War Story by Jim Morris

"Ever since Robin Moore wrote that book, we'd been green-bereting up a storm." --Jim Morris, War Story

Vietnam.

Just the mention of that geographic term is enough to spark controversy among  people my age and older. Pretty much every adult I knew growing up had some sort of strong emotion attached to it. My teachers had protested the American deployment there; my parents had feared it; and once in a while I ran into someone who had been directly involved in it.

I think most people would agree the whole mess we call Vietnam was tragic (though my teachers/professors undoubtedly believed it had a happy ending since the Communists conquered the South and Vietnam has joined the number of Socialist dictatorships that American jobs are being outsourced to).

American veterans of the conflict certainly suffered, whether from combat wounds, Agent Orange, being spit on when they returned home and called baby-killers. But nobody suffered as much as the natives of Vietnam. I mean the Vietnamese, of course; but also the Montagnards and Nungs.

Jim Morris was in-country from early on, before the first conventional troops were deployed, until after the Tet Offensive (more on that later). As an officer in Special Forces, he bounced around quite a bit in South Vietnam, able to put both the forest and the trees of that conflict into a perspective that  your average lowly grunt (or a REMF in Saigon, for that matter) could not--at least without years of investigative journalism afterwards, I'd bet.

From Lyndon Johnson on down, the prosecution of the Vietnam War was a confusing, convoluted, self-defeating debacle. But no more confusing or convoluted than politics, or life in general, for the people of Vietnam. In this autobiographical work, we get just enough of a snapshot of the situation over there to appreciate just how complex it was.

More than anything, though, War Story is about a man whose chief aspiration in life was to be a soldier. While other young men were dragged to Vietnam kicking and screaming, or dodged the draft altogether, Jim Morris and other members of the Special Forces volunteered for Vietnam. Against his wishes, Morris was assigned jobs either in the rear or on Okinawa--jobs other men would have killed for. Still, he clawed and scratched his way back to the periphery of the conflict. Sometimes right into the hot thick of it--you can be certain that, unlike some who've attempted to parlay their service into political success, Morris earned his Purple Hearts. In fact, Morris actually feared promotion beyond 0-3 (Captain), because it would nix his chances to command an A-Team.

In the author's own words: "I do not recall a moment in my life when I was not bored, before I got to Vietnam; very few since leaving there. Going to Nam was like trying on my first pair of glasses. Before the glasses I didn't know that other people could see clearly. Before going to Nam I didn't know that everyone wasn't paralyzed by boredom all the time. I suppose that in any well-ordered society people like us would be locked up or shot. But then you would have to get people like us to do the locking up and shooting."

Had there been more officers like this in my time, I might have held to my original plan of being a 30-Year-Man. Or at least 20. Morris was a soldier who cared about the mission, and wanted to make a difference, armed with ideas which could have done so. He worked within the system, but (and this is one thing I love about SF) wasn't obsessed with following counterproductive protocols, or eating cheese. He wanted to fight, and to win, while the average career officer just wants to kiss ass, shuffle paperwork, and admire rows of spit-shined boots and starched uniforms all perfectly dress-right-dressed.

But not only was victory not an objective for the US chain-of-command, the South Vietnamese weren't much interested in it, either. The ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) was infamous for its corruption and incompetence. It would be hard to name a military organization more rife with cowards, crooks, traitors and fools. Whatever good soldiers fought for the South were buried under bureaucratic BS.

Morris relates the story of how some loyal villagers reported six VC (Viet Cong) sighted in a certain ARVN officer's district. "Only one weapon between them." That ARVN commander could have captured them quickly and easily, possibly getting some valuable intelligence into the bargain. Instead, he sent the report up his ponderous chain of command. Three days after the VC left the village, an airstrike leveled it. That's how loyalty was rewarded. Any wonder why most of the Vietnamese citizens turned a blind eye to VC activity?

"All intelligence in Vietnam flowed up, and none flowed down to the people who could use it. But the maps in Saigon were gorgeous."

At one point, Morris compared two of the strategic maps available for MACV brass. One map showed the areas of VC/NVA (North Vietnamese Army) incursion from across the border(s), and the other showed the distribution of American base camps. In context, the latter made no military sense. Had nobody ever thought to make this comparison? Morris didn't like camps, but still, armed with this information, he came up with a plan to interdict a high-traffic stretch of the Ho Chi Minh trail. You would think there would be an outbreak of forehead-smacking among the high command, and a rush to act on this info and hurt the enemy in a big way.  Fortunately, Morris showed his discovery to Colonel Ludwig Faistenhammer--another officer who considered it his job to fight and win. Here's Morris' own words about this man:

'There weren't many like Ludwig. He was the character Fritz Scharne in Robin Moore's The Green Berets. It was the story of how he managed to ambush a VC battalion commanded by a Frenchman... It was such an improbable story that I asked him if it was true. He said it was. "I lay awake nights dreaming up ways to get that son of a bitch," he said. Part of how he set him up was by feeding him false information while playing tennis with him at the Cercle Sportif in Saigon.'

The next camp was, in fact, set up right in the notch Morris identified, though he never did get the command there.

As Morris hops around South Vietnam in War Story, you might want to follow along on a map. Having never been there myself, I was unfamiliar with the geography and sometimes grew confused about where he was and when he had been there before. The command structure on both the American and South Vietnamese sides were equally cumbersome. Heck, it was a convoluted mess by WWII and has only gotten worse every decade since then.

