Who's behind the wheel

I got into trucking a couple of months out of high school, when I enlisted in the Air Force. I served on a Red Horse combat engineering unit, moving heavy equipment and building runways, with deployments to Saudi Arabia and around the country. We drove just about anything, big or small.

From there I went to the U.S. Forest Service and became a wildland firefighter, running a fire dozer on wildfires in Florida. Getting that dozer to a fire meant hauling it on a 35-ton lowboy, so a good part of the job was already driving. I liked being out on the road.

Over 26 years with the Forest Service I worked up to Deputy Chief and got called out to disasters around the country. One that stayed with me was Hurricane Katrina. I ran a distribution center in New Orleans, where semi-loads of water, ice, Gatorade, and MREs came in every day, and we broke them down and routed them out to points of distribution across the city. I met a lot of good truckers on that job, and it got me wanting to get more involved in the work.

I retired in 2025 and founded Fire Chief Transport. To start, I've run freight off the load boards, out to Ohio, Texas, up to Washington, and all over the West, while I learn the business and get the equipment dialed in. What I'm after now is direct work: manufacturers, agencies, and shippers who would rather deal with the person hauling their freight. With no middleman, the price isn't padded with a broker's fee.