Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
A:
Well, we really don't know, but I'll tell you as briefly as I can what we know. My father
really did a lot of research into the area. We know what happened within the United States,
which was not the origin of the name. But Kems came to the United States, to America, from
England early on in Revolutionary times. They settled in Virginia and North Carolina, and
then later made the trek to the west and settled in Richmond, Indiana, and went on to
Missouri. Senator James Kem from Missouri, who was in office I guess in the late '40s, early
'50s, was from the Missouri branch.
My parents were Quaker, and I grew up inside the Society of Friends. Richmond is the home
of the Quaker Five-Year Meeting, thus the central home. So, part of the Kem migration west
was with the Quakers when they came to Richmond.
How we came to this country from England has been put together, and it seems plausible, but
I'm not sure it's certain. In the research that my father had done, it seems that most short
names are either shortened from something else, though we have no indication of that, or
come from Asia. It's thought that perhaps the Mongols' move north into Russia was part of
that. We do know, up in the northwestern parts of Russia, White Russia, that there's a town
named Kem. Then Dad suspected a migration across into Finland. There's a river and a town
named Kemi in Finland. Then, supposedly followed a migration down into northern
Germany. There was, as I found out later when talking to German Army counterparts in
Germany, such a migration into the northern parts of Germany in what was called the
Dettmarshes. From there, we believe the Kems followed historical migration to England.
We don't know that we were part of each of those migrations. We just know that there was a
pattern established and that we've only found the name existing in that one particular region.
So, it sounds plausible, but it's not certain. It's not a very common name. You don't find
many in this country. As we traveled around the United States, which we did quite a bit after
World War II, my father would always look in the phone books in each of the big towns we'd
go to, and maybe in Denver we'd find one, and maybe here or there we'd find the name, but
seldom did we find many.
There was one other Kem in the United States Army in my earlier years--of course, there's
another one now because my son John is in. We came together one night, but I didn't even go
to meet him. That sounds pretty bad, but I had just arrived in Vietnam on my second tour and
was sent to the replacement depot down in Long Binh. At that point in 1968 you were herded
there like cattle when you arrived. I was a major (P) [promotable], and I was supposed to go
command a battalion. We arrived late in the evening, about nine o'clock, after a very long,
tiring ride from the United States. We were told, "Go find yourself a bunk," and they were
three deep all over those buildings. I mean, it was really like a corral. We were told, "Nothing
will happen with you tonight. Your records will go into our screen tomorrow morning, so go
enjoy the evening. Can't call anybody, can't do anything, can't leave, and we'll call you
when we need you in the morning after we start the replacement processing stream."
So, about one o'clock in the morning, after I'd really conked out, I was awakened and told,
"Get up. You're going to deploy this morning. Your orders are through."
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