We Few (ii)

from Nick Brokhausen at the Studies and Observations Group

Al Pacino. Dog Day Afternoon, 1975. Right?

No. It’s not John Stanley Joseph Wojtowicz at the original bank robbery in 1972 either though John did serve in the Army in Viet Nam as Al did not. John did look just like that, except the sideburns. Nor is that Al’s performance, with sideburns, of Pavlo Hummel in the David Rabe play of 1977.

Pavlo was a soldier in Viet Nam too but he was a fuckup. Maybe John was a good soldier in Viet Nam but as a bank robber afterwards he was an astonishing fuckup shit magnet. Watch the movie. The soldier in the photo above, 1970, is instead Nick Brokhausen of the Studies and Observations Group: competent, driven, and lucky.

When a sergeant of the United States Special Forces isn’t in class, he or she is teaching one. They are a clinical faculty as of a teaching hospital. On the job at least they are relentlessly mature and pro-social. They train and lead men and women to great deeds like the rest of us watch movies. Not bank robbers.

You could get the wrong idea about the Special Forces while reading this book because someone very like William Shakespeare’s drunken robber Sir John Falstaff wrote it. Falstaff is the fat fool of the plays Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. He is the life of the party of William Shakespeare, chaotic and willful.

I used to work for a literary critic, Harold Bloom, who considered John the life of all literature. Sir John does not appear in the play the paragraph in the photo just above refers to, Henry V. The page pictured retells the great moment when Falstaff’s former sidekick Hal wins his kingdom as Henry by addressing his army before Agincourt.

Often a career officer or some lieutenant who has become a general officer of corporations has used the speech in his memoirs. He will cite more specifically than this book does and quote more accurately and extensively but the colonels and generals reach for Shakespeare’s eloquence and miss the drama of his action. My old boss called this weak misreading.

Here instead Nick Brokhausen makes his own line, “we are so very few” and refers to the heir Hal, become the royal Henry, as Hank, a workingman’s name, as for instance the foreman of mechanics Hank Morgan, Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court.

Like Hank a practical man among the chivalry of Christendom, Nick lays out his vision of the band of brothers in a horrible dance with death. Not yet the danse macabre because his brothers remain alive, full of beans, piss and vinegar, Falstaff’s crew. I learned from Harold to call this strong misreading, a more memorable version of the original.

Do you want to follow some king or do you want peers? The author is introducing the Recon Club, where his peers get loaded beyond reason while they conduct a seminar on their most recent work duking it out as a small band against regiments of the People’s Army of Viet Nam.

You haven’t read anything like it unless like me you seek out sergeants. Officers work in the realms above reality. I am not being mean. That is their jay oh bee. Private infantry work in the mud with no clue where they are and what happens next. Again, that is the job.

The sergeants of the United States Special Forces both stand on the ground and read the map. If you recall Falstaff as a fat fool that would be because you met him while in some version of officer’s candidate school.

Next time a suit quotes Henry’s speech from St. Crispin’s eve, recall as well Nick Brokhausen’s assessment of the tactical situation. It was grim. You get the impression that he never wanted it to stop. On the one hand he didn’t want to die. On the other he had all these brothers.

This was the second Viet Nam Letter of 3 so far addressing We Few: U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam by Nick Brokhausen. The first posted on August 15, 2022 and the third, also the seventh of 8 so far concerning Dawson’s War by B.K. Marshall, on February 25, 2023.

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.