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League of Families of Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia
[00:06]	Ratcliffe: I’d like to pick up at least one further thing about the mire of how running black operations or operations that are not above board through military channels or funnels, conduits, creates complete confusion. And you had been mentioning being invited to try and help work out the mess that had been created for the families of people who one way or another, I guess from the ’50s or the ’60s on, were now missing or declared POWs in Southeast Asia, but that the army would say, "Sorry, we have no record of them." And to tell us something about your experience with the wives or the mothers or the brothers or whatever of these people and how it just created such a confusion that had never existed that way before for the US government.
[01:06]	Prouty: Yes. We really have to realize that the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War is intended for what we might call civilized societies. That if both sides don’t respect the convention, or even more bluntly, if one side is just not able to do it, like one of our enemies we call them in the China were the Viet Cong. There was no central administration, no accounting area, no central prison camp. There was the Viet Cong. Little men in black pajamas running through the woods, trying to—really bandits, trying to stay alive, trying to eat. And if they had to shoot Americans, they did. If they had to capture an American, they did. But to think there was accountability among those people or even an awareness of such things as Geneva Convention, is just out of the question.
[02:00]	[00:02:00] And such things as that snowballed because we had been fighting in Vietnam or at least supporting warfare there since September ’45 up until 1965. For 20 years, that was what was the Vietnam War. And it was really not a war. We never declared war against Laos, and yet a predominant number of these so called POWs went down in Laos. They were airmen that the airplanes crashed in Laos because it’s smarter to crash in Laos than in North Vietnam. And only a few miles further they could get there and then if they lose and control the plane, they’d lose it. But Laos, it was not at war with the United States. How are we going to have a POW without a war?
[02:44]	So there’s a lot of the intricacies of that kind of procedure developed from a war or from warfare that started in ’45 and went to ’65 when all of the operational control was under CIA. Now, if you are an employee of the CIA and operating in another country, by historic definition, you’re a spy. You’re an agent. You shouldn’t be there. And putting a spy up against the wall is the name of the game to stop them from coming again. So there were not adequate safeguards for the people who worked in Vietnam in that period of time. And although there were a lot of military there, for example, the CIA called me in December 1960 for a squadron of helicopters to be used in Vietnam.
[03:36]	Now, a squadron of helicopters doesn’t sound like much, but you need the pilots, you need the mechanics, you need the supply men, you need all of the equipment to keep that thing going. Over 500 men. And that’s a modest number because once you get that many men there, there has to be a hospital, a supply and everything else, place to live. So we had men there. Well, we did what we called sheep dipping. We only took volunteers to work on those arrangements. The volunteers would then be employed by the Central Intelligence Agency at a commercial rate. They made money on the deal. And then we made duplicate records of their military records so they wouldn’t lose their seniority in the military. And then we made another set of duplicate records of their civilian records so that, for example, if they were paying payments on a car back home or a mortgage, they could keep that up and keep all the records straight in accordance with the paperwork of their normal lives. That’s called sheep dipping.
[04:35]	Well, when you put people like that and expose them in a war run by the CIA, the fact that they’re military works backwards. If they’re lost someday on a helicopter mission, and I don’t know how many people realize this, we lost over 5,000 helicopters in Vietnam. Those men are missing. They’re not—well, if the wife writes to the army and says, "Where’s my husband? He’s flying helicopters in the army." And we’d say, "We have nobody flying helicopters by that name. We have nobody in Indochina by that name. We’re very sorry. We have no records of this whatsoever." And the parents would get no answer, but they couldn’t understand that situation. And it got worse and worse as we stayed longer in Vietnam because all of the things that put together the Geneva Convention were not working at all, on either side.
[05:29]	You see, we were swearing up and down that the men weren’t in the army anymore, working with CIA. We were trying to protect the CIA and its activities. We’re trying to keep people from being shot as spies and that sort of thing. And yet we thought we could carry things along normally and just operating helicopter squadrons. Well, things don’t work that way.
