September 2nd, 1967. Route 19, Central Highlands. A 39 vehicle convoy runs into an ambush. The NVA hit it with mines, recoilless rifles, and automatic weapons. The engagement lasts 10 minutes. Seven Americans are killed. 17 are wounded. 30 vehicles are destroyed. Zero enemy casualties. Not one.

11 weeks later, on the same road, the same enemy ran the same ambush against the next convoy. The engagement lasted 20 minutes. 41 of them were dead when it was over. Nothing changed about the road. Nothing changed about the enemy’s tactics. What changed was what American truck drivers, not infantry, not special forces, but supply clerks and mechanics had bolted into the beds of their cargo trucks without asking anyone’s permission.

September 2nd, 1967. Route 19, Central Highlands Republic of Vietnam. A 39 vehicle convoy from the eighth transportation group, 54th transportation battalion is returning empty from Pleu to Quan. 110 mi of mountain switchbacks and dense jungle canopy. Protection. Two M151 gun jeeps with a single M60 machine gun each.

At 1855 hours, a fuel tanker near the rear develops mechanical trouble installs. It splits the convoy in half. 500 meters of open road between the front vehicles and the rear. That gap is all the invitation an NVA company needs. Command detonated mines detonate simultaneously along the column.

57 millimeter recoilless rifle rounds follow. The lead gun jeep is destroyed by the first shot. Driver JD Calhoun 8th transportation group remembers the exact moment his mind caught up with what was happening. He said, “Oh crap, I can’t sit in a truck. I’ve got to get out and get behind something.” He had an M14 rifle. No training and ambush response.

No idea what the standard operating procedure was because there was not one. A reaction force from the first cavalry division was located less than a mile away. It took them 15 minutes to arrive by helicopter. By then it was over. Seven Americans killed, 17 wounded, approximately 30 vehicles destroyed. Zero enemy casualties found.

The NVA withdrew without losing a single man. From the cab of any truck running Route 19, American drivers could see something that should have told them everything they needed to know. French grave mounds scattered along the roadside. Remnants of Group Montel 100, 30,000 soldiers annihilated on this same road in June of 1954.

They were destroyed in a series of running ambushes through the mountain passes that the French had called Route Colonial Dixie and the Americans now called Route 19. One newly arrived driver remembered his shotgunner, a history major back home, quietly recounting the whole story as they drove through Mangyang Pass.

Great news for a soldier with no combat training and not enough ammunition. The fundamental problem on Route 19 was physics. NVA forces ambushed from inside heavy jungle. An M60 round fired into thick canopy would embed in a tree trunk, deflect off bamboo, and lose energy in the foliage. You could put an entire belt of 7.

62 62 mm rounds into that jungle and the men behind the trees would never feel it. The V100 Commando armored cars that arrived in mid 1967 were underpowered and mechanically unreliable. Veterans would later call them death traps. The M151 gun jeeps carried weapons that could not reach through the cover the enemy was standing behind.

Nothing in the convoy’s organic inventory could solve the problem. Nothing. That is until Colonel Joe Bolino, commanding officer of the 8th Transportation Group, looked at what September 2nd had cost and made a decision. He was going to arm his truck drivers. He was not going to ask permission. The weapon Bolino reached for wasn’t designed for this.

The WL Maxinson Corporation of New York built the M45 quad mount in 1942 to shoot aircraft out of the sky. Four M2HB Browning heavy barrel machine guns mounted in a single electrically powered turret with traverse, elevation, and firing. All controlled by one man through two hand grips and a reflex sight.

One canvas seat surrounded by the four barrels pointing in every direction. Designed to track a fastmoving target across a clear blue sky. What the army discovered in Europe and confirmed in Korea was that the weapon did something to infantry that no anti-aircraft gun was supposed to do.

It erased the terrain between the gunner and the target. At maximum cyclic, four barrels fired simultaneously produce roughly 2,300 rounds per minute, 40 rounds per second. Not a burst, a sustained continuous roar that veterans consistently describe, not as individual gunfire, but as a single wall of sound, a physical thing you feel in your chest before you process it as noise.

And the round it fires is the 50 caliber BMG, a projectile that has been punching through engine blocks since the First World War. An M60 round embeds in a tree trunk. The 50 BMG cuts the tree down. Four of them simultaneously do not suppress the jungle. They remove it. In Korea, the Chinese people’s volunteer army attacked in human waves.

Thousands of soldiers advancing across open ground at night. The logic being that sheer mass would overwhelm defensive positions before they could be adequately engaged. The M45 broke those attacks, not by suppressing them, by physically destroying the men making them. The army converted 1,200 halftracks to carry the mount.

The men who watched what those guns did to infantry in the open gave it a name, the meat chopper. That name was earned before Vietnam, before Route 19, before anyone imagined bolting the thing into the back of a cargo truck. In the summer of 1967, before the September disaster, Colonel Bolino and Lieutenant Colonel Philip N.

