Dawson's War (ii)

from novelist B.K. Marshall and the Studies and Observations Group

Judge a book by its cover.

What it's for. Let's start at the top.

Dawson's War, the title of the book. The war of Dawson, a family name, the term of personal address in the armed services of the United States of America (USA), the title on your uniform.

Dawson is an English version of Davis, from the Welsh after they got religion, referring to the David who slew Goliath and wrote songs. Scots as well as Welsh names in the USA suggest the frontier and hill nations of the United Kingdom (UK) who ran ahead of the English into the cordillera behind our eastern piedmont and tidewater.

Fighters. Rogers' rangers and Shays' rebels. Alvin York's people. Well named, this individual Dawson has a war. What is a war anyways?

Judged by their monuments, the citizens of our nation have in mind the mass mobilizations. The Civil War, the Great War, and the really awful ones after that for Europe and the Pacific, then musical chairs in Korea, and then well what was that next one anyways?

Dawson's? Fine with me. I am a Southeast Asia area specialist so I never know which war for Viet Nam you mean. They have fought two more since we left.

What could one man's war be? You need at least two men, right, and still that would be manslaughter or self-defense. A dozen for a skirmish, hundreds for a battle.

For a proper war, myriads, several of that number coined to count the stars of heaven or just one division, ten thousand men, of an army, and again you need at least two armies. So call it fifty thousand men, minimum, for a war.

I take it from the title that this Dawson's war is not an epic with a cast of myriads but his greater jihad, the struggle inside just one man alone. No, the subtitle says not one but at least two men, “A novel of friendship under fire.”

Novel means news as in novelties, something entertaining and informative, the definition of art. Doesn't say anything here about fiction, by the way. The novel from its origins has reported social reality. (Watt, 1957)

This novel concerns itself with the reality of friendship. Caught my eye because a friend of mine told me about the book because he is a character in it.

So I read it the first time looking for him. My friend appears at a desk in the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN) because he already has lost his friends over there across the border, in the Kingdom of Laos, Land of a Million Elephants. He tells Dawson where his officer school buddy, who was my friend's lieutenant, has gone.

There are a good half dozen friends in the story, not a gang of room-mates in a situation comedy, but the real thing, one pair of friends at a time among men who each make maybe one in his life. Losing him hurts, more than losing half a platoon of expendables in a firefight in a war movie.

Under fire, the subtitle says, friendship under fire. By fire it means rifle fire, people shooting at you in particular while you shoot specifically at them. One of our physicians in RVN (Glasser, 1971) remarked on the few patients he saw with aimed bullet wounds.

Most of our guys who died in the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) succumbed to wrong place wrong time, also got wounded that way. Artillery, rockets, artillery rounds and grenades used as booby traps, arrived by chance on any specific body to deform it in unexpected ways.

One triage nurse spoke of cutting a man's clothes off searching for the wound that only the pathologist found at last in the perineum where one coil from the springs inside one of our anti-personnel grenades entered to twist around within his abdominal cavity only.

Such as Dawson and his friends had learned to bring their boots together when jumping away from a grenade, to avoid that very wound. When they got wounded it was a matter of full human figures shooting rifles at each other, in their sights or from the hip.

An astonishing number of them survived, to wear the medal we don't normally award the dead. The decoration is as old as what we now remember as wars, the levees en masse, when the new democracies recognized citizens for suffering rather than generals for winning.

The purple heart on this book cover has two oak leaf clusters. A spoiler. We are to understand that Dawson gets shot on at least two occasions but survives at least the second wound.

There on the medal is George Washington, its founder even before he was president. The Purple Heart is an award 9 years older than our federal government.

On the purple ribbon above George a cartoon skeleton bloody in eyes and teeth is breaking out as through the cover of a pulp magazine from the years before the Comics Code of 1954 when our boomers were boys. He wears the green beret but there is no language about United States Special Forces (USSF) or for that matter the USA.

"MAC SOG." Who? It's an insignia for a unit who did not wear any.

Military Assistance Command Studies and Observations Group worked as scouts, spies, spotters on the supply route from Vinh in the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRVN) to their war with RVN for the whole ball of wax. USMACV considered rather that our nation supported some place that never has existed called South Vietnam against another nyebulitsa called North Vietnam, separated by a demilitarized zone (DMZ) and distinct from the Kingdom of Laos and whoever was running Cambodia from Phnom Penh that year.

