________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
In August 1962 the 20th Engineer Group of the Army of the
Republic of Vietnam was opening a road from Cheo Reo
to Cung Son.
You know, there are two different monsoons, and so you'd have six months of dry season
where all the foliage would almost go away it'd be so dry and hot, and then six months
where, at least for the middle four months of the six, you'd really have almost a constant mist
with a rain squall moving past about every five minutes for a duration of five minutes. So, it
was almost constant rain. Then the foliage would just grow up to overhead height, just like
that. Now we were cutting a path through the jungle, a plateau kind of jungle, not triple
canopy but heavy foliage, to restore this road--really, really heavy work.
It overgrew at least twice more after I left and before that Corps commander decided to
withdraw down that road. So, to think that he was going to pull out his Corps headquarters,
all of his combatants and all of their families, down that road and make it in quick time--
there's no way. When I read about it, it was obvious the Vietcong just chopped them apart,
came in close and hit them from the side again and again, and just kept picking away at them
all the way down that road until, by the time they got to Tuy Hoa, there were just elements
remaining.
We did a lot of ad hoc engineering on that route in our time. On another river, not so wide,
we found old French pontons. We sank them, filled them with rock ballast, and built a
combination M4T6 and timber trestle bridge over the top to restore the road.
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