Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

the 300,000 square feet of paper stored there that it had even existed. A clerk said to me, “The record-keeping over there was pathetic, at best. When somebody does a history of Vietnam based on what we have here, anything that is close to accurate will be purely accidental.”

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I was there, all right, and so was the harborcraft company, even if the government refuses to admit it. Almost every morning, one of our tug-boats would head up the Dong Nai River to Long Binh Post, making about two knots against the current, towing a barge wallowing under a massive load of fuel or ammunition. It was the ammunition, the tons of assorted explosives, that troubled those of us who rode along. The riverbanks were dense with foliage, plenty of cover for an overly ambitious Vietcong armed with an RPG launcher and willing to fire a round that would blow up the barge, the tug, and probably himself.

Most mornings, the tug left without me. That’s because I was an REMF, the unofficial designation given to soldiers who never went into the field by the men who actually fought. I didn’t ask to be an REMF, nor did I volunteer for more demanding duty when I became one. I took what the army gave me. REMF stands for “rear echelon motherfucker.” There were a lot of us.

I didn’t endure many hardships, except when the mess hall ran out of ice cream, my customary late-afternoon snack. I’ve heard that only about 15 percent of U.S. forces sent to Vietnam were actually in combat, which means that about 85 percent of all the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen (only members of the Salvation Army see less combat than the modern airman) were pretty much like me. Not long ago I called my former boss, who was the best officer I ever knew and is now retired in Phoenix. I asked him what he thought of me as a soldier. “I was always impressed by your cheerfulness,” said Victor Largesse, then a major and the company commander. I figured that for a euphemism, and I was right. “I always thought you were on a lark, never took it seriously.”

When people talk about the turning point of the Vietnam War, they always bring up the Tet Offensive of 1968, when the Vietcong achieved tremendous psychological victories, even capturing the U.S. Embassy in Saigon for a few hours. I always thought the turning point came in 1969. When I arrived early that year, Saigon still felt like a combat zone.

By the time I left, my unit was marching in parades. The REMFs had taken control.

F O R K I T O V E R

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Once or twice a month, I got out of my swivel chair and went to war. I didn’t have to, but I did. It was guilt, not patriotism or heroism, that inspired me. I was always ashamed that the only time I regularly went on the water was for dinner on our hundred-ton floating crane, the one with the recently naturalized cook who had mastered his Italian mother’s recipes. To this day I don’t recall many meals I enjoyed more than his lobster fra diavalo, made with pilfered lobster tails.

I would grab my helmet and flak jacket and jump on one of the tugs heading up the Dong Nai. Once I was aboard, my mission was not to get in the way. No shot was ever fired at a boat while I was on it, and while I like to think my steadfast presence behind a machine gun made a difference, I know it was luck. The trip took hours, and standing for that long with that much clothing on in the intense heat of a country that is almost always hot and wet builds a thirst.

By the time we docked, I’d be hungry and dehydrated, and I’d head for the Chinese restaurant on post for sweet-and-sour pork with three or four Cokes. I don’t eat much sweet-and-sour pork anymore, but when I do, I recall those rides upriver and immediately need a Coke. You’ve heard about Vietnam flashbacks. That’s mine.

“Where are you staying?” asked Tony Newman, chief of the Saigon office of the International Organization for Migration. Officially, Saigon is now Ho Chi Minh City, but only people who don’t live there call it that.

“The Majestic,” I replied.

“Which room?”

“Five-oh-one.”

“I think Westmoreland stayed there.”

In defense of William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam throughout most of the sixties, I would like to say this: he was an uninspiring general, but he had standards. He would not have found room 501 of the Majestic acceptable.

Don’t get me wrong. When I returned to Saigon a few months ago, I made sure I stayed there. The Majestic once offered the grandest 8 6

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lodgings in a city once called “the Paris of the Orient,” and the Saigon of decades past is what I hoped to find.

It wasn’t difficult. Saigon doesn’t look much like Paris anymore, but for that matter, it didn’t look much like Paris back in 1969. The city does look remarkably like it did a quarter-century ago, which cannot be said of Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo, and most of the other met-ropolitan centers of Asia. Credit for this time warp goes to the economic boycott imposed by the United States and to the less-than-innovative development strategies implemented by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam under the leadership of the former U.S.S.R. Saigon is a city that has stood still.

Camp Davies, where I was stationed, was an obscure chunk of dock space on the fringe of the city in 1969. The docks, warehouses, and even the Quonset hut where I slept are still there, looking more insignificant than ever, although nobody seems to remember it was an American military installation named Camp Davies.

Astonishingly, the monetary