Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
3:13 | Before they deployed to Vietnam, the transportation unit got brand new 5 ton trucks, which were loaded on a ship while the men flew over on a cargo plane. Bill Patterson will always remember the heat and the smell that greeted them on the tarmac at Bien Hoa.
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One day at his Army Reserve weekend drill, an NCO walked up and handed Bill Patterson a truck driver's license. Then he pointed to the truck he would be driving. The entire unit was being switched to a transportation role and they prepared to deploy to Vietnam.
Bill Patterson was assigned to sandbag detail on his first day in Vietnam. It was so hot and humid that the newly arrived Americans paid some locals to fill the bags. They were truck drivers and they were about to get firsthand experience of the decrepit roads that connected the bases.
The truck convoys in Vietnam had to keep moving even if someone broke down. That happened to Bill Patterson on the road to Quan Loi and he wondered what he was going to do with one spare and three flat tires.
Bill Patterson's transportation unit was housed near the perimeter of the huge base at Long Binh. When they were under attack from the Viet Cong, the truck drivers had to grab their weapons and man the bunkers.
There was some serious weaponry in Vietnam, recalls Bill Patterson. The truck driver felt his 5 ton truck bounce into the air when a huge cannon was fired. On another occasion, as he was delivering ammunition to a base, the ground began to shake so violently he thought it was an earthquake. The men unloading the trucks went calmly about their business as if nothing was going on.
The dangers to the truck drivers in Vietnam were mainly mines and ambushes, but their only loss was from a road accident. Driver Bill Patterson enjoyed listening to music on the Army radio station and as he listened one day to the news, he heard something that made him run to tell everyone.
As he returned from Vietnam and the plane was descending, the landing was aborted and the plane diverted to a different base. Bill Patterson and the rest of the men were thinking that they had survived a year of war and were now going to die back home in Georgia.
