________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
abilities on both sides. It must have been a difficult job because you didn't want to take
command of the battalion, I presume, you wanted the Vietnamese captain to. But you had
some very definite ideas about how he was doing things and some goals in your mind about
how to work, so all of that required a lot of initiative and skill from a captain, I would think.
A:
Well, without doubt. You described it very well. I came out of the 23d Engineers, which I've
described--a can-do, mobile, heavy warfare, think on your feet, on the move, kind of
operation. That's what I had been taught. Now I still had the same kind of can-do thing and
wanted the battalion to do all of those things--but I had to bring it out of somebody else; it
had to be their idea.
Not only that. We were there for seven days a week, and the Vietnamese didn't work the
weekend or didn't fight the weekend. I mean, war to them had been going on for a long time.
If you never took a day off you were never going to get a day off, so when a war lasts 20
years, I mean, you look at it differently than when you're there for a year and you want to
accomplish something. So, I had the sense of wanting to accomplish the mission, but the
accomplishment had to be through my cajoling, persuasion, break down the obstacles, and
that sort of thing. So, it was a rather sporty course.
Q:
How would you rate the Vietnamese officers? How would you rate the enlisted men in terms
of training and initiative at this stage of the war?
A:
Well, the officers were certainly in the higher class. They were very well educated, seemed to
be well motivated, seemed to know basically what they were doing. There was no obvious
noncommissioned officer Corps as we know it here. There were noncommissioned officers
but they weren't take-charge people, and the soldiers didn't have any particular skills. They
were put there and they did the kinds of jobs--they'd been maybe taught to run a dozer, but
the rest of them were really laborers.
They spent their day, a lot of it, just in basic housekeeping. Up at the culvert factory, when
we woke in the morning, soldiers had to do their own breakfast. There was no mess hall
that'd been up for an hour and a half getting it ready so you could go in, eat, head out for
physical training, and then hit the job site. The first thing they did was start the fire and then
go figure out what they were going to eat for breakfast and then cook it. In the middle of the
day they had to knock off the job for lunch, then the siesta. At night they had to knock off
early enough to be sure they could eat before darkness fell. So, there weren't many
productive days in that garrison kind of atmosphere.
The troops got their rations by getting doled out rice. The commander would be given money
to buy chickens and pigs or something and issue that out to the troops, who'd have to carve it
up, issue it, and cook it on their own. So, there was an awful lot of motion spent in just
living, without being productive on the job. When your upbringing is "can-do," knowing
what the 23d Engineer Battalion could do, you get a little frustrated with that.
I should move from there to say that after about eight months, more advisers had arrived,
things were maturing, and we had a lot more people over there. There were some
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