‘REMF?’ queried Dexter. He had never heard the word before.
‘Rear Echelon Mother F****r,’ supplied the corporal.
Dexter was getting his first taste of the Vietnam status ladder. Nine-tenths of GIs who went to Vietnam never saw a Vietcong, never fired a shot in anger, and rarely even heard one fired. The 50,000 names of the dead on the Memorial Wall by the Reflecting Pool in Washington, with few exceptions, come from the other ten per cent. Even with a second army of Vietnamese cooks, launderers and bottle-washers, it still took nine GIs in the rear to keep one out in the jungle trying to win the war.
‘Where’s your posting?’ asked the corporal.
‘First Engineer Battalion, Big Red One.’
The driver gave a squeak like a disturbed fruit bat.
‘Sorreee,’ he said. ‘Spoke too soon. That’s Lai Khe. Edge of the Iron Triangle. Rather you than me, buddy.’
‘It’s bad?’
‘Dante’s vision of hell, pal.’
Dexter had never heard of Dante and presumed he was in a different unit. He shrugged.
There was indeed a road from Saigon to Lai Khe; it was Highway 13 via Phu Cuong, up the eastern edge of the Triangle to Ben Cat and then on another fifteen miles. But it was unwise to take it unless there was an armoured escort, and even then never at night. This was all heavily forested country and teemed with Vietcong ambushes. When Cal Dexter arrived inside the huge defended perimeter that housed the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, it was by helicopter. Throwing his kitbag once again over his shoulder, he asked directions for the HQ of the 1st Engineer Battalion.
On the way he passed the vehicle park and saw something that took
his breath away. Accosting a passing GI he asked:
‘What the hell is that?’
‘Hogjaw,’ said the soldier laconically. ‘For ground clearing.’
Along with the 25th ‘Tropic Lightning’ Infantry Division out of Hawaii, the Big Red One tried to cope with what purported to be the most dangerous area of the whole peninsula, the Iron Triangle. So thick was the vegetation, so impenetrable for the invader and such a protective labyrinth for the guerrilla, that the only way to try to level the playing field was to clear the jungle.
To do this, two awesome machines had been developed. One was the tankdozer, an M-48 medium tank with a bulldozer blade fitted up front. With the blade down, the tank did the pushing while the armoured turret protected the crew inside. But much bigger was the Rome Plow or hogjaw.
This was a terrible brute if you happened to be a shrub or a tree or a rock. A sixty-ton tracked vehicle, the D7E, it was fitted with a specially forged, curving blade whose protruding, hardened-steel lower edge could splinter a tree with a three-foot trunk.
The solitary driver / operator sat in his cabin way up top, protected by a ‘headache bar’ above him to stop falling debris from crushing him dead, and with an armoured cab to fend off sniper bullets or guerrilla attack.
The ‘Rome’ in the name had nothing to do with the capital of Italy, but with Rome, Georgia, where the brute was made. And the point of the Rome Plow was to make any piece of territory that had received its undivided attention unusable as a sanctuary for Vietcong ever again.
Dexter walked to the battalion office, threw up a salute and introduced himself. ‘Morning, sir. PFC Calvin Dexter reporting for duty, sir. I’m your new hogjaw operator. Sir.’
The lieutenant behind the desk sighed wearily. He was nearing the end of his one-year tour. He had flatly refused to extend. He loathed the country, the invisible but lethal Vietcong, the heat, the damp, the mosquitoes and the fact that once again he had a prickly heat rash enveloping his private parts and rear end. The last thing he needed with the temperature nudging ninety was a joker.
But Cal Dexter was a tenacious young man. He badgered and pestered. Two weeks after arriving on post he had his Rome Plow. The first time he took it out, a more experienced driver tried to offer him some advice. He listened, climbed high into the cab, and drove it on a combined operation with infantry support all day. He handled the towering machine his way, differently, and better.
He was watched with increasing frequency by a lieutenant, also an engineer, but one who seemed to have no duties to detain him; a quiet young man who said little but observed much.
‘He’s tough,’ said the officer to himself a week later. ‘He’s cocky, he’s a loner and he’s talented. Let’s see if he chickens out easily.’
There was no reason for the big machine-gunner to hassle the much smaller plow-driver, but he just did. The third time he messed with the PFC from New Jersey, it came to blows. But not out in the open. Against the rules. But there was a patch of open ground behind the mess hall. It was agreed they would sort out their differences, bare knuckles, after dark.
They met by the light of headlamps, with a hundred fellow soldiers in a circle, taking bets mostly against the smaller man. The general presumption was that they would witness a repeat of the slugging match between George Kennedy and Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. They were wrong.
No one mentioned Queensberry Rules so the smaller man walked straight up to the gunner, slipped beneath the first head-removing swing and kicked him hard under the kneecap. Circling his one-legged opponent, the ‘dozer driver landed two kidney punches and a knee in the groin.
When the big man’s head came down to his level he drove the middle knuckle of his right hand into the left temple, and for the gunner, the lights went out.
‘You don’t fight fair,’ said the stakeholder when Dexter held out his hand for his winnings.