Playing by our own special rules, the USA fought on the ground in RVN only. We didn't cross the DMZ into the DRVN because when we had done that in Korea hundreds of thousands of Chinese over-ran us.

So we sent infantry without insignia on reconnaissance into Cambodia and the Kingdom to direct bombers to convoys on the paths of former Indochine, where for centuries even before France whoever wanted to rule Viet Nam had ranged. MAC SOG watched trucks carry the support of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) south towards Saigon to supply Ha Noi's divisions.

All this was secret, in the same sense that the much longer war in Laos, with dozens of fire missions and sorties daily for decades and massed infantry assaults, was secret when Garry Trudeau showed in his nationally syndicated Doonesbury comic strip an old couple wondering what secret bombing of their country could possibly mean.

It was secret in the sense that no individual could talk about it here as such. The first SOG non-commissioned officer (NCO) I got to know, when I was 21 years old in 1981, just talked about the work. Never used the word because it didn't mean anything in public because it was secret.

Which raises a vexing issue, down here at the bottom of the cover of this novel of friendship under fire. Since those days when no American alive in 1965-1975 ever wanted to talk about what we called Vietnam again, SOG, never secret, has become public.

At work in the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) around 1994 I watched a cart of newly declassified after-action reports roll by. At the same time, downtown in the Mall, men home from Viet Nam had started to display themselves at their monument as Green Berets, LRRPS, SEALS, sometimes all three at once and so as a matter of fact none at all.

Stealing valor, as the haters call it (Burkett, 1998), is a way of talking about yourself, about your inner state in your social predicament that in your confusion you think that people will understand because you all have seen the same movies. I see these people as I do those with simple, true stories about their service who also flew the lying black POW/MIA (Prisoner of War/Missing In Action) flag (Franklin, 1992).

They felt like they were prisoners of that war, as they were, that they were missing, as they are. I feel them.

Still, they were my enemy in the 1980s, resisting normalization of the foreign relations of the USA with the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam (SRVN), the one whole ball of wax under Ha Noi. Now they are helping those Vietnamese and not our former allies find their own guys and I am in turn writing nastygrams to the police over there about some friends of mine gone missing more recently.

A shithouse rat is crazy for good reason. In a hundred years, Nguyen Du begins his novel of three friends, the life of a body, the ocean covers the orchards, talent and fate are at war, and you will see things that twist your guts. (Thong, 1973)

We do well to be kind, or at least tolerant (Thuy, 1987). But I guarantee some old boy already has nutted out looking for B. K. Marshall in a list of no-longer secret squirrels authenticated as MAC SOG, what we called outing a spy when the Covert Action Quarterly did it in the Cold War.

You see, B.K. might have stolen some of that other guy's valor. We can't tell because B.K. is a nom de plume, pas de guerre. What does it mean? Blood Killa? Buzz Kill? Marshall, well that is martial, warlike, and Martial, author of epigrams, sprung from Celts.

Marshal is the highest rank, never used in the USA, while the focal character of this novel of friendship holds the lowest commission there is, the place-holder, lieutenant (LT). But the continual after-action analyses in this book recall the battle histories of brigadier S.L.A. Marshall while the decency of its friends recall George Caitlin Marshall, once field marshal of the USA in all but title.

B.K. Marshall evoked for me just now all those meanings. Thinking it over I see I missed those that suggest some kind of police, civil and military, the provost marshals and the United States Marshals, because they are not germane. The only law in this novel is rough justice.

Many meanings are no meaning, not yet. Turn the book over and continue judging from the back cover.

The background of the back cover is a black and white photograph of the same feel as the one in the background of the front cover, where we see a grenade and a rifle and a rope and a big canvas sack on a wooden pallet. Each photograph, shot with a professional camera by a trained observer, could hang on a gallery wall.

There is no sack on the back cover, where the same battle kit hangs from a belt on suspenders and the rifle hangs from the right hand of a standing human figure. He wears glasses.

Wide, tall, thick glasses perched on the beak of an Adams-appled ectomorph such as rolled an overhead projector into my home room from the A/V club in 1970. It is Dawson, a four-eyes as all readers will learn, and B.K. Marshall, the author who made the book.