[05:48]	So by 1970, many of the wives and mothers and fathers of the men who were missing, either POW, they assumed POW, or just plain missing in action, at least they had not been declared dead, began to get together. And a group in the San Diego area formed just an informal club of about 35 wives. And finally, they got the attention of Washington and in May of 1970, they agreed to meet in Washington. And as a function of that meeting, they established what they called the League of Families for Americans in Vietnam, American prisoners and missing in Southeast Asia—American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. It’s interesting to note that they didn’t say American soldiers. They knew by that time that they weren’t dealing with that problem. It was a new thing. Another thing was, this is the first time in our history that the services didn’t take full care of the military. Regardless of the sheep dipping and everything else, the service is responsible for the man, and yet the services let the League of Families do it.
[07:04]	Now, that’s the public story. Is that the real story? Well, I can tell you that because of the experience I’d had before I retired, that I received a call from a General’s Office in the Pentagon suggesting that I be an Advisor to an Organization that they were putting together to be called The League of Families. I had never heard of it. I was a banker in Washington at the time. I had no idea something like this was being done, but I was asked to do it. I told them I would do it. Sometime in June of 1970, I went to a big party, a big meeting of all these people in the offices of the Retired Office Association and met many of these women who had come in from San Diego and other places to start this association. There were many military people there. There were congressmen there. It was quite a meeting, probably 400 or 500 people were there.
[07:59]	And then I got a letter shortly after that from the woman who was the head of the national committee and the woman who was the—they had two sort of national commander and another one was like commander in chief, two titles. Anyway, I got a letter from the both of them saying that they needed me to be an advisor on the committee. There was no reference whatsoever to the fact that they had got my name from the Pentagon. It was as though they had dreamed it up. Well, how would they know me from anybody else? And you see, so the Pentagon and this committee were definitely related to each other and they had common interests.
[08:36]	But in between that, on the 28th of May in 1970, this League of Families was incorporated legally as a nonprofit organization in the city of Washington DC. It was incorporated by three Washington DC residents. I believe that none of them were related to any prisoners of any kind. One of these residents, in writing a letter to me within a week or so after the incorporation, wrote it on stationery that listed him as vice president and general counsel of the Reinsurance Association of America. Now that is the cap insurance organization over all insurance. That’s the one that handles catastrophes like the crash of a 747 or something like that. And at that time then, I realized that insurance was part of this problem.
[09:32]	Now, just think what happens. If a man is a POW and has not been declared dead and he has insurance policies, the family receives his pay every month and from the pay, they take the allotment and pay his insurance policy. So the insurance policy is still, to the company concern, a profit making deal. If he’s declared dead, they have to pay the family and then they have to pay out. And when you consider that 2,600,000 men eventually went to Vietnam, the overhang of that kind of an insurance policy as a prospect in the future was awesome from the point of view of the insurance industry. That’s why they were interested in incorporating and forming this League of Families.
[10:22]	I’ll put it another way. Many of the men were not POWs. There wasn’t any way to define their loss that way. So they were just listed as missing in action. That meant they just couldn’t find them. The guys disappeared. Now, when a man is missing in action, the federal government continues to pay his salary at the amount that when he disappeared and on a scale that is controlled by the government, increase it as though he was promoted in the—well, just think of the years from, we’ll say 1958 to today, the family’s still being paid.
[10:56]	Well, naturally, we sympathize with the families, but at the same time, the family recognizes reality. If nobody has proved the man is dead, they get the checks every month. And if he is proved dead, they get the insurance. And if they get the checks every month, they pay the insurance policy, so the insurance company is happy. But if he’s declared dead, they have to pay the policy. So you see, the families and the insurance company both lose if the man is declared dead. So there’s an enormous incentive to not permit the government, to prohibit the government from finding that the man is dead.
