All this talk about driverless cars and trucks reminds me of when I was in the Army in the mid-1970s. I was one of the first female tractor-trailer drivers stationed in Germany. I was in a town called Russelheim, in the Azbill barracks. Our group drove commercial International rigs, not the old Army tractors.
One day I arrived at a base at lunchtime. Since there wasn’t anyone in the warehouse to unload my trailer and I wasn’t hungry, I decided to sit in the cab and read a book. A male soldier walked by and stared. He came over to the truck and asked where the driver was. I told him I was the driver.
He said, “No, you’re not. Where is the driver?”
Our group had wooden boards on the front of our tractors with our names on them. I showed him my name on my uniform and told him to check the name board. But he insisted I wasn’t the driver, and asked where the driver was.
I asked if he could keep a secret. He said he could. I told him I really shouldn’t be telling him this, but the truck was computerized. The Army was experimenting with this. I wasn’t supposed to let anyone know because it was top secret. The only reason I was along was because the Army hadn’t figured out how to get the truck to accept the paperwork.
