". If you tie straight out, left to left and right to right, a very little stretch in the tie-down will result in enough slack for the APC to shift laterally...the wires work like windshield wipers and the load slides sideways and sometimes over the side of the trailer.

That is what happened to this driver. The crew at the Army Depot didn't use enough wraps of tie-down wire, didn't make it tight enough, and didn't go cross-trailer with them. On that hard curve the APC shifted, slid halfway off the side of the trailer and changed the geometry of that turn enough to pull the whole rig over.

The driver is the person who is ultimately responsible for his load. If it doesn't meet the requirements, he isn't supposed to move it. This load had not been tied correctly. No one will ever know why he decided to pull the load anyway. It was a short run so maybe he thought it wouldn't matter, or maybe he didn't check it out, or maybe he just didn't care. In any case, on that snowy hillside just outside of Pirmasens in December of 1967, that driver and the lead MP saved my life, at least twice, and didn't even know it. But that is another story...later