100 Miles in America's Worst Army Truck

TL;DR

The Gamma Goat was pulled from US military service after 4 years due to catastrophic unreliability, deafening noise, and near-zero power.

Key Points

• 1.The M561 Gamma Goat was designed in 1959 by ARPA to solve Vietnam's terrain problem. It needed to be air-transportable, swamp-capable, and lightweight, powered by a 3-cylinder aluminum Detroit diesel making only 101 hp and 217 lb-ft of torque.
• 2.The engine was so loud it caused permanent hearing loss. The US military mandated hearing protection for all operators, and the noise also made radio communication impossible in the field.
• 3.Reliability was catastrophically bad. A 1972 Army Times column revealed the Army lowered its reliability standard from 10,000 miles without failure to just a 94% chance of traveling 75 miles without breaking down.
• 4.The truck broke at mile 50. A fastener holding the transmission to the driveshaft sheared off and flew away, stranding the crew at Rowher Flats and perfectly illustrating the vehicle's notorious unreliability.
• 5.4,400 Gamma Goats were pulled from service and put into storage to be retrofitted, but the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 made that moot and the vehicles were largely abandoned.
• 6.The driving experience was miserable by any standard. No power steering, no seatbelts, constant noise requiring racing headsets, extreme heat, and a finicky transmission made the 100-mile urban and highway drive exhausting.