Hunter-Liggett is a training/exercise/testing facility about 65 miles south of Fort Ord in central California. It was the 7th Infantry Division's main playground for several years and (as I have mentioned before) if you saw the movie, "We Were Soldiers" you have seen Hunter-Liggett. Most of the outdoor battle scenes were filmed there. It is several miles off of Highway 101, west into the coastal hills, a little south and a lot west of King City. From 101 you go up Jolon Road into the training area. There used to be a very steep and curvy road up the grade;  sometime in the seventies or eighties the road got improved. That was where I had my second flashback to the accident I wrote about at "Pirm Hill".

I was piloting an M-800 series 5 ton tractor.  We were tasked to pick up an engineer unit from a field site in H-L. I was told to leave my trailer behind because they needed me to pull one of the engineers' lowboys. It was a field site on top of a steep hill accessed by a very narrow, tightly winding dirt track. I want to get my excuses registered ahead of the story...otherwise they don't count. The 800 series 5 tons were stronger than the M-35 s they replaced...but...they had some drawbacks. The split from third to fourth gear was too wide (that means that when you were wound up in third and shifted to fourth, you lost too many RPMs) and made it difficult to gain momentum going up hill. The other thing was that the turning radius was way greater than the M35...meaning that you needed a lot more room to make a turn. The good thing was the change from the 465 cubic inch multi-fuel engine to an honest Cummins 250 hp diesel engine.

On the way up the track I was wary of the switchbacks...WITHOUT a trailer.  I was concerned what the ride down was going to be like with a loaded trailer behind me. We got to the top of the hill and I was directed to the lowboy I was going to pull. I got hooked up to it and started to inspect it. The engineer sergeant who was going to ride with me tried to rush me, saying he had already inspected everything and he was a driver and it was all okay and lets get going etc, etc. I ignored him and did a pretty thorough look-it-over. It was loaded with a rough terrain fork lift. I looked at the way it was tied to the trailer and immediately got a flash of the Pirmasens accident. The chains on the RT on my lowboy were not crossed;  in one case they had doubled up a chain, using one chain to tie down two points. I told the sergeant what they had to do before I could move the trailer and immediately got more grief than an Irish funeral. Almost at once I had the unit's commander, First Sergeant and a host of other folks, all of whom out-ranked me, yelling and ordering and generally threatening me. I told them I would be happy to disconnect and let someone else pull the trailer...or they could do the RIGHT THING and we could get off this hill.

Somewhere in the middle of this mess, an E-7 from my battalion operations showed up and watched the action for a few minutes. He called the First Sergeant over and they had a quiet conversation. The 1SG returned and told the maintenance people to start unchaining the RT and redoing it correctly...six chains and binders...crossed front and rear. I got out my lug wrench and started checking lugs, found a rag and checked my fluid levels.  I spent the next half hour doing excellent drivers' maintenance to my truck. I finished up at the exact same moment the RT was finished. Drivers are not supposed to secure their own loads (in the Army) but when there are E-7s and E-6s working on your trailer, it is best to be busy on legit stuff, especially if you are an E-5.

So we were all squared away. My truck was thoroughly checked out. Too bad the trailer wasn't. We were about the middle of the pack heading down the windy dirt road. The road was getting churned up pretty good, turning to powder. Dust in the air was thick and visibility was not good. I was puckered up pretty tight;  the RT was pushing me pretty hard and I had a hard time getting around the curves.   They were very tight. On the worst switchback, the road was cut out of a steep sidehill, a six or seven foot bank on the left and a good drop on the right. I had the left front wheel half climbing the bank and the right rear of the trailer was right on the edge of the drop. As soon as I could start turning the wheel to the left I felt we had it made, but some of the dirt on the inside of the curve crumbled out from under the rear axle of the trailer and it started to slide off the road. I was lucky to have a fairly straight piece of road in front of me so I goosed the truck, trying to pull the trailer out of the slide before it broke completely loose an went over the side. It worked, but it set the RT and trailer to rocking back and forth violently for a couple of cycles...I could hear the chains singing over the roar of the truck motor. But they held. And it settled down and we felt relieved to be upright and rolling.

We made it to Jolon Road and started down the grade. I was in fourth gear, slight pressure on the brake...slow ride and secure. Started to pick up a little speed so I increased the pressure a leeeettle on the brake and was greeted with the sound of all four brake canisters on the trailer popping at once. I don't know why. The 800 tractor had what is called "Air over Hydraulic brakes" which means that they had regular hydraulic brakes with an air assist...like the power brakes on your car...sorta. The lowboy trailer had straight air brakes. But apparently this trailer had been sitting around unused for some time.  The brake pods have a rubber diaphram in them and when they dry out and rot, they don't work.  This trailer didn't have "maxi" cans (a device that applies the brakes automatically if the air pressure falls below 60 lbs) so we were on our way down that long steep grade with no trailer brakes at all. The idiot from the engineers kept yelling for me to downshift...remember I told you about that third to fourth gear split? Well, it works going down the same way. You had to slow down a lot more than usual in order to downshift from fourth to third...and we weren't slowing down AT ALL.

It was a heck of a ride. By the time we reached the bottom of the grade the tractor brakes were laying down smoke like a Navy Destroyer. Genius in the right seat was now yelling to stop. We didn't. I am not sure we could have. But if we had, I am sure all the brake pads would have flashed into flame. I kept rolling, trying to cool things down. We didn't stop at all;  in fact, I didn't even touch the brake pedal until we were getting off 101, 60 miles later. By that time the drums had cooled considerably and I was able to speak in a normal tone of voice. After 60 miles of listening to the engineer sergeant yelling at me for not listening to him, for not down-shifting, for not stopping, for whatever else was on the agenda...I kinda tuned him out after a bit...I did speak...in a normal tone of voice. I looked at him eye to eye and said, "Shut up." He did.

Some of those missions were more fun than others.