When the year started, Brandon Meredith, a U.S. Army Special Operations veteran, was still serving as a civil affairs specialist at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. On Veterans Day, he's already months into a successful truck-driving job as an elite chemical hauler for Slay Transportation (No. 221 on the FleetOwner 500: For-Hire).
His early success includes two driver of the month awards from the fleet, where he recently began training new drivers in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Now, he's set his sights on representing tank truckers as the next Transition Trucking champion.
Meredith is one of five finalists for the 2023 Transition Trucking: Driving for Excellence award, presented by Kenworth, Fastport, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation's Hiring Our Heroes initiative. They will crown a winner—and award a Kenworth T680 Signature Edition truck as the grand prize—on Dec. 15 in Washington, D.C., after online voting through Veterans Day on Saturday, Nov. 11, to help determine the winner.
Meredith told FleetOwner affiliate Bulk Transporter that winning "would be an incredible honor. It'd highlight a field that's not as recognizable as other truck-driving avenues. I tell people all the time how interested I am in this segment, especially now that I'm in it—and it isn't Groundhog Day to me. I'm always out doing different things, going to different places, and unloading different products, and you need to be very attentive safety-wise.
"So I feel like I have an important mission when I'm out here."
Read more about Meredith's journey from the military to the trucking industry from our colleague Jason McDaniel of Bulk Transporter, a FleetOwner affiliate and Endeavor Business Media Commercial Vehicle Group publication.
