Word: cumshaw
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...Baez in a 1965 antiwar demonstration. Last week Worrall, in striped shirt and sweat-stained Levi's, was humming a different tune as he sweated in the dust of Phu Cuong, twelve miles northwest of Saigon, building homes for Vietnamese refugees. An adept at the ancient art of cumshaw and cajolery, Worrall overcomes the perennial shortages of materials by canvassing battlefields in a borrowed "deuce-and-a-half" (2½-ton army truck) and scavenging useful debris like 105-mm. ammo boxes, which he pounds into A-frames for his buildings...
...mutton face, a shoulder holster sagging from the armpit of his sweat-blotched, green T shirt, a drinker of nothing more stimulating than cream soda. Yet Senior Chief Petty Officer Bernard G. Feddersen, 35, of the Seabees, is renowned from Danang to the Delta as the sharpest cumshaw artist in all Southeast Asia...
...Cumshaw derives from the Chinese kam sia (grateful) and entered U.S. naval argot during the 19th century when ships calling at Canton began swapping rum and ratguards for labor and litchi nuts. Today's scrounger can be an Air Cav supply sergeant or an Air Force crew chief, but Viet Nam's Feddersen outdoes them all-both in Yankee horse-trading skill and sheer inventiveness. In a scant 14 months, he unplugged the logistical bottleneck that had plagued the development of the Chu Lai enclave, and in the process set up his outfit as the most efficient unit...
...last May, Saigon's harbor was clogged with ships unable to unload their cargoes, and airstrips elsewhere were glutted with traffic. Morale at Chu Lai itself was desperately low due to an overabundance of sand flies and a dearth of comfort. It was a perfect situation for cumshaw, and fortunately Bernie Feddersen was on hand...
...came as a grisly epilogue. His career had been built on his crusading efforts to prove that the union's entrenched leadership had for years been a party to "sweetheart" contracts and other schemes to hold down rank-and-file wages in exchange for cumshaw from grateful contractors...