The Box - Marc Levinson [95]
Chapter 9
Vietnam
In the winter of 1965, the United States government began a rapid buildup of military forces in Vietnam. In the process, it created what may have been the greatest logistical mess in the history of the U.S. armed forces. The resolution of that mess represented containerization’s coming of age.1
Few places on earth were less suited to supporting a modern military force than South Vietnam in early 1965. The entire country, seven hundred miles long from north to south, had a single deepwater port, one railroad line that was largely inoperative, and a fragmentary highway system, mostly unpaved. The tasks of providing civilian aid and supplying the U.S. military “advisers” who had worked in Vietnam since the late 1950s—there were 23,300 of them at the start of 1965—were already overwhelming; by 1964, the small U.S. port detachment in Saigon was working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, to prevent a backlog of ships. The various American forces in the country had sixteen different logistical systems, a situation that led to endless competition for basic resources such as delivery trucks and warehouse space. There was no central system for keeping track of arriving cargo, and the navy’s Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS), which was responsible for chartering merchant ships to haul supplies to Vietnam, did not even have an office in the country. So far as Washington was concerned, the entire operation in Vietnam was predicated on the assumption that all troops would be withdrawn in 1965. This political fig leaf meant that spending on docks, warehouses, and other permanent infrastructure was hard to justify.2
The logistical challenges were well known when President Lyndon Johnson ordered 65,000 U.S. soldiers and marines to Vietnam, along with several air force squadrons, in April 1965. Being aware of the problems, though, was not the same as resolving them. By June, when U.S. troop strength in-country had reached 59,900, the supply chain was already hopelessly tangled. Ships coming from California anchored outside Vietnamese harbors, but getting their cargo safely ashore was almost impossible: the harbors were so shallow that oceangoing ships could not reach the piers. Instead, a barge or a landing ship tank (LST), an amphibious vehicle longer than a football field but with a very shallow draft, would serve as a ferry. The barge or LST would tie up to the larger ship, whose crew would off-load the cargo painstakingly, often by placing crates or boxes into nets that were lowered by rope. The process was so slow that barges carrying ammunition from ships near Nha Be required ten to thirty days to make a single round trip to shore. At Qui Nhon, LSTs brought cargo directly onto the beach and lowered their huge ramps to let trucks and forklifts inside, but unloading them still took eight days. At Da Nang, oceangoing ships had to drop their cargo into lighters four miles out at sea. Coastal ships with less than a five-meter draft could reach the dock, but the port was repeatedly thrown into chaos when they arrived without advance notice. Storms, common during the summer monsoon, could bring the intricate unloading process to a halt.3
The situation in Saigon was even worse. Vietnam’s only deepwater port, located on the Saigon River forty-five miles from the South China Sea, was a major bottleneck. Tonnage rose by half during 1965, and the port was simply overwhelmed.