Please welcome back David Willson's REMF, an altogether different kind of war story charcter. In The REMF Returns, Willson continues his story of the office-based soldier who never fires a shot in anger- and whose days are pervaded by the moral and spiritual twilight of life in the rear echelon of a shooting war. Willson's sly humor and carefully stylized minutiae of daily life in the Army join to make this book an important document in an area rarely confronted in our literature of Vietnam.
This is how it was to be a REMF in Vietnam- the ice cream, the Coca Cola, the air conditioning, the clean, starched jungle fatigues, and yes, the parades and the whores, I leave nothing out; it is all in there. The typing and the saluting, too. With this, David Willson sets the tone for REMF Diary. Between these covers is a very funny, ironic novel of the Vietnam War. It is a story told by an army clerk stationed in Saigon. His perceptions of the war and of the paper war around him make for hilarious reading.
Nine out of ten of all US military personnel who served the Vietnam War did not fight. Instead, they served in support of those who did. They were postal workers, military police, guards, office clerks, mechanics, cooks, and drivers. Very few of their stories have ever been told. Van Carter was an Iowa boy who was sent to Vietnam as an infantry lieutenant, but who instead served as one of these rear echelon personnel. He discovered the other side of Vietnam, the side where all these people lived who worked in support of the soldiers in the field. He saw rampant drug use, prostitution and a huge racial divide between black and white American soldiers. He saw the absurdity of poor leadership, bad planning and even worse implementation of America's war effort. He saw how everything and everyone became corrupted in Vietnam. And he, himself, succumbed to this all-pervasive corruption. He smoked dope, visited an authentic opium den, enabled some of the prostitution, openly defied authority, and made new rules he still hopes saved many from life-long addictions to heroin. And he fell in love. These are his recollections.
The drying stage is important in biotechnological and chemical processes because it allows the pretreatment of feedstocks with different moisture contents for their physical or chemical transformation. Drying also enables the post-treatment of products for their final presentation and packaging, thus having wide application in the food, agro-industrial, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries. Current Drying Processes presents recent advances in the development of drying operations through the presentation of chapters dealing with theoretical and experimental aspects of different technologies, namely solar, convective, fluidized, and ultrasonic drying, for organic and inorganic materials.
Not a tale of firefights and blood, this book should be read by anyone who lived through the Vietnam era that was not directly involved and did not go to Vietnam. It provides a sense of what went through their minds, the conflicts and confusion and related fears. In a self-deprecating style, the author comes of age, examining these emotions and the guilts of being assigned to a secure area, of leaving a job before it was completed, and abandoning faithful Vietnamese friends. It should be read by anyone who cares about those who went and who want to understand more about them and their era. Forty photos provide a flavor of the year and the place. RAPID CITY JOURNAL 8-21-05 SAYS "MORE THAN OTHER STORIES ABOUT VIETNAM, THIS ONE IS REFLECTIVE, AND THANKFULLY SO. MUEHLBERG SORTS THROUGH THE MORASS TO FIND ENOUGH GOOD TO GIVE HIMSELF AND READERS THE FEELING THAT VIETNAM WAS NOT ENTIRELY AN INSTANCE OF MINDLESS OBLIVION THAT IT SOMETIMES SEEMS." ***Rapid City area may contact author for copies (605-342-4297).***
This textbook presents the fundamental of transport phenomena and metallurgical process modeling in easy-to-understand format. It covers all the important and basic concepts, derivations and numerical problems for the undergraduate and graduate engineering students. It includes topics such as fluid dynamics, mass and momentum balances, mass transfer, basic concepts of models and applications. This textbook can also be used as a reference book by engineers, professionals and research scientists to gain better understanding on mass and heat balances. Given the contents, this textbook will be highly useful for the core course of transport phenomena in metallurgical processes for graduate and advanced graduate students in various engineering disciplines. This textbook will also serve as a refresher course for advanced graduate students who are engaged in research related to transport phenomena and metallurgical processes.
This memoir recalls the experiences of young men serving in US Army in Thailand during the mid 1960s. We supplied the air force with the bombs of Rolling Thunder. We aren't Vietnam Vets because, while we served within the designated combat area of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam for far in excess of the thirty days required, we were not in direct support of ground forces. We were REMFs. Rear echelon service is the rule in the military. Actual combat soldiers (so-called maneuver elements or trigger pullers) are the exception. This produces a sense of elitism among those in combat, who refer to the majority of their fellow troops as rear echelon mother fuckers (REMFs). They earned the elitism, since the death rate among members of maneuver elements runs around fifty times that of rear echelon troops. What percentage of US ground forces are REMFs? Well, according to Michael Kelly (Misconceptions: Vietnam War Folklore) only about 1/3 of the personnel in deployed combat units end up as trigger pullers. In addition, only 25 to 30% of the military at large are in combat units. The rest end up in headquarters and administration, life support, or as in our case, logistics. So like many Vietnam era troops we aren't Vietnam Vets, but we were definitely involved. This is our story as I remember it.