No publishing partner made this back cover. A professional publisher solicits blurbs, which I knock myself out writing then they use the one fatuous compliment I made. For tales of derring-do they grab quotes from famous tough guys.

This back cover is instead self-reliant, self-respecting. It is didactic, a good thing if you agree that we all need to learn. "HISTORICAL FICTION IS THE LIE THROUGH WHICH WE LEARN THE TRUTH."

Glance up to the edge of the back cover. No publishing category. No specification of fiction or non-fiction. At the old age home up the street from my office they label all the bookshelves one or the other and they shelve the bible with the non-fiction.

That anthology of scripture is largely war stories, after all. Would you rather they filed it with Danielle Steele? There is a rabbinical quality to this back-cover definition of historical fiction, equivocal as midrashim but unambiguous as a mitzvot.

God is strange beyond human reckoning but he, whatever, is trying to tell you something. This back cover is not waving its arms and saying there are lots of truths, we can never know which truth, sea stories, war stories, all rather are lies.

No. We learn the truth, the back cover starts, through historical fiction. The fine analytic mind in the headband, standing behind the text wearing a grenade and holding a rifle goes on, "They wore no dog tags or uniform insignia."

I already told you about that. If captured they were to be Boy Scouts from Canada visiting the Land of a Million Elephants on a McNamara fellowship. No, it didn't make any sense.

Entire divisions, myriads, of the People's Army of Viet Nam roamed Cambodia, Laos, and RVN, with Chinese Communists driving USSR trucks down the supply route while Soviets manned the surface-to-air missile (SAM) rings around Ha Noi and both kinds flew MiGs overhead.

They were secret only in the sense that Moscow and Peking, as we said at the time, lied about all that and the USA stamped SECRET on such information. Because no one wanted to end life on earth just yet.

So our men went naked of nation, to avoid nuclear holocaust, and unreadable of rank so the other side wouldn't shoot them first. Everyone who actually wears a green beret in the book is working as arm candy.

The first Army interrogator I got to know told me they too dressed without rank or insignia at their prison at the airport in Saigon, to avoid issues of rank with their wards, and when going out to pick them up from the field, to avoid nonsense with commanders.

A clerk typist told me of a Central Intelligence Agency officer who arrived at the administrative center at Long Binh also without insignia, to the delight of my friend who was therefore free to deny, reaching as if for a pistol, the man's demands to rummage in the Inspector General's files. My friend would not have tried that on two SOG walking in.

"They carried four hundred rounds of ammunition," the back cover continues. That was a lot back then.

They needed the bullets for their gunfights. Democratic, industrialized armies had stopped holding gunfights the century before, right after the first war where every infantryman got a rifle. It's a coin toss. If you can shoot him he can shoot you. A proper war is not fratricide, or a game.

"The Special Forces soldiers assigned to the deceptively named Studies and Observations Group suffered casualties unheard of since the Civil War." Our generals complained on that very point, that the enemy spent lives like they were fighting a civil war - ya think? - while the MACV command would have been relieved after a week of losing men at that rate, and the entire executive branch would face our own new civil war back home.

"Their mission was to interdict the North Vietnamese supply lines on the famed Ho Chi Minh Trail." Oh, well. "The only evidence of the top secret operation were their bodies that lay in the Laotian mountain jungle, often for decades." Killed In Action/Body Not Recovered (KIA/BNR), not the POW/MIAs that never were.

And here next, in the middle of the back of the book, is a block quotation from inside. "'So, if nobody acts on what we find, what's the point of going out and risk getting our ass shot off?' Dawson asked.

'That's why our operations are classified for twenty years,' the major replied. 'By the time your kids are grown and you can tell them what you did, I'm sure they will have come up with something.'"

As indeed they have. Read the novel to find out what. Read the novel also to learn the truth about this past that these men could have told us were they not secret. Who knows, the American people might have said sure let's further invade all of Viet Nam up to the border with China.

Alternatively, after reflection, the people might have said, gee, we really don't want to mobilize the Reserves as required and chance a three-way nuclear exchange, then keep a fourth hostage army, as in Europe, Japan, and Korea, in the field indefinitely . Let's bug out.

Instead we dithered with dominoes, with two nations of North and South that never existed, quarreled among ourselves over which brand of bullshit we preferred then doubled the butcher's bill for everyone concerned after electing a president whose secret plan to end it all was to hand those of our allies we had not already assassinated over to Peking as a peace offering.

