Vietnam War Short Stories (iii), ‘Not About Battles' In 1970, two years after her brother Kenny was killed in the Mekong Delta, Diana Dell went to Vietnam as a civilian with United Services Organisation (USO), a non-profit private organisation that provides morale-raising and recreational services to members of the US military since 1941. She had written “A Saigon Party and Other Vietnam War Short Stories”. For the first six months, she was a programme director at the USO Aloha Club at 22nd Replacement Battalion in Cam Ranh Bay, then this humanitarian organisation's in-country director of public relations, and also the host of a daily radio show, "USO Showtime", on American Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN), the military station in Saigon. As an eyewitness to the significant coming-ofage Baby Boom Generation (a term that refers to the cohorts born during the middle part of the 20th century; the post World War II demographic boom), she claims that she would tell war stories until her final moment on this earth. However, Diana's tales – some exaggerated, many true – are not about battles, blood, gore, or angst. They are about participants of the war other than grunts: CIA agents, bar girls, war profiteers, missionaries, donut dollies, strippers, civilian contractors, pilots, cooks, telephone operators, disc jockeys, rock stars, landladies, pedicab drivers, generals, Buddhist monks, movie stars, pickpockets, politicians, prostitutes, prisoners, beggars, nightclub owners, drug counselors, Montagnard tribesmen, foreign correspondents, ambassadors, doctors, humanitarians, celebrity tourists, and other REMFs, civilian as well as military. REMF is an acronym for ‘Rear Echelon Mother Figure', a name given to all who served in rear echelon assignments on land, at sea and in the air, whether in-country or in-theater. The REMF have also inspired David A. Willson to write “The REMF”, a sequel to “REMF Diary”, an account of the last days of an Army clerk's Vietnam tour-of-duty from July 5 through October 23, 1967. Both books claim to be novels, but if the reader looks for intense combat scenes or romantic interludes back in Hawaii, he/she will be disappointed. The fate of Western democracies is not decided here. The point is comic, although in a way cautionary: this is the tale of a clerk in the rear areas of Saigon and the plush base at Long Binh, and the truth is that it is at least as representative of the enlisted man's Vietnam War as are tales of combat by Larry Heinemann, Gustav Hasford, or John M. Del Vecchio.
