Twist in the POGO’s Tale: An Army Clerk’s Passage from Childhood to War in Vietnam

A Twist in the POGO’s Tale is a very detailed personal account of one man’s journey and experience in building a life and a profession in the Army through the transformative decades after the World War II. The author has provided an insight into what it was like for a young Queensland man to be swept up in the Australian coming of age entailed in closer engagement with Asia, after the Western ascendancy ended in the decade following the surrender of Japan in 1945.The new Australian Army of the Sixties and the Seventies engaged in a form of warfare that was very different to that experienced by earlier generations. Nothing was straightfor-ward and everything was complex.POGOs, like the author, could no longer be considered to be separate from the battle and had to be trained and ready to take their part in the action. That is part of the twist in this story. The other part is the sympathetic connection with Vietnam that followed for many veterans of the War and is very much a part of this POGO’s Tale.Derek was born at Murwillumbah, New South Wales in 1946. He was educated in Redcliffe, Queensland. He joined the army as an apprentice clerk in January 1963.It was from this date that Derek officially donned the mantle of POGO, an acronym for ‘Posted on Garrison Operations’. In military parlance it refers to non-combatants: clerks, cooks, storemen and the like. It is from this abbreviation that he derived the title for his book–A Twist in the POGO’s Tale. After graduating in 1964 he was allocated to the corps of Royal Australian Engineers and served in various units which saw him in New Guinea on three occasions, and Vietnam five times. He gained a commission to the rank of lieutenant in 1975 and served in various officer appointments, finally retiring from the Army as a major in 1986. pp. 131 illusts #0820 SCARCE