[11:35]	Now, it’s a terrible thing to have to put your sympathetic feelings up against the business aspects of this. But when you’re dealing in thousands and thousands of people, you have to be realistic and understand that this was a situation that developed as a result of the method of what we call the Indochinese warfare. It was not a war. Even when our troops landed in March of 1965, when the Marines landed on the beach of Da Nang in Indochina, then those Marines were under Marine commanders, and as far as they were concerned, they were in a military campaign, but it wasn’t a war. What do they call this thing that Lyndon Johnson had from Congress that got us into the war, the—
[12:24]	Ratcliffe: Gulf of Tonkin Resolution?
[12:25]	Prouty: Yeah. Even the Gulf of—that’s a resolution. That’s not a declaration of war. So that according to the Geneva Conventions, we still aren’t at war. And with all of that kind of complexity, you could see that more and more families are going to be deeply concerned in the situation, and the insurance companies are going to be deeply concerned. By 1976, the US government was paying to the MIA’s families, or whoever their beneficiary was, $9 million a year than they would have paid if the men had been declared dead and they never paid it. $9 million.
[13:02]	So from all of those angles, you can see what drew this thing together. And it didn’t just start from families. I was brought into the thing at the very beginning to be the financial advisor. I was a banker in the city. And as financial advisor, the first paper I ever processed for the advisory board and eventually for the League of Families was a budget. For the first year, it was over a million and a half dollars. Now, where would these few families, most of them not wealthy, put together that kind of money in a way of donations? The million and a half came from major sources within the military complex; Boeing, Fairchild, companies like that. We processed the checks. Much of the money came from letter writing campaigns by these organizations that send out three or 400,000 letters, and then you get the $10 bills in.
[14:07]	In fact, they came in in such quantity that the League of Families couldn’t handle it. And I had to set up a special post office box for our bank to go down there with a truck and bring these letters in, and then we’d open the envelopes and piles of $10 bills and checks and everything else would tumble out. And every day we made an accounting to the League of Families as to what their budget was. They had plenty of money.
[14:31]	You see, it isn’t at all what we’ve been reading in the papers about this POW, MIA thing, but the government and its approach to that subject exacerbated the situation because they couldn’t handle it otherwise. There was no way the Navy could say that a pilot lost on a flight over North Vietnam could just be written off. The family wouldn’t permit that. And nobody could say that some special forces officers who were last seen on the Ho Chi Minh Trail somewhere in Laos could be written off, even though there’s no war with Laos. And without going too far in this, you can see that if you go back to the very beginning of where this started, that it did not start the way that people talk about it today and way the papers talk. And that even today, the really smart thing to do, and really the most justifiable thing to do would just be to say tomorrow, "This thing ends," because it’s inconceivable that there are people living under this kind of condition with one exception.
[15:35]	There were people whom I know, I could identify one of them to you clearly, who made so much money in illegal transactions in Indochina during the war, from the sale of equipment that were delivered by ship and then disappeared in the night, from drugs, from gold, from money exchange, from things like that, who worked with the Chinese, who worked even with the mafia, that they can’t come home. A man that used to work in the office with Lansdale and myself when we worked for the Secretary of Defense, merged his interests with a man in Australia to create the Nugan Hand Bank. Nugan died, supposedly of suicide. Hand had never been located by the Australian government, but Hand is alive. Now, the billion dollars disappeared. I don’t know how much of the billion dollars he may have kept, maybe 25 cents, maybe the whole billion. He’s an MIA, and he can’t come home because of his status.
[16:36]	Well, there’s an awful lot of men who made millions and millions of dollars in the Indochina War, and by choice or other reason, they cannot come home. And if they do, they can’t identify themselves. Now, whether the families know that or not, that’s another matter. But to try to straighten that out by the procedures that they’re trying to do now where they send the Senator to Hanoi this month and another Senator the next month is utterly ridiculous. We should face the facts that by now we ought to be mature enough to understand what’s going on. But I don’t think there’s any Americans who have ever read anywhere or thought that the incorporating organization of this league was the insurance companies, that the motivation for many of the families was the monthly paycheck, and on and on like that. And probably the motivation for many of the missing is that they have so much money that they can’t come home and declare it.
