The Box - Marc Levinson [98]
It was not the excess of cargo alone that caused the port logjam in Vietnam. Aside from fuel, every bit of cargo shipped to Vietnam, military or civilian, arrived in the holds of breakbulk ships. Unloading meant lifting individual items out of the hold and placing them on the dock or, even worse, into a shallow-draft vessel that would ferry them to shore, where they would have to be unloaded a second time. Many ships made multiple stops, and if a ship had been stowed poorly in Oakland or Seattle, some cargo would have to be unloaded and then reloaded for delivery to the next port. Often, cargo could not be identified once it was finally on the dock, complicating efforts to get it to the troops who were supposed to receive it. After surveying the situation, a military study team recommended basic changes in shipping procedures in November 1965. Logistics officers in the United States should send full shiploads to individual Vietnamese ports, rather than having a ship make several port calls, so the vessel could return to America as quickly as possible. Vessels should be loaded for ease of discharge. Cargo for different consignees in Vietnam should be kept separate as much as possible, to minimize sorting at the dock. The first recommendation on the committee’s list was most notable of all: all shipments should come in “unitized packaging.”11
To military logistics experts, “unitized packaging” meant above all the ubiquitous five-ton Conex boxes that were carried with other cargo in the holds of breakbulk ships. Palletization, in which individual items were wrapped on a wooden pallet and moved on and off ships as a single piece, had come into commercial use in the early 1950s, and by late 1965 the Sharpe Army Depot, the main supply base in California, was promoting it for military cargo. McNamara, however, knew that the commercial world had moved far beyond small containers and wooden pallets. Leading shipping executives were invited to Washington, where they were shown film clips of sailors lowering cargo nets by rope and asked for advice. When Malcom McLean saw the film, a colleague recalled, “[h]e got obsessed with the idea of putting containerships into Vietnam. He was back and forth to Washington, talking to people, and they told him there isn’t anything you can do in Vietnam.”12
McLean finally got the ear of Frank Besson, the four-star general who headed army supply operations. At Christmas 1965, Besson agreed that McLean could take a look at the situation in Vietnam. McLean phoned his engineering chief, Ron Katims, and consulting engineer Robert Campbell, both just arrived in Europe to plan the start of Sea-Land’s European service, and told them to meet his Pan Am flight in Paris the next morning. A day later, with their wool suits and overcoats, the trio was in steamy Saigon. They visited Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay, got rounds of military briefings, and crossed paths with a delegation from the International Longshoremen’s Association, which had arrived in Saigon on December 16. McLean’s team concluded that containerization would solve much of the logistical confusion in Vietnam. He received the prompt endorsement of ILA president Teddy Gleason—the same Teddy Gleason who had fended off containerization in New York for the better part of a decade. On departing Vietnam