The Box - Marc Levinson [99]
The military command was of two minds when it came to such a radical change in procedures. On the one hand, political pressure to bring in private-sector expertise was intense. At a top-level conference in Honolulu in January 1966, the Joint Chiefs announced a new policy “to contract for civilians to perform duties which they could accomplish, such as the operation of port facilities.” On the other hand, no one in the military had experience with containerization. The MSTS had never leased a containership or run a supply exercise involving containers. The Defense Department’s initial request for proposals to run a “containership service” to Vietnam involved only 7-foot Conex boxes carried as breakbulk cargo, not the far larger aluminum containers that could be handled by high-speed cranes and lifted directly onto truck chassis for delivery. The numerous port construction projects under way by early 1966, including the deepwater complex at Cam Ranh Bay, the Newport development in Saigon, and the new piers at Da Nang and other ports, all were proceeding as conventional breakbulk facilities. Container shipping, no matter how important in the commercial world, was not something that the military knew how to do.14
Through the winter of 1966, McLean struggled to convince the Pentagon that containerization could solve its logistical problems in Vietnam. In April, he finally obtained a foothold. Equipment Rental Inc., a new division of McLean Industries, was awarded an army contract to run a trucking operation at the Saigon piers. The contract had nothing to do with containers, but McLean was so eager to show what his company could do that Equipment Rental began moving freight two months ahead of schedule. In May, Besson asked the MSTS to give Sea-Land a contract to run three containerships between Oakland and the Japanese island of Okinawa, a major staging point for Vietnam. Sea-Land was to deliver 476 35-foot containers every 12 days. At the same time, with conventional carriers unable to supply additional vessels, the MSTS solicited bids for containerships to sail directly from the United States to Vietnam. Sea-Land would have to compete for the business—but as the largest containership operator by far, the only one sailing across the Pacific, and the only one with a handy supply of vessels equipped with the shipboard cranes needed to unload in Vietnam, it had the edge. When several competitors sought to submit a joint proposal, the MSTS refused to accept their bid. Things finally seemed to be going McLean’s way.15
But Vietnam was still not ready for container shipping. The First Logistical Command, the agency in charge of the military’s port, warehousing, and trucking operations in Vietnam, was notably unenthusiastic. The port delays facing military ships had eased during the first half of 1966, from an average of 6.9 days in February to 5.3 in July, and port congestion problems had less urgency for the forces on the ground. No cranes or storage areas for containers were available, and none were under construction. With Besson’s Washington-based Army Materiel Command pushing container shipping aggressively, and with Sea-Land showing in Okinawa that container service required only half as many ships and one-sixteenth as much labor as breakbulk service, Westmoreland ordered the First Log to reassess its opposition. In July 1966, that command finally conceded that a containership service was desirable, but no sooner than October 1967. Sea-Land won a contract to open a containership service to Subic Bay, the huge U.S. naval base in the Philippines, but the bidding for service to Vietnam was postponed.16
It took yet another logistical breakdown in Vietnam to put an end to bureaucratic resistance. The improvements of the first half of 1966 were being reversed by August under the mounting flood of supplies and war materiel: shipments from California to Vietnam would be 55 percent higher in the year starting July 1, 1966, than they