[17:33]	You put all that together and you just about solve the problem. They’re not running around in the bushes in Laos or Thailand or Burma or what have you. Maybe a few are, but not too many. It’s quite a story and a strange thing is, every step of it is reasonable.
Epidome of Aeronautical Technology and Government’s Ulterior Motives
[17:51]	Ratcliffe: A different kind of cover story. Shifting into something more in the civilian sector on some levels, you’ve mentioned to me the design of a plane in the 1920s that was never approved by the FAA. And if I understand correctly, it cannot therefore be built in any kind of commercial way because it’s not given sanction by official regulations of the government for vehicles that fly in the air.
[18:27]	Prouty: Yes. One of the most difficult things to do with the government is to get the government to certify something as safe, because safe is a nebulous word that no two people understand the same way. And you can have an airplane, such as a company I was once affiliated with that is as safe as any airplane ever flew in, but they won’t certify it on certain safety grounds.
[18:54]	Well, the same applies to the Burnelli. I don’t know how well our camera can do, but the Burnelli airplane was built, designed early in 1923. This is a modern design of it. In one unfortunate accident, the plane crashed and rolled over, almost cartwheeled, and as the ambulances went out to pick up the bodies, the crew climbed out of the plane unharmed, and the plane didn’t burn because the fuel is not in the fuselage area where the engines are, and the plane is safe.
[19:27]	Now, Mr. Burnelli started the design of these planes in 1923. He has never been able to get the thing manufactured or purchased in gross numbers simply because people claim it’s not safe, whereas many of us who are very acquainted with aviation know that it is probably as good an airplane as has ever been built and better than most. It just happens that in 1949, two years after the US Air Force was created by the National Security Act 1947, I was ordered by the Air Force to write the college level textbook on the subject of aeronautics. At least I can spell aeronautics. I have some idea of this. I’m a jet pilot myself. I understand airplanes. This airplane could probably do as much for civilian aviation as anything we have going now more economically, safer and better than any other airplane in a design suitable to passenger carrying. And we have designs here, which I could show you, and I hope the film can pick up, which show the plane even in supersonic environment and things like that.
[20:40]	This is not a singular case. Frank Piasecki designed helicopters that were acquired by the army by the hundred. The Piasecki is mostly characterized by the fact that it had a rotor in front and a rotor in the back, and they called it the flying banana, big long fuselage in the middle with rotors on either end, a very safe plane. And each rotor dampened the other one out so made it more stable in flight than most helicopters. But because of his success with that model of helicopter, he designed an advanced model entirely different from the banana type. When it was done, he took the prototype, which was built in South Philadelphia and flew it. And in one of its early flights as just a prototype design, practically hand built, it set the world speed record for helicopters.
[21:33]	The army had hundreds of his earlier planes. Not one single army officer ever came up to South Philadelphia to even look at this new prototype, which is probably the best helicopter ever built, and as a result, had never been flown. His company was bought for him at a good price. And after the company was bought from Piasecki, the designs were pushed aside and the plane has never been built. Now, that’s the follow on on the helicopter side, the same as the Burnelli side here. And I myself, when I was working for the Air Force, was asked by the CIA to see if there wasn’t some airplane that would meet their requirements of flying in distant areas where there weren’t well established airports and where they could land short and safely with long range and all that sort of thing.
[22:28]	Well, I knew that there was a plane designed by the MIT people, Dr. Koppen, who was head of the aeronautics labs up there, that could do this. I didn’t know whether it was in production. So with the CIA men sitting in my office in the Pentagon, I called the office of the Helio Aircraft Company up near Boston and I asked if they had some planes. "Well, sure. Come on up and see them." I said, "Well, I’m going to have some men from the Air Force," I couldn’t identify the CIA, "drop in and see you all." Long and short of it, CIA bought hundreds of these planes, flew them all over the world, a 00:23:05] airplane. They can land safely, so short that we used to land it on the helicopter pad at the Pentagon, on the helicopter pad, safely. Load it up with people and take off and flyaway.