Three points end the back cover write-up. First, "Surviving a determined enemy was difficult. Surviving the incompetence of command often proved impossible." These two sentences situate the point of view of the book, reckoning on the goals and reasoning of the other side, and judging our performance in light of them.

Second, "Fast-paced action takes you from the battlefield to the brothels of Saigon." Sure does. If you like to watch gunfights and Vietnamese sex workers, you have got the right book.

Third, "The characters are so genuine and ultimately decent, you will miss them long after you finish Dawson's War." Again, this is just true. There is scholarship on the fact that Special Forces soldiers are the nicest people you are likely to meet. (Simons, 1998)

Cadre select out selfish and thoughtless jerks in training. Special Forces men, and now women, are all sergeants, which means servant. Their historic role has been to serve partisans, people who have every reason to distrust the USA.

The Army has long taught a broad spectrum of our society how to jump out of an aircraft and shoot straight, but getting foreigners to fight and die with you is an ability they have had to select for. The SOG men in this book leave behind an odor of sanctity, the sweetness of saints.

Which brings me now to who are not on the cover, the men they fought with. SOG fought PAVN alongside men of the hill peoples of mainland Southeast Asia.

PAVN had their own. Ho Chi Minh had run ratlines with hill people, for pilots of the USA escaping from the Japanese in China.

When after 1945 he declared the nation of Viet Nam, and lived among Vietnamese for the first time as a grown man, he kept a personal guard of hill people. He trusted them.

The hill peoples are composed of individuals who do not wish to live in the lowlands, where they grow wet rice and boss you around. The montagnards do things their own way. (Leach, 1954)

It is just as well they aren't on the cover because it is hard not to say something stupid about them down here in the flat. They just aren't like us at all. I only bring it up because I think the novel dramatizes them unusually well.

Here we are at the end of the cover. I hope it is for you the beginning of the novel. The very bottom of the back cover gives the URL, dawsonswar.com, for a less sardonic introduction than mine and a link to Amazon where you may buy what I hope my backchat has conveyed to you is about the smartest thing I have read from that war for Viet Nam.

Why wouldn't it be? The novel is a study and an observation from among the most intelligent men caught in a nationwide dragnet that let the most subordinated go to instead raise families and study.

The dim and the public-spirited did get caught in the dragnet, to walk around half-trained in the fields and woods, third-party constables in a civil war, with a target on their back and no clue where they were and why. Most of them still have not figured it out.

Meanwhile, some decent, thoughtful men, bright but somehow unwilling to raise babies and rack up degrees in the Selective Service, arrived instead at the border and studied the situation. This novel is their seminar paper.

There isn't anything else like it. I urge its observations upon you. I have told you how well it looks back at their service. If you want to look out thoughtfully as they did in their time, at our new century where their exotic manner of war has become normal, it is good for that too.

References

Burkett, B.G. Stolen Valor: how the Viet Nam generation was robbed of its heroes and its history. Dallas, Verity Press, 1998.

Franklin, H. Bruce. M.I.A or Mythmaking In America. Brooklyn, Lawrence Hill Books, 1992.

Glasser, Ronald J. 365 Days. New York, G. Braziller, 1971.

Huynh Sanh Thong. The tale of Kieu. New York, Vintage, 1973.

Leach, Edmund. Political Systems of Highland Burma: a study of Kachin social structure. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1954.

Simons, Anna. The Company They Keep: life inside the U.S. Army Special Forces. New York, Free Press, 1997.

Tran Van Thuy. Chuyen tu te [Story of kindness.] Ha Noi, 1987.

Trudeau, Garry. Doonesbury. November 10, 1973.

Watt, Ian. Rise of the novel: studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1957.

This was the second Viet Nam letter of 8 so far addressed to Dawson’s War by B.K. Marshall. The first posted on February 12, 2022, then the third on March 16, 2022, the fourth on April 13, 2022, the fifth on May 16, 2022, the sixth on June 18, 2022, the seventh on February 25, 2023, and the eighth on June 28, 2023.

Other posts from the United States Special Forces include 3 on their Vietnamese Phrase Book. We have posted 4 on the work of Loyd Little and 3 on Nick Brokhausen and 2 on Alan Farrell and 1 on William P. Yarborough.

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.