Awards or commendations—interviewer Brown asked Chester whether he and the other soldiers received any. “You gotta be kidding. That war with them Japs over there, and with the Germans coming up.” Nobody paid any attention to roadbuilders in Canada. “We were the peons playing in the mud.”
Bit and Brace Brain Surgery–More from Chester’s Memory
Chester vaguely remembered hearing about a “whoopsidoo” at Soldiers Summit. A few weeks before that event, Chester’s 35th, working north and the soldiers of the 340th, working south, met at Contact Creek—completed the road all the way from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse. The interviewers asked about Contact Creek.
“I never saw no bands, or nothing…”
Interviewer Brown asked Chester to describe what happened there. Chester responded, “We met…. That was about the size of it. We were just tickled to death. We were gonna get to go home.”
Wrong.
Big shot officers in Whitehorse, Edmonton and Washington had endless ideas for projects to follow up on the Alaska Highway. Chester and the soldiers of the 35th, spending the frigid winter in British Columbia and Northwest Territories, doing the actual work and having no idea why they did it, found it more and more difficult to give a damn.
They built a very long winter trail from Dawson Creek north to Fort Simpson then returned to the Liard River Camp. Chester scored a furlough, and he hitched a ride with a civilian trucker to the train station at Dawson Creek.
In bitter cold, the trucker produced a fifth of whiskey and poured it into his gas tank, Chester asked him, “How come you to do that?”
“That’s to keep the water from plugging up the carburetor.”
A couple of weeks later, on the way back north, finding it ever more difficult to “give a damn”, Chester got drunk in Edmonton. He didn’t make it back to the regiment quite as soon as the regiment expected him to. Eventually he made it to Dawson Creek and hitched a ride up to the Liard River Camp, but another big shot with an idea had moved his company on to work on a pipeline road up to Norman Wells, so he kept hitching.
When he finally caught up, someone pointed him at an enclosed “wanagen sled”. “Why don’t you go down there and get one of them bunks and take a nap?”
Sounded like a great idea.
Chester stayed in the wanagen for a week before his company commander spotted him emerging for a call of nature and “things got a little rough.”
Great story
Thank you.
go go go
Indeed