[23:16]	It’s a very good airplane with one condition. We never could get the FAA to approve the airplane because in the FAA safety standards, it says that all aircraft must show the capability to recover from a stall. This airplane, because it was so controllable, even in slow fight, would not stall. Obviously it would fall. I mean, anything would fall, even a kite well if you pull it up too tight, but it wouldn’t stall. Therefore, it could never demonstrate that it was coming out of the stall. You were always in control of the plane. They canceled it out and we couldn’t export the plane because it couldn’t get an FAA certificate for export because it wasn’t safe. Probably the safest airplane ever built.
[24:01]	A few years later, this aircraft company was purchased by, to me anyway, an unknown purchaser, and they have never built another plane. It’s put away on a shelf. Why is it that the peak, the epitome of the technology, of the aeronautical art is hidden in shed somewhere, unbuilt? And some of these other things that are really quite dangerous—I mean, imagine, we fly every day in a big long tube of an airplane with the motors on the wing and with the fuel right there with the wing and the motors so that the minute something happens, the whole darn thing goes up in flames. Why should we ride in that kind of an airplane day after day when these others get around it by a completely different design? It’s just, again, trying to deal with the government’s idea of what’s safe and what isn’t safe because they have ulterior motives.
[24:58]	Ratcliffe: Ulterior motors being in part, the industries—
[25:00]	Prouty: Well, to maintain the current industry. They’re good enough, what’s wrong with it?
[25:04]	Ratcliffe: Status quo.
[25:05]	Prouty: It’s like the highway. It’s good enough, what’s wrong with the highways?
The U.S. Railroad System – Then to Now
[25:09]	Ratcliffe: As well, you were mentioning before that you’ve had a lot of involvement with the railroad community or business of at least maintaining railroads, if not building them, because they’re mostly all built before middle of this century, I guess, in the United States. I don’t know about Amtrak. Didn’t they just use old railroad lines?
[25:29]	Prouty: Just use the existing ones, yes.
[25:31]	Ratcliffe: But say in France or in Japan with the bullet trains, the trains go very fast, they’re on very smooth, even track. They’re very high precision machines, but apparently in the US, the decision was made that freight traffic would travel on the same lines as passenger traffic, and so there was never a distinguishment between the two kinds of transportation. Why did it go so awry here?
[25:58]	Prouty: Well, there are a lot of procedures, but the thing that’s best is to stick to technology and then it’s the same for everybody. The United States Patent Office, Patent Number One was issued in 1829. And that patent is about the railroad wheel riding on a railroad track because the railroad wheel are hitched to the same axle so that they have to go around at the same rotation, each one. Well, it’s pretty obvious if you come to a curve that the one on the outside ought to have a longer circumference than the one on the inside so that they meet at the end of the curve and they 00:26:42], or the alternative would be to skid through the curve, you see?
[26:45]	Well, way back in 1829, they knew that to accommodate that at the relatively slow speeds they were thinking of in those days, the intelligent thing to do would be to put a flange on the inside of the wheel, and then as you went into a curve and there’s a little bit of force to the outside, as you ride toward the flange, you ride on a beveled wheel instead of a flat wheel, and so the circumference is bigger near the flange than away from the flange. On the other side, as it moves in the same direction, the flange is moving a little bit away from the track, you’re on the smaller part of the wheel, and so over here, this is a shorter circumference, this is the longest circumference, and you get around the curve.
