I was at an intersection of two major roads right on the edge of Saigon when I saw the Air Force truck's predicament.  The Saigon traffic was unrelenting, and obedience to traffic law was non-existent...obedience to good driving sense was non-existent.  At intersections,  cross traffic would creep out into the lanes, blocking one after another until they got across.  On big roads with multiple lanes, it got really messy.  This Air Force tractor-trailer was trying to make a left turn and the cars and bikes and cabs and motorcycles and pedicabs and cyclos and everything else were jammed up and blocking the path of his trailer (a forty-five-foot lowboy).  If he continued he would drag the back of the trailer over a lot of those cars and bikes, etc.  I stopped and watched...(traffic wasn't going anywhere anyway), to see how he would handle it.  This flyboy was no rookie to driving in Saigon, it seems...he put the truck in its lowest gear and started creeping around the corner.  When the trailer started gently rubbing up against the leaders of the pack on the cross street, everyone started yelling and screaming but he just kept creeping...and creeping...and creeping...and the crowd got the message.  they scrambled to get out of the way.  It him took about a half hour to get around the corner and on his way.  Towards the end all those soon-to-be crushees were actually helping him, trying to move others and guide him through. 

I don't think most drivers pay much attention to trucks on the road.  The average "four-wheeler" (that means "car") has no real concept of how powerful trucks are (average over-the-road tractor is rated at 450 to 600 hp), how much they weigh (80,000 to 85,000 pounds gross weight), how long it is (anywhere from thirty to sixty-five feet), how much space it takes to stop (a scary long way...it depends on speed and weight but figure about four seconds on the freeway), and how much room it takes to get around a corner (this can be a lot...there was an old country song that said, "Give me forty acres and I'll turn this rig around", and it sure seems that way sometimes).  This lack of knowledge on the part of the motoring public leads to some real misunderstandings.  Like when a car races to pass a truck and then pulls in front of it and immediately slows down for a turn or exit...and he doesn't understand why that stupid trucker is blowing his horn!  The car driver doesn't realize that the trucker, by slowing down, has given up momentum;  he probably had to shift down at least one gear, and will be struggling for several minutes to get back up to speed...just in time for some other car driver to repeat the process.  Even when a trucker tries to maintain a safe following distance, some car slips in that space.  If he backed off everytime that happened, he'd soon be driving backwards.

Another problem is the fact that things can happen in the back of the truck that the driver can't feel or see.  I posted a story a little while ago about one of my drivers who had a Volkswagen drive up under his trailer and get jammed there and he had to be stopped by other drivers 'cause he didn't realize it.  In another article I wrote a few years ago I told about how three of our unit's drivers got into the Nurnberg, Germany,  daily newspaper on the same day:  Number One dragged his trailer over the corner at an intersection barely missing the scattering pedestrians who were waiting to cross the street,  Number Two slid his truck on icy cobblestones and wiped out the guard shack at W.O. Darby Kaserne, and Number Three tried to drive a thirteen-foot-tall load under a twelve-foot-high train trestle...they all three had one thing in common..."I didn't see it coming."

I had one of those moments in Phoenix in 1972.  I had learned to drive tractor-trailers in the Army.  Most of the Army's trailers are twenty-seven feet long, not long by civilian standards, but about as long as you want a trailer to be in a combat zone where you have to wiggle through the forests.  I got out of the Army in late '71 and after a few miserable failure jobs, I got hired onto a night shift, joined the Teamsters, started making a pretty good wage, and drove much nicer equipment than the Army ever had.  One night we were hauling ABC (aggregate base course...gravel) into an expansion of Sun City, filling in the road beds in preparation for paving.  The truck I was assigned to was an older Mack pulling a trailer called a "Flo-Boy", which had a conveyor belt in the bottom of the trailer that discharged the gravel out the back...the whole rig was about twenty feet longer than the rigs I had driven in the Army.  We started about six pm but by the second trip out to Sun City it was dark.  I heard a couple of the old hands chuckling on the radio that "the new kid must be made out of money"..."Must be;  runnin' down them signs 'll cost ya 'bout three hunnert bucks"...I was pretty new and had no idea what they found so funny until I got to one of the intersections on our exit route.  When I pulled up to the corner, I stopped because I was sure that there had been a stop sign there on the first go-round...but there wasn't a sign there anymore.  Then I saw it laying flat on the ground (pretty clear set of tire tracks right over the top of it).  I chuckled because I knew that it meant some rookie hadn't watched how his trailer was tracking as he made the turn.  Then I made my turn and glanced into the right side mirror to see my trailer tracking right over the dead sign.   OOPSY!

After years of pulling that forty-plus foot long trailer along behind me, I don't often have those moments anymore...one or two now and then...I have written about most of them already.  It becomes so ingrained that MC gives me doo-doo about it sometimes, driving the car and turning wide and she says, "There's no trailer back there, BFD."

There are a lot of things that catch drivers by surprise that truckers have no control over.  When a car pulls out of a side street onto a major road, driving 20-30 mph in a 45-55 mph street...he better give the oncoming truck a little space or he'll think the rotten trucker is tailgating when in actuality he is trying to keep from running over him.  Or when he passes a truck on the freeway  and as he gets to the front of it he discovers the "bow-wave" effect of the truck busting through the air (heeeheeee...breaking wind at 65 mph) as it rocks his world, or on a windy day, moving him into the next lane.  Just driving next to a truck is daunting for some folks...the tires on most trucks are taller than the roof of a sedan;  the driver glances over at that turning wheel and it can be scary!  And the horn.  Mack trucks have the best horns:  deep and loud.  Kenworth trucks usually have a two-tone horn that is loud but wimpy.  Some truckers install better horns to "get folks' attention"...one guy locally has an old locomotive horn on his truck...he really gets your attention!  I always avoided the horn unless it was a last resort...I mean, most folks get startled by a loud horn and they usually don't know where the noise is coming from and when they get startled they hit the brakes...which is usually the last thing the horn-blower wants.

Maybe if there was a requirement for new drivers to spend a day or two riding around in a truck, or ambulance, or fire truck, or cop car, the new driver would have a greater appreciation for the others who use the roads.  And don't even start about motorcycles...hey have their own set of challenges.  Maybe if the new drivers had these kinds of experiences before they got on the road they could avoid being a mashed-flat statistic. 

So this could be a public service announcement!  Hmmm, is there a tax deduction for psa's?  Anyway, just remember this:   if you are behind a truck and you can't see his mirrors, he probably can't see you, either.  If you are in front of a truck, especially "conventional" trucks and all you can see in your mirror is a bumper...the trucker probably can't see you.  And if you drive for any length of time in the space next to a truck that is in his "blind spot"...he might change lanes right over the top of you.  Sixty-five feet is longer than the aver house.  85,000 pounds...that is forty-two and a half tons...your sedan might weigh in at about 3700 pounds, if you drive a full size car...even my aged arithmeticker can see that a twenty-to-one weight disadvantage means you lose!  Would you, an average 150- pounder,  climb into the ring with a 3000-pound opponent? 

Well, "I doesn't do it no more" as Saint Waylon said, but when I am driving around, I see the truckers enduring all the same stuff I did and others before me did.  Next time you are out there, think about it:   see what goes on around you, and give the truckers a break...most of them are pretty good guys.