Colors of War & Peace, Audie Murphy in Saigon, and Hues of Green (i)
From D.M. Thompson and Edgar Tiffany of the Studies and Observations Group
The Studies and Observations Group of the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam observed and studied traffic from the government of Viet Nam in Ha Noi over the mountain roads through Laos and Cambodia to war on the government in Saigon.
The People’s Army of Viet Nam studied and observed SOG. Early days, from 1965, a squad would infiltrate to call artillery and bombing missions on traffic then bug out. When PAVN security located these forward observers everyone played cowboys and Indians until the Army cavalry arrived.
By the time SOG stopped in 1972 a reconnaissance had become a matter of jumping out of a helicopter if it had dodged enough anti-aircraft fire then running for your lives away from a company of the world’s fourth largest infantry in order to confirm that Moscow and Peking were still replacing without pause any truck and its load our missions had destroyed.
Studies and Observations Group is an apt name. It had been coined in 1964 as cover for a unit sending teams of our allies to capture and death on the other side. It was a good name for that, opaque to the free world, like an iron curtain. From 1965 through 1972 it was transparent. It meant what it said, what PAVN already knew.
The men of SOG learned to observe and study. D.M. Thompson’s collection of short stories Colors of War & Peace credits the recollections of his friends in the Special Operations Association, and the intellectual support of both the Mighty Pen Project of the Virginia War Memorial Foundation and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Veteran Writers Group.
Edgar Tiffany’s fictions and nonfictions of Audie Murphy in Saigon call out to brothers from other mothers. His monograph Hues of Green studies D.M.’s stories for associations, observing the signals and traffic of a group.
I will in turn study and observe these books for my group. My first impression is that the authors and I have way too much in common given that they are retired career soldiers while I have worked for the United States of America across 6 weeks only, supervising enumerators for the Department of the Interior in the 1980 census.
Edgar and I share instead of arms a passion for exegesis. D.M. and I both don’t want to be officers but those are the schools we went to when we were easily led.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.