Company restores military vehicles
When people around here think of military equipment or weapon systems refurbishing, there minds immediately go the Red River Army Depot, west of Texarkana.
But they’re not the only ones in that business. Take a look closer to home.
Drive down West 7th Street in Texarkana and one will pass by a business that features a garage, workshops and groups of clearly military vehicles waiting in the fenced in yards outside. The names associated with the facility include White’s Paint and Glass as well as HD Logit. Various workers toil on different tasks, mostly centered around refurbishing and preserving these military vehicles.
“That is what is done here,” said Wesley Ernest, a paint expert at the facility. “We can refurbish anything. We’ve done it to HEMTTs (most of the vehicles currently there) in various configurations, engines, engine containers, close to a dozen different trailer types.”
HEMTT stands for Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck. It is a modular vehicle and can be configured in many ways for many purposes.
An engine container, as Ernest explains, is a container designed, as the name says, to contain and pro
tect and engine. Once inside, the engine is safe for either transport or storage.
“We work on equipment for all the U.S. armed forces, working as independent contractors,” he said. “We also do work for the Israeli Defense Forces.”
The shop also works with armored glass.
“We sell it, set it up for transport, install it, we do it all,” he said. “We also work with civilian equipment like horse trailers, utility trailers and vehicles, even big rig concrete trucks. We’ve worked with tracked vehicles, including specialty Army gear that is only used in Alaska.”
In addition, the shop works with armor on vehicles, plating as well as whole kits, which is where the armored glass comes in.
Jeff Ford, a technician in the shop as well as a Liberty Eylau volunteer firefighter, comes from an Army family, and he has been around these kinds of vehicles all his life.
“Some of these old warhorses have pretty colorful history,” he said. “We get a little of everything here, and crews have, in some cases, been shot or blown up in them. It is kind of an honor to be able to work on vehicles with this kind of history, to have a chance to put them back together and to imagine what it is like where they are going next, considering most of our current crop is headed to Israel when they are done.”