[27:31]	With that in mind, the men who designed the curves on the track would keep in mind the limits that that permits, and they would build a track nearly straight, or they would build the curves to match. Well, that’s step number one. That’s a very basic step, and that’s back in the days when locomotive power was so small that nobody was thinking of going 60 miles an hour, 80 miles an hour. As they began to develop the capability to go faster, the wheels alone, which by the way, compensate on straight track very well too. If the trains weave a little bit, this difference in the circumference, the beveled edge of the wheel compensates very, very well on the straight track.
[28:11]	So what they had to do as they went faster is if they were coming to a curve, they had to raise the outside track, technically what is called superelevation or tilt or camp. They had to camp the track. Then the force vector that is pushing the train away from the curve, pushes it right into the curve, takes over for gravity, makes you feel comfortable in the seat, keeps the wheels on the track, and as far as the wheels are concerned, it comes out as though it’s the same track. So you go into a curve and out of a curve, and the dominant engineering factor is the speed of the train. The faster you go, the higher. I’ve been in Japan and seen track 11 inches higher on one side than on the other side, because the train ran through that area at about 110 miles an hour that didn’t have to slow down. Perfectly good.
[29:03]	Now there is not an 11-inch different track in the whole United States, meaning we couldn’t begin to run a train like that. In fact, I doubt you could find three or four inches today as far as elevation goes because the railroad system in the United States is freight dominated, freight owned. They have no interest in a passenger train and they build their track just to get the freight cars around the curve and their big problem there is a kind of a strange one. The length of the freight train is so great that the locomotives are way on around the curve and the pull they’re making back to the, we’ll call the center of gravity of the train, cuts across the cord in this arc and creates a vector, a very great force and wants to pull the cars in the middle of the curve into the—and even if it’s flat track, pull them off.
[29:57]	So they lean the track the wrong way. They super elevate backwards and pull the trains through that. Well, you put a passenger train on there, you would turn the passenger train over. So you cannot put the two together except bring all the track down to what engineers call flat track and then let them do the best they can with what is terrible flat track. And if you’ve ridden on Amtrak recently, you know that it’s not very comfortable in a lot of areas because there’s just no way to run a train at say a 65 mile an hour schedule on flat track or worse of all, on negatively canted track.
[30:36]	Now these are all things that the engineers know, but because the owners don’t know or don’t care, nothing will be done about it. And since in the railroad business, there are hundreds of railroad companies, you’re never going to get agreement. Where if one railroad company would spend $10 million to fix the track and the next one spends $10 million, the next guy say, "I don’t have any money. I’m not spending anything." He’s got bad track. He ruins the system. It’s the old weak link in a chain system.
[31:04]	So the railroad system in the United States is an absolute disaster until we start from zero and begin to work it up again. But at that point, this might be a good thing to do because if you look next by the railroad tracks over here a few hundred yards, you’ll see the super highways. And what’s the trouble with the super highways? Too many trucks. The same thing that would make better railroad track for passenger trains is they should be up on pylons to get them above the ground. No crossroads of any kind, no grade crossings. Just keep them up there 15, 20, 30 feet in the air on pylons. But the pylons need a heavy base at the bottom to keep them from vibrating.
[31:46]	So put strands of concrete, good lanes of concrete on either side, solid concrete, and anchor the track and run trucks on it. And so you get the straight track, you got them off the super highway, you take the trucks and put them over here with the railroad cars and you have better railroad with high speed rail. You have the trucks running eastbound this way and westbound on this side. The trucks have dedicated lanes, no automobiles in the way, no grade crossings. Well, the grade crossings would be submerged under them. The trains will go over. And then you clean up the super highway situation. On the super highways, the trouble is not the quantity of automobiles going through there, how many cars go. It’s the weight. One truck can do more damage to a road by its weight than hundreds of cars. If you look in the highway system reports, the maintenance costs of what are called parkways where trucks are prohibited, are almost negligible compared to highways where trucks are prohibited. Same with bridge costs and all that.