In Morris' war novel, Above and Beyond, he remarks upon some of the field-grade officers deployed in Vietnam that they were "trying to fight World War Two, but with helicopters." In my opinion, that would have been fine, had such sentiments gone straight to the top. After all, MacArthur conducted a successful jungle campaign some 20 years before, without helicopters. But then, victory was the objective at that time; the enemy wasn't allowed to hide behind "neutral" borders; and American commanders were not stifled with ridiculous rules of engagement. But, since kicking the enemy's ass back through North Vietnam and marching through Hanoi was not allowed, Johnson had shrunk the window for success to a very tiny aperture. This was the reality confronted by Morris and others who made an effort to win despite the limitations placed upon them.

"There is only one way to fight a guerilla war and that is to outguerilla the guerilla. You have to steal his political issues and his social issues and his tactics; and if you do that he has nothing left to sell and the war is won. It was so easy. Why couldn't the bastards see it? Maybe that was what made me not one of the boys: the fact that I moved around so much as a kid that I was highly sensitive to new social situations. That was what made me not one of the boys. Maybe I knew what I was doing and 'The Boys' didn't."

And Morris could certainly adapt to new social situations. He didn't just work with the 'Yards (Montagnards--ostracized mountain tribes of Vietnam), but made friends with them. He could make sense of their military and social network, and knew who could get the job done unclouded by the "all Dinks are the same" attitude held by some of the more condescending officers on our side of the fence. One such 'Yard comrade, nicknamed "Cowboy," is a fascinating enough character to warrant his own biography.

The author is not just a Special Forces officer who wants to do his part--he's a soldier, and likes being around other soldiers.

"One of the nice things about being around other soldiers is that they will suffer your bullshit gladly, knowing that sooner or later you will shut up and listen to theirs."

Amen.

I could go on at great length about this book and what I learned from it. I recommend that you just read it and let Morris' narrative speak for itself. Unlike some of my rants here, it is fairly devoid of politics. He mentions more than once his admiration for the VC he was fighting. But not because of what many assume--that the Cong were super-guerillas unparalleled in all history. Compared to the ARVN, any combatant would seem like a super-soldier. The Cong had their limitations, too (which were not exploited). The truth is, many factors worked in the VC's favor. And when Charlie bit off more than he could chew, the Press and the Johnson Administration came to his rescue, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

For the Tet holiday (Vietnamese New Year) in 1968, the Communists launched their most ambitious offensive of the war. They had conquered North Vietnam with a decisive victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu, and now they imagined themselves ready to graduate from their guerilla campaign in the South and do the same to the Americans.

After the Tet Offensive, the news media declared the war "unwinable." With the protest movement back in the US threatening to become a war on the streets, and a Commander-in-Chief who was never committed to victory in the first place, the US caved in to these pressures and began to pull the troops out. Prolonged defeat became the official policy. Tet was what put the final nail in the coffin for any hope of even securing a stalemate as in Korea.

Rather than me pontificate on how the "battle for hearts and minds" was affected by Tet, I'll quote somebody who knew, and saw, and experienced what myself and the "experts" did not:

"These are the facts about Tet: The ARVN found itself during Tet. Units that had never fought well before, or thought about fighting at all, did a creditable job. Public opinion was mobilized against the VC for daring to profane the Tet holiday, and the cities were alienated, when before they had been entirely indifferent to the war except as a profit-making venture. Just in our own little area there, when the Mike Force, which was Montagnard, came through to mop up and check the place out, Vietnamese housewives who, two days before, wouldn't have walked across the street to spit on a 'Yard came out of their houses with tea and cakes for them and hailed them as liberators. Vietnamese actually feeding Montagnards. Tet was such a bad fuckup for the VC that it is scarcely describable, but the Press reported it the other way, and people believed it."

In other words, early in 1968, we had won the battle for hearts and minds that the Johnson State Department had been so fixated on.

How about the strategic picture? Tet was a military disaster for the Communists. What few tactical successes they enjoyed were minor, short-lived and earned at tremendous cost. Even as inept as US and RVN leadership in-theater had been, the VC got their asses kicked all over the map and were in sad shape to continue fighting afterwards. Had the NVA gone toe-to-toe with American forces during or afterwards, we would have won the war despite ourselves.

Morris himself was assigned to a REMF unit at the time of Tet, but he and those under him set out to join in the nearest firefight as if they'd learned of a nearby kegger and were crashing the party. While journalists were screaming "we're doomed!" to the folks back home, American fighting men were ecstatic that the VC were coming out for a stand-up fight. All over the country, VC were getting spanked.

Morris continued marching to the sound of the guns well after Tet, and during another firefight, while helping some wounded GIs get out of harm's way, he received the wounds that would send him home.

War Story doesn't spend any time justifying US intervention in Vietnam, or much time defining what was at stake. At its core it is the story of a soldier who wants to fight, and does so, in the only war that happened to be available. Obviously he was more than just a soldier, but a (at that time) new breed of elite warrior, heartbroken when forced to park behind a desk when there was fighting to be done. In just that respect alone it stands apart from most of the memoirs on Vietnam you may come across.

Above and Beyond by Jim Morris

 

I was born during our nation's involvement in Vietnam, but by some strange combination of coincidences, I never learned what Vietnam was until I was 14 years old. Oh, I'd heard of the Green Berets (both the Special Forces soldiers and the movie made about them). I'd watched an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man with a scene depicting some wacked-out veteran's flashback of Vietcong chasing him through the jungle (though it didn't make sense to me until many years later..."Who are those people with the funny hats, Dad?"). And I'd listened to "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" on the radio and even memorized the lyrics without understanding their specific reference.

It might be hard to imagine now, but not only that, I had also absorbed the anti-American sentiments that were en vogue ever