Dawson's War (viii)
from novelist B.K. Marshall and the Studies and Observations Group
I have written 7 times before of this novel about spying in Laos on the People’s Army of Viet Nam. I started with a blurb, on February 12, 2022.
“It is the smartest novel I have read from the war between Ha Noi and Saigon, surely a personal judgement. An objective way to say it is that if you too read that literature in English, French, and Vietnamese with a sense of the national history of the region and its empires and their subject peoples and offshore allies you also may find that the new book does not contradict anything you know to be the case, and teaches you something.”
Second, on February 26, 2022, I judged the book by its cover. I have since written a Viet Nam letter about the cover of many books. It is a way to introduce context, the frame of reference which the covers evoke.
You might otherwise miss it all, in that distant place and time where and when you read the novel. I have said much too much already in just these 2 of about 75 more paragraphs, field notes on my reading:
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.
My third letter, on March 16, 2022, opened the novel and started reading.
Alan Dawson’s first attempt to acquire a college education was unsuccessful.
It’s a boy’s story, about an unemancipated minor becoming a cadet then an officer of society.
The fourth letter, on April 13, 2022, continued with the story.
Having a week of casual company before jump school began, Dawson ventured down to the sparkling lights and plastic flags of the used car lots that dotted Victory Drive in Columbus. He bought a four year old Chevrolet Corvair. The car Ralph Nader had labeled 'Unsafe at any Speed.'
When you plan to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, who needs a seatbelt? Columbus is Georgia, 7 miles from Fort Benning, and Victory Drive is the strip near every base where usurers sell credit to soldiers. Sounds like our man paid cash for the car that was a dream for those a little older while a catchphrase for a death-trap to those a little younger. Hm.
In the fifth letter I just lay down and read chapter after chapter, on May 16, 2022.
It's a novel. What's new? You keep turning to the next page. I lie back on a couch, head supported, natural light on the page, a waking dream
this time for 8 chapters, on my third time through the book. After the second read I repeated here at length in words only what the cover says in words and pictures.
Then I expounded here on lines from the first and then on a page from the second chapter. This time I will just remember the dream, as from the couch, speaking to myself in the chair.
The sixth letter introduced, on June 18, 2022, a real-life friend of mine whose intelligence has affected my own writing as well this novel.
“My name is Fallon.”
No it isn’t. He is a representation of a friend of the author’s, of mine and many other readers of this book. Fallon is a fine Irish name starting with the same letter as his own. Also almost the Greek for prick.
“I got dinged up on hatchet force operation out of Kontum last month,”
A hatchet force attacked the enemy supply route on the ground. Worked just as well as you would expect. He refused evacuation then the helicopter he didn’t get on got shot down.
The seventh Viet Nam letter about Dawson’s War, on February 25, 2023, moves on to a different kind of war story, We Few by Nick Brokhausen, also of the Studies and Observations Group.
It all makes as much sense as it can and no more. Dawson’s War: a Novel of Friendship under Fire is a young adult fiction, a gripping introduction to a grown-up world of work.
We Few is not for children. They will find it and read it as they will find your ammunition, booze, the Christmas presents, every firearm, and the porn. The book presents stories for adults among their buddies such that the rest of us may overhear.
The two don’t go together. We Few is as cerebral as Dawson’s War. These SOG men are inescapably intellectual each on his own terms. Now that I have given you all my field notes on B.K. Marshall I want to write again from the start what I think of his work alone.
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.