Brands Built Roads In Thailand
Pictured: Ron Brands built roads in Thailand during the Vietnam War. He is pictured here at Main Street Printers where he is the manager and press operator.
By Jill Fennema –
Ron Brands was drafted at the age of 19. He was the second to the youngest of Dorothy and Bert Brands’ nine children. His older brothers had also served – Art in Korea at the end of WWII, Evert in the navy, and John during the Berlin Crisis.
Ron entered the United States Army on January 6, 1966. His dad brought him to the bus stop in Pipestone, and from there he went to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. Ron remembers that his dad shed a few tears when he dropped him off – it was one of the few times he saw his father express emotion.
During basic training, Ron came down with a bad cold or flu. He did not want to go to the doctor because he was afraid he would have to start basic training over. The weather in Missouri was miserable and cold. Even though he had been battling a fever for a few days, he made it through the rifle training. Ron remembers that he was so weak he could hardly hold onto his rifle. He passed the training and then went to the hospital. He would be there a week.
Staff Sergeant Ronald Brands
The day he was discharged from the hospital was the day for the infiltration test, which required crawling on the ground under wires in the dirt and mud. He barely made it through that exercise, but he did pass.
He also recalls bivouac week, which was a week of training out in the field, sleeping in a pup tent in cold and sometimes rainy conditions. Ron said for his unit they each only received half a tent and had to find a buddy to pitch their tent with. The tents were small and their heads practically stuck out one end while their feet stuck out the other.
After completing eight weeks of basic training, Ron had eight weeks of an Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) where he was taught carpentry skills. Why carpentry? All the soldiers took a test that gave the powers-that-be clues as to what they should be good at. Ron ended up in an engineering group.
He finished his training in May 1966 and then had to wait around until June for orders for where they would be sent.
In June, he found out he was going to southwest Asia. He thought it was Vietnam, but it wasn’t. He ended up going to Thailand, which borders Vietnam. He boarded an air force cargo plane at St. Louis with other soldiers – none of which were part of his unit.
It took three days to get to Thailand. They made three stops before landing in Bangkok: Hawaii, the Philippines, and Vietnam. After arriving in Bangkok, they were put on a truck and driven out into the countryside, which was a mixture of rice paddies and jungle.
“For a young guy it was quite a shock. You’re pretty much a kid yet,” Ron recalls. “You drive through the jungle and don’t see anything but rice paddies and people walking with water buffalo. It was so primitive.”
Ron Brands (back, right) helped drill holes for dynamite to clear the way for a road in Thailand. The man at the left is holding a bottle of Pepsi that he bought from a Thai child.
They used elephants to help with some of the heavy work of building a road through the jungle.
As an E5 in the army, part of Ron’s job was to oversee Thai workers who were hired by the army to help build roads and walls.
Ron was in an engineering unit and their job was to build a road from Bangkok to Korat. Ron had received a few promotions so his job was basically to supervise Thai workers as they built the road. One part of the work involved explosives – they had to clear away the mountain for the road to go through.
The biggest explosion Ron experienced reminded him of an a-bomb mushroom cloud. For two weeks, they had been busy drilling several two-inch holes 20-feet deep. The holes were packed with dynamite. Their lieutenant crawled into a culvert about a quarter mile from the site to detonate the dynamite.
“There was a huge mushroom cloud,” Ron said. “When they went to inspect, there was about two-feet of powdered dirt all over and rocks flew all the way to where they were parked a mile away.
They also used Agent Orange to clear away the jungle so they could build the road. Later in life, Ron would find out he had cancer and a heart problem that were tied to that Agent Orange exposure.
While it was often hot and humid, when it did rain the rain would come down so hard that one could hardly breath. Then it would stop raining and the sun would come back out and it was instantly hot and humid again. But the ground, especially the roads, would turn into a slippery mess.
The camp they lived at during that year was guarded by the Thai military. They lived in 10-man tents with wooden floors. Each soldier had a cot with their own mosquito net. Malaria was a big concern.
Another concern was snakes. They were everywhere. Some were pythons, others were small and poisonous. Ron said that they always kept a sharp eye out for snakes on their way to the latrine at night when the snakes would be out warming themselves on the road.
According to Ron, the food overseas was not great, The C-rations did not have much meat, so one time they sent someone to town to find meat. “But it must have been water buffalo because you could not chew it,” Ron said. “It was food you could survive on, but it was not good.” Even worse than chewy meat was the time they ate maggot-infested oatmeal.
With a light diet and hard work, Ron found he lost a lot of weight. The work was hard and the climate made things miserable. Some days he would work 11 a.m to midnight. There were plenty of times where it would still be 100 degrees at midnight. There was mud and grime to deal with every day.
“It wasn’t like you had to spit shine your shoes every day,” Ron said. But something as simple as getting a sunburn would get you in trouble. “They wanted you to take care of yourself,” he said. The solution to all the sun was to wear long sleeves and try to stay out of the sun. In the summer, their uniform was a simple t-shirt and fatigues.
In the winter, the temperature would dip to 60 degrees, which was cool for the American soldiers, but the Thai people would wear heavy coats if they could afford one.
The Thai women would come to their camp and offer to wash clothes and do housekeeping for pay. The children would bike to the worksite and have bottled pop to sell. They might walk or bike up to 20 miles in the heat to make their sales and then bike home and come out again. Sometimes if it was the end of the day, the soldiers would give the children a ride back to their village with the truck because they felt badly for them.
A big part of Ron’s work was supervising the Thai people who had been hired by the army to help work on the road and build walls. “Pretty much my job was to keep people working,” he said. “It wasn’t easy because they did not speak English and I did not speak Thai.”
Ron did learn some of the Thai language. One of his favorite sayings was, “Hurry up and get to work!”
