I have not seen one of these for years. I'm surprised the Army is still running them (the Mac truck - not the Globemaster). I got to drive them back in the late 1980's, when we were doing an exercise one year around the Nannup area. Our unit usually didn't take Macs on exercise, since they were unnecessary for the size of the exercise that we were running. We normally just ran Unimogs and Landrovers, with a smattering of F1 trucks until they were phased out.
However, our transport Staff Sgt somehow wangled one, and we took turns in fanging it around the countryside for a week. They were a big jump up from the Mogs in terms of size, and took a bit of getting used to. The bonnet is enormously long - you could lift the lid and park a Commodore under it. Judging the corners was a nightmare, which is why I am glad I never had to drive one in the city. The gearbox was a doozey - the tacho had a line painted at some level of revs, and when you changed up, you had to double declutch into neutral and let the revs fall to exactly that line before shifting into the next gear. If you tried to shift before or after that line, you were stuffed. Stop the truck, fail to collect $200 and start again.
Part of the fun was tooling around the backroads and scaring the cows. Whenever we found a paddock with cattle in it, we'd blast the air horn and watch them take off - tails out vertically, seemingly propelled by liquid poo squirting out of their bums. It was lots of fun until a farmer saw us. Oops.
This is one of the old International Harvester F1 6x6 trucks that were around when I did my military driving course. I read today that these were deployed to Vietnam the year before I was born. Plenty of them were still around when I got my military license over 20 years later. They had a 283 cubic inch petrol motor that wasn't capable of de-skinning a custard and a crash gearbox. Power steering was something that we only dreamed about. At least the windscreen (which was flat and split down the middle) could be folded out frontwise to provide a bit more circulation in the cab. Until some bees flew in one day and stung my co-driver in the face.
They were great beasts, and many of them are still around today doing things out in the country somewhere. They were tough. We found that out the hard way when our regiment got its first issue of Mogs. We commonly used the F1 to make roads through the bush, since it had a front bumper that could easily handle pushing over small trees, and there was nothing down the sides to catch on boulders, tree stumps and the like.
We tried the same trick with some Mogs, and found out the hard way that they were made of plastic and fibreglass. $100,000 worth of damage was done to three trucks in one day. Tool boxes torn off. Front ends smashed up. Mud guards destroyed. Don't get me wrong - I love the Unimog. It's fantastic off road. It's just not suitable for use as a bulldozer.
The F1 truck by the way is not to be confused with the F1 submachine gun, which was also around when I did my basic training. According to Wikipedia, it was phased out in 1991 and replaced by the Steyr. That might be the official story, but I never saw one after my boot camp in 1985.
I grabbed this photo, which shows diesel being pumped out of a 44 gallon drum using a hand pump. I would have thought by now that the Army would have come up with a faster method for transferring fuel in the field. I don't know how many litres of fuel I pumped this way, but I do know that I used to stink of diesel for days after an exercise had ended. There was no way to avoid it splashing over your clothes and skin.
I also had biceps and triceps back then - I doubt I could pump out a couple of drums in a row like I used to be able to.
Ah, the good old Charlie Gutsache. The best thing around for sucking all the snot out of your nose, or blowing all the fillings out of your teeth (if you fail to keep your mouth open whilst firing it).
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