Useless, that is, unless one hopes to appear on TV’s Jeopardy, win lots of money, and add to over-inflated self-perception.
I’ve always had a good recall for little needed trivia. Ask me about 50’s and early 60’s television, old military campaigns and military leaders, mountaineering history; and it’s likely that I will have answers to your questions available at hand, on the tip of my tongue. Of course, that knowledge base, as I’ve mentioned before, excludes those things that do not interest me or that did not in those days of knowledge acquisition. Professional, (which includes collegiate) athletics, opera, who directed which movie, and popular “music” after about 1975 will often draw my stock answer, “that Russian, Fukivino!
For your amazement. The image below was created, I believe, in 1968. It is an image of a 1St Infantry Division shoulder patch approximately 1 mile in length.
It was in the area of Vietnam known as the “Iron Triangle, defined by the Saigon River on the west, National route 13 on the East, encompassing around 125 square miles of heavily wooded, forest and rubber plantation with its vertex only 12 miles north of Saigon and upper definition points at Ben Suc and Ben Cat. It was the site of several major operations designed to deny the Viet Minh access to a net work of tunnels, hospitals, headquarters, and other underground facilities that had been under construction and use since the war against the French.
Along with heavy bombing, the U.S, used flamethrowers, CS (tear gas) tunnel rats to investigate underground bunkers and tunnels, and land clearing operations to deny overhead cover and to reduce the availability of roadside cover in screening ambushers.
The road clearing was conducted using infantry and mechanized infantry to provide support for teams of engineers using a device known as a Rome Plow.
These specially modified Caterpillar D-7E’s literally ate jungle. They cleared everything over 6 inches above ground level. For a better review, see the link below.
http://www.military.com/HomePage/UnitPageHistory/1,13506,701430%7C700254,00.html
This road and land clearing was not unopposed. U.S. WIA and KIA were significant. The results of these operations, their benefit to the U.S. war effort may vary depending upon who is evaluating them. However, I found then, and still find today, no benefit to be derived from carving an insignia into the forest, visible only from the air.
Despite fears at the time concerning the use of defoliants, unlike its human victims, the forest has recovered.
When I first saw them at work and heard them called “Rome Plows”, I thought immediately of the Roman’s destruction of the city and lands of Carthage. “Carthago delenda est!” Like Carthage, after the trees were burned, nothing seemed to be living. It is actually only this week, doing research for a history class, that I learned my classical studies had left me hanging in the wind, having dispensed bad information a time or two. These monster jungle eaters were named Rome Plows because they were initially made in Rome, Georgia. So much for classical history in the minds of the overly prepared.
So join me in singing: “Keep the home fires burning,”
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