During the Vietnam War, I served as a Naval Officer in the Civil Engineer Corps. My first duty station after Officer Candidate School and further CEC training was to Saigon. I was assigned to the Officer in Charge of Construction, Republic of Vietnam, or OICC-RVN. It was a command of about 90 Naval CEC Officers, with no enlisted but about 500 civilian workers. Our job was to manage the largest construction contract ever attempted in a war zone, which was to build the modern infrastructure of South Vietnam. We managed a giant joint venture known as RMK-BRJ, which had 50,000 civilian workers throughout South Vietnam building ports, airports/airfields, highways, bridges, buildings, etc. I was part of an extraordinary group of professional military men, all engineers or architects. We worked very hard 6 days a week to manage this giant contract.
A couple of years before I got there, the men of the command formed a theatrical group and named it the Fun And Ridicule Thespian Society, or FARTS. The idea was to create original musical comedies to be performed when a senior officer finished his tour of duty and was feted with a farewell dinner. It's an old tradition in the military, a chance for the lower ranks to burlesque the foibles of the honored guest. It was a great morale builder for the command and was very strongly supported by our commanding officer, Admiral Mike Marschall. During my year-long tour there were five such productions created and performed. The last two of my tour I co-produced and wrote the script.
I reunited with a few very close friends from my Navy days in 2013 and we decided to create the first ever reunion of our command, which turned out to be much more work than we ever assumed. It was held in the fall of 2015 in Washington DC and we had a great turnout. Amazingly, all our FARTS performances had been photographed and recorded on reel to reel tape. I had secured copies of everything and held onto those artifacts for four decades without having any idea what use they might be. I worked for months to create a video of the highlights of the shows and a tribute to all the performers. It was a great success and enjoyed by everyone. I hope you do also.
