The Fort Dix Motor Pool Story

1960

A True Story

rewritten 12/2019* 812 Words

By Howard Yasgar

In 1960, I was on active duty with the Army Reserves.

I was assigned to the motor pool at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

The Fort Dix motor pool was, a big operation, run by a Staff Sergeant named Brian Kimbrough.

Kimbrough was a career soldier, and he was now very close to retirement.

When a Staff Sergeant gets close to retirement, it becomes very important to him that he has a clean record so he will get his full retirement pay.

To a career soldier that has put in his twenty years there is nothing worse than at the last moment getting involved in some kind of situation that would reflect badly on him.

Up to now Sergeant Kimbrough’s record was flawless, he had fought in Korea and had run the Fort Dix motorpool for the past three years.

I became friends with Sergeant Kimbrough, and I learned how he was able to run such a large motor pool and never had anyone complain about him.

I found out that Kimbrough had a trick up his sleeve, he was sort of like a hoarder, but he was only a hoarder of vehicle parts.

Once a month he would take a case of beer to the base junk yard, and they gave him all the good used truck parts he wanted for free.

Of course this was all illegal, and Kimbrough’s motorpool eventually became loaded down with extra tools and spare parts that he shouldn’t have had.

That’s when he heard from one of his insider friends at headquarters that there was going to be a surprise “IG” inspection of his motorpool.

If the Inspector General came to the motorpool, and found all the illegal parts, they would court marshal Kimbrough for theft, and that would be the end of his flawless record and the end of his retirement pay as well.

Kimbrough was told by his inside friend that someone had complained about him, they said that it was impossible for Kimbrough to run a motorpool and never have any broken-down vehicles, they said something strange was going on.

The rumor on base was that Kimbrough always had a full compliment of trucks ready to roll, and everyone knew that it was impossible to have 100% of your vehicles always running.

The following morning, I saw that Sergeant Kimbrough was sweating profusely, and that’s when he asked me for a big favor.

He wanted me to get together five truck drivers that I could trust to keep their mouth shut.

He said that he would give me five trucks, and I was to fill up four of them with all the illegal stuff that he had laying around the motorpool.

Then he wanted me to take the five trucks and hide them somewhere for a week until the inspection was over.

The fifth truck was for me to bring the drivers into the mess hall for food.

We filled up four of the trucks with all kinds of used tools and parts, and I kept one truck empty.

Even with the four trucks loaded, there were still too many used parts, and Kimbrough was now under extreme pressure, so he started burying parts in old army fox holes that were behind the motor pool.

By evening the motor pool was clean like a hospital.

I saw Kimbrough had stopped sweating and he had on a pair of white gloves and he was running his finger around the door frames and the workbenches.

Kimbrough showed me an old map of Fort Dix and we saw that there were several firing ranges that hadn’t been used in years, so that’s where I headed.

Everything worked out fine, of course if we were ever caught with all the parts, I don’t even want to think about it, I would be writing this story from Leavenworth Prison.

We hid the trucks in the woods near the abandoned firing ranges.

By the end of the week Kimbrough was all smiles, he had passed the IG inspection, and he told me to take all five trucks to the base junk yard and just leave them there.

I had wondered how Kimbrough had explained to the Inspector General his having five missing trucks.

Well, I understood now, there were no five missing trucks, they were trucks that Kimbrough had put together from parts he got from the base junkyard.

That’s how Sergeant Kimbrough always had trucks ready to roll, he had five extra ones that that no one knew about, they were not on his official inventory.