[32:51]	So while we improve the railroad and build a high speed system on pylons and let the trains run 140, 160 miles an hour, also put the trucks there and get them off the highway. Then we get the highway situation straightened out and we benefit the whole system right across the board. The other thing is the railroads would run on electricity. Electricity’s a lot cleaner, no petroleum use and all that. And we’d set up electrical system from coast to coast. And it’s all there. We know the technology. You can go to Japan, you can see this thing operating every day. Why it doesn’t operate here is really a joke.
[33:27]	And part of it is because our railroads were built in this segregated fashion of many owners and all. I don’t see anything wrong with that, except there ought to be some recognition that they need a central office who can decide the engineering problems, otherwise it’s always going to be a mess. Either that or have the government take it over the same way the government takes over seaways and airways and so on, and roads. And I think it’d be practical for the government to take over railways simply to bring them all under the same standards.
[33:58]	Ratcliffe: What do you mean by saying the government takes over airways? It doesn’t own the airports, but it owns the air traffic?
[34:03]	Prouty: Well, it owns a lot of the airport, but it owns the air traffic system.
[34:06]	Ratcliffe: I see.
[34:07]	Prouty: And it controls where they operate and how they operate, what altitude. Everything you do once you leave the ground, even takeoff is governed by the government. I don’t know whether people realize that. But when you’re a pilot, you sit there with your clearance ready to go to Chicago, but you don’t move that throttle forward to go until the government tells you you can go. And in the air, tells you what height to fly, everything. That’s all controlled by the government.
[34:29]	Ratcliffe: And that maybe happened—I mean, trains are much older, the whole train network system. So that’s why that may be true with airplanes, but not with trains.
[34:40]	Prouty: Well, the train system, you see, was running slow when it started. It didn’t have the problem anyway when it started. They didn’t have a coast to coast, even the concept when it started. They were thinking of going 20—like the first railroad was from Baltimore to some little town out here, 20, 30 miles from Baltimore. Well, that was the first railroad. They didn’t realize they were going to go to Miami on the same train a little later. Things just grew and evolved.
[35:04]	Well, they’ve evolved to the point now where they’re their own worst enemy instead of getting together and do it right. And one of the really bad things about this is that because the railroads will not try to improve their own situation, there’s not a single college in the United States that teaches civil engineering railroad specialty. You have to go overseas. You have to go to Germany or Japan if you want to be an engineer on a railroad business, I mean an engineer for track work.
[35:33]	People don’t realize that a well run track is really a three-dimensional sculptured piece of work. And what determines the sculpturing is one factor; speed. Doesn’t make a difference how heavy the car is that’s going around this curve. It’s how fast it’s going. And if the curve is built right, and if you can get your locomotives to pull it fast enough that you want to get around there at 60 miles an hour. In France, freight averages 67 miles an hour. Freight. I’ll let you guess what it averages in the United States. 20.1 miles an hour. That’s loaded operating freight. I’m not talking about sitting in the yards. 20.1 miles. We can’t run any faster. The track won’t accept it.
[36:19]	It’s really a disaster and very dangerous. There are more derailments now under this sorry condition than there used to be. When really in today’s world, we shouldn’t have derailments at all. We have better steel. We have more power in the locomotives. We have better drawbars. The equipment is built better. The track is terrible. Simple.
[36:40]	Ratcliffe: So the system has been allowed to degrade? And there’s—
[36:46]	Prouty: Well, yes. It’s degraded itself because all the owners think about is how many ton miles they can get on each train and they load the cars so heavily it has been proved by the best metallurgist that when a railroad car is loaded up to 92 tons, over 92 tons, it deteriorates the track all the time. It just absolutely—and I have pictures of railroad track that has been melted off the side just as though the track was made of butter, simply because the cars running over the track all the way over 92. The average freight car loaded today is loaded for somewhere around 105 to 115 tons. Well, the owners all know that at 92 tons, the steel will fragment and melt right off.