Smiley were already experimenting with armed trucks. After September 2nd, experimentation became directive. Lieutenant Colonel John Burke, commanding the 27th Transportation Battalion, ordered construction from pre-cut steel plating he had already requisitioned that summer. The M55 trailer was the standard platform for the M45, a proper two- wheeled towad mount designed for static anti-aircraft positions.

In the eighth transportation group’s maintenance yards, crews pulled the mount off its trailer and bolted it directly into the bed of an M54 5-tonon 6×6 truck. The army had a proper system. The men in the shops decided the truck was faster. Battalion commanders directed the builds. Company commanders picked the crews.

Then they stepped back and let the mechanics decide what the trucks became. One of those crews would eventually receive a Medal of Honor for what they did aboard one of these trucks. That story is coming. But first, what the weapon actually did the first time an ambush walked into one. November 24th, 1967, 11 weeks after September 2nd.

Same road, same enemy, same jungle passes. The first hardened convoy equipped with improvised gun trucks rolled west through ambush alley. The North Vietnamese army attacked as they had attacked every convoy before with command detonated mines, recoilless rifle fire, and concentrated automatic weapons from covered positions in the treeine.

What came back at them was different. Not the crack of M60 machine guns. Not the flat report of rifle fire. A wall of sound that does not stop. 20 minutes of 50 caliber fire pouring into the jungle on both sides of the road. Not suppressing the ambush, dismantling it. Four gun trucks working the tree line.

The rounds going through the first row of trees and through the second row and through whatever was behind the second row. 41 Vietkong confirmed dead. Four captured. Two Americans killed. 17 wounded. Colonel Bolinino’s afteraction report was direct. The quick reaction and firepower of this convoy were the only factors that prevented this ambush from being a success.

The North Vietnamese Army’s entire ambush doctrine on Route 19 was built on a single assumption that the convoys firepower could not reach them through the trees. Roger Blink, driver of gun truck Brutus, explained the shift in the simplest possible terms. With an M250 caliber machine gun, we simply cut the tree down.

an ambush position that was functionally impervious to everything else the convoy carried could be systematically destroyed by a quad 50 in seconds. The jungle that had made Route 19 a killing ground for 3 years was not a defense anymore. It was just wood. That was November. By January, the gun trucks were running missions beyond Route 19.

January 31st, 1968, Hugh City, the opening morning of the Ted offensive. Sergeant Bob Lver, G Battery, 65th Artillery, was crewing a single Quad 50 truck in support of Marine operations when a Marine officer approached him near the Nguen Hong Bridge over the Perfume River. The Marines were trying to reach the besieged MACV compound.

Men were dying on the deck. The officer’s request was not complicated. He asked Sarge. My men are getting the hell shot out of them. Can you help them out? Lver looked at his crew. Private first class Theodore Harris. Davis. David. He remembers what each of them was thinking. There was never any thought to say no.

But I think that each of us told ourselves that we were not going to make it back from this one. They drove the Quad 50 truck onto the bridge into direct fire. Dead and wounded Marines lined both edges of the deck. Men using the bodies of their dead as cover to keep shooting. At the north end, Lover opened on NVA positions in the multi-story buildings across the river.

He watched his tracers go through the first wall of a concrete bunker. Through the second wall, he watched them strike sparks off the surface of the perfume river beyond. When the firing stopped, the bunker was a pile of sand. An NVA soldier appeared at the corner of that position with a grenade. Lver later described what came next with the particular dry humor of a man who has had a long time to think about how close it was.

He said he yelled grenade and they all jumped off the truck and took cover beneath the truck bed. He remembers hiding behind the dual wheels of the truck, shooting at this NVA with an old Smith and Wesson 38 caliber revolver. All the while, there were four perfectly good 50 caliber machine guns over his head. The grenade was a dud.

Sergeant Lover received a silver star and his second purple heart. His three crew members received bronze stars with the V device. surviving Marines of Golf Company, second battalion, fifth Marines told him later they believed fewer of them would have been alive without that one quad 50 on that bridge.

The men of the 359th Transportation Company, 27th Transportation Battalion, had their own truck. They called it Brutus. Specialist for Larry Gilbert Dah had not originally crewed it. He and three friends, Ronald Mallerie, Charles Huer, Richard Bond, had come to it the way men come to things that need doing.

When the original Brutus crew was hit in November of 1970, one man was killed and two were badly wounded. Doll’s group volunteered from the motorpool. They cleaned the blood out of the gun box. They repaired the damage. They repainted the name. They wanted the enemy to see no signs of what the truck had already cost.

Specialist Ford Doll was 21 years old from Oregon City, Oregon. He had requested combat duty in Vietnam three times before his orders came through. February 23rd, 1971, and Key Pass, Route 19. Two fuel convoys were heading west. A large North Vietnamese Army force ambushed the lead convoy at the top of the pass, disabling gunruck, the Creeper, with an RPG.

In the opening seconds, the 359th Transportation Company convoy halted at the base of the mountain. Gun trucks Brutus, the Untouchable, the Misfits, and Gun Jeep Lil Brutus raced up the mountain road into the active kill zone. Ambush had turned the pass into a battlefield. The ambush had been running for 30 minutes.

