David A. Willson (ii)

Rear Echelon Mother Fucker still gone

It was an acronym he never had heard while serving in the Republic of Viet Nam. He first heard it after he had earned his advanced degree and begun work at Green River Community College.

Yes, that Green River, the one with all the dead women. When we met last century he said it wasn’t him and I believed him instantly.

He loved women. They loved him.

When he heaped ridicule on the very idea that any hippie ever had spit on a serviceman returning from Viet Nam he would lick his chops in recall of his treatment at the hands of hippie women as a Viet Nam veteran. They did swap spit.

Where was I? Green River. The community college, not the killer who later came forward as Gary Ridgway, a United States Navy veteran of Viet Nam.

David rather was Army, a clerk typist at the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. You could call him the Long Binh killer, as David often asserted that the memos he typed at our rear echelon there killed more people than any infantry.

His colonel at the Inspector General asked the private to stay on as a career man becoming a captain but the woman who cleaned his shoes advised him to go home, just before the new year of 1968. David instead became the founding reference librarian of Green River Community College.

While serving there a man told him he was a REMF. What? Rear Echelon Mother Fucker.

News to David at the time. I also have not seen that acronym attested in-country before 1975.

One author from the Studies and Observations Group, Nick Brokhausen, has used it in wartime dialogue in his recollections written this century. Who knows, SOG may well have used the word.

Their reconnaissance teams worked in Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, and Laos, with no friendlies on the ground in front of them. The entire Republic of Viet Nam and all of its occupation by the United States of America including those Special Forces supervising from a nice, safe Forward Operating Base were REMF to them.

David seized that idea and ran with it. Yes, his army of occupation were indeed all REMF, or nearly all of them. Maybe 60 thousand proved not to be.

You can read their names on the 2 walls in the Mall in Washington, District of Columbia. Then there are no one knows how many hundreds of thousands wounded now dead well short of shelf life for a homo sapiens born in the USA in the first half of the 20C.

For sure there were oh, on the order of 8 million REMF passing through RVN 1945-1975. For their war, see my friend David’s books.

Here is me talking to him one Veterans’ Day when he was this side of the grass.

This is the second Viet Nam letter of 2 so far on author David A. Willson. The first posted on February 14, 2022.

2 other letters discuss his poem The Frogs Are Gone, first on March 9, 2022 and second on June 1, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.