[37:40]	So they replace the track steel three to four times more often than they would if they ran the track right or ran the trains right on the right track. It really is a—you want to use the word stupid because you can’t think of any reason why anybody would want to run a railroad. And the other side of it is rather dangerous to the public. That is that the original United States railroad network that sort of built itself in the 19th century, serviced 45,000 communities. Another way to put it is it built those communities. The railroad track came and somebody put a city there, you see? They built the communities, 45,000.
[38:22]	Today, it’s down to about 13,000. That means that the other 30,000 that used to be served by railroad service for the benefit of the people out there, for the movement of freight, for transport, isn’t there now. The bridges could support those loaded freight cars. The bridges were all built strong. Now, when you want to get an 18-wheeler truck in there, the little town motorcar bridges weren’t built for the 18-wheeler. So the trucks can’t go into town.
[38:53]	At the present time, there’s $82 billion worth of bridges that are condemned for truck use. Now, what does that mean? That a farm town in Nebraska that has produced quantities of wheat, that used to put the wheat on the railroad cars and the railroad cars don’t come, now they call the trucks. The trucks can’t come because they can’t carry the load and the wheat is rotting in the streets, in the towns in Nebraska, simply because we don’t have the railroad system that used to go and the bridges can’t hold the truck system that would go. The trucks are not an alternative for the railroad, except in certain conditions, and then they’re on the highways beating up the automobiles.
Rudyard Kipling: “Transport Is Civiliation”
[39:37]	See, the whole system needs to be designed. You can’t take a piece of it and fix it. As Rudyard Kipling said many years ago, "Transport is civilization." If we want to ruin our civilization, we can let it go the way it’s going, because go one step ahead. If you’re out in this small town and the railroad can’t come, and you’re out there in a small town, and the truck can’t come, where do you get a loaf of bread tomorrow? And that’s not very far away.
[40:08]	Ratcliffe: It seems that the way governance is now being bungled, mismanaged, just worse and worse per year, per year. Do you have any sense of how the system as it’s currently configured can really adequately change or address that kind of problem?
[40:28]	Prouty: Sure. We’ve all got one. Stomach. Hunger will do it. It’s too bad to say that. I remember one day when I was working for a railroad, my wife called me at the office and she said, "Listen, I know there is a supermarket downstairs in your building." She said, "I’ve just been to the supermarket and they’re on strike. I couldn’t get any bread and I couldn’t get any milk. Would you please go down and before you come home, bring some bread and milk?" So, "Sure." Hung up the phone, went downstairs. All the way down the hall, I saw a line of every man in the building had got the same call. By the time I got to the supermarket, they didn’t even have aspirin in there. They were cleaned out.
[41:14]	Well, I would say that any city in the United States within 72 hours, if the trucks did not arrive with food and other necessities would go stark, raving, mad, hungry. And when you start going hungry, you start thinking or fighting either way. Have your choice.
[41:32]	Ratcliffe: Right.
[41:32]	Prouty: Really, and we’re that close because where would you go, where you live, where would you go for a loaf of bread if it wasn’t in the store? You’d bake it yourself? There’s a guy down the street? You don’t even know where to get the wheat, the wheat for cooking. And it’s not funny. That’s where we are today because airplanes can’t fly bread. Although Pan American used to fly more bread across the Atlantic Ocean than any other cargo because people like French bread. That just tells you about American bread, not so good, isn’t it? Pan America used to fly more French bread across the ocean than any other air cargo because people preferred French bread to American bread.
[42:08]	You see, the situation is already looking for alternatives, the economic situation. It’s just like buying athletic shoes from Singapore or someplace. They’re making them better over there than here, and the difference is transport. But remove the transport and you don’t have them because we don’t have those factories anymore. To be blunt about it, the transport situation makes our civilization. Rudyard Kipling knew that and we need to listen to that.
[42:39]	Ratcliffe: We appreciate your time very much today.
[42:44]	Prouty: Well, good.