Fuel tankers were burning. The lead convoys crews heard Brutus’s guns open up as it came around the bend. Their accounts later described morale improving significantly at that sound. 15 more minutes of fighting passed before the contact subsided. As the gun trucks began to withdraw, a hand grenade sailed into Brutus’s gun box.

Specialist for Larry Gilbert Dah saw it first. He called a warning. Then he covered it with his body. He was killed instantly. Sergeant Hector Diaz, Ronald Mallerie, and Charles Huser survived. The Medal of Honor was presented by Vice President Gerald Ford on August 8th, 1974 at Blair House to Doll’s widow, Michelle, and his six-year-old son, Michael.

Diaz’s son, born 4 days after the action at Enk Pass, found words for it years later. February 23rd, 1971, was only 4 days before I was born. Had you not jumped on that grenade for my dad and the others in that truck that day, he left the sentence where it belonged, unfinished. The NVA did not stop ambushing convoys.

They studied the problem and adapted. Richard Kilblain, transportation corps historian and the definitive scholarly authority on convoy operations in Vietnam, documented the evolution. The first adaptation was targeting priority destroy the gun truck before engaging the convoy.

RPGs were retasked as the opening shot aimed at the most heavily armed vehicle in the column. The creeper at an key pass. Proud American destroyed by a B40 rocket on route 9 during operation lambson 719. Satan’s little angel destroyed in a night ambush on the same road. Richard B. Frasier killed. Chester red Israel metabeacted with severe wounds.

The second adaptation was the decoy, a first kill zone designed to draw gun trucks off the road with a second kill zone further ahead waiting for the unprotected cargo vehicles trying to escape the first. The deterrent effect was real. It was also double-edged. Units that armed their trucks found the enemy letting their convoys pass to attack the weaker looking ones following behind.

Specialist for John Robert Kruinski senior G Battery First Battalion 44th Artillery who ran a quad 50 truck along the DMZ at Dong Ha described the gunner’s reality without sentiment. When running those 450 caliber guns, you sat in a little chair with quarterinch steel around you.

If the enemy hit you with their RPGs, you were dead meat. You were gone. Quarterin plate stopped fragments. It did not stop an AK-47 round. The ready supply was 800 rounds, four tombstone chests, each weighing 89 lb. At maximum cyclic, those 800 rounds were gone in under 30 seconds. Loaders had to swap chests under fire in a moving truck during an active ambush, lifting 89 lbs of steel and brass over the side of a gun box while tracers came in from the tree line.

The electrical system, traverse elevation firing, ran on two 6volt batteries in Vietnam’s 100% humidity. Corrosion found every connector. Moisture found every seal. If the power died, the mount was a very heavy pile of steel that could not rotate. During Operation Lamsan 719, the 523rd Transportation Company lost three gun trucks in under 30 days.

Ace of Spades destroyed February 16th. Satan’s Lil Angel destroyed February 20th. Proud American destroyed March 12th. Specialist 4 Robert Thorne was killed at the wheel. Second Lieutenant James Baird had his left arm taken by fragmentation. Thorne, in the last seconds available to him, steered into the hillside instead of off the cliff edge.

He saved his crew. The Army never authorized a single gun truck. Specialist for Robert Thorne died in one. Anyway, after the 57th Maintenance Company was ambushed at Naseria in March of 2003, 11 killed and five captured, American transportation soldiers in Iraq began building armed and armored trucks from scrap metal, plywood, and Kevlar blankets.

The same improvisation, the same desperation, the same logic. Nobody else is going to protect us, so we will protect ourselves. 36 years after the eighth transportation group built the first gun trucks in the maintenance yards at Quean, a soldier from a supply unit asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld why he had to dig through a landfill for scrap steel to armor his vehicle.

The lesson that JD Calhoun’s convoy had paid for in blood in 1967 had never been written into doctrine. Vietnam gun truck veterans were eventually consulted by Iraq era soldiers directly. One generation of truck drivers teaching the next what the institution had failed to preserve. One truck came home on May 31st, 1971.

Captain Donald K. Voitritter, commanding officer of the 523rd Transportation Company, submitted a formal request to ship Gun Truck Eve of Destruction back to the United States. It arrived at Fort Eustace, Virginia in July of that year. It is still there. Sammy C, rear gunner on Ace of Spades, did not talk about Vietnam for 30 years.

After his son died in 2001, he spent a year building a full-scale replica of the truck from a surplus 5tonon, fabricating every piece of metal himself. When it was finished, his old crew mates drove it 700 miles to Branson, Missouri. They climbed back into their positions. C passed away in 2018.

The replica stood as a testament to what they had lived through. September 2nd, 1967. Seven dead, zero enemy killed. The North Vietnamese Army withdrew without losing a man. What the truck drivers of the Eighth Transportation Group decided in the weeks that followed was that the road was not going to keep working that way. They were right.