A short account of sabotage at a US army oil depot

A short, personal account of worker and army veteran sabotage of oil supplies to the military towards the end of the Vietnam war.

Submitted by Steven. on July 21, 2014

I once worked a temp job at an oil depot, a "tank farm". We were filling and packing five gallon drums of motor oil for the us army.

This was in the last days of the Vietnam war and a couple of the guys I worked with were young Vietnam vets.

They started out writing "FTA" (Fuck the army) on the tops of the cans. One day a vet had a bright idea and filled his pocket with sand.

As each can went by he trickled in a few grains of sand. Soon several of us were carrying a little sand into work every day.

The job lasted a couple of weeks but that meant we had sent something like 10,000 gallons of gritty motor oil to the army.

The vets used to laugh over lunch about how many tanks and helicopters we were putting out of commission.

I was the only radical in the bunch. The rest were just angry young men who had been used and abused by the war machine.

We were making around $100 a week but it still warms my heart to think of the millions we cost the army.

Source: Comment posted to Facebook

Comments

Chilli Sauce

10 years 4 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Chilli Sauce on July 21, 2014

That's wonderful.

Norman Young

10 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Norman Young on August 14, 2014

That's one good way of buggering up the war effort, it reminds me of the film "Schindlers list", in which the artillery shells they produced were of the wrong calibre and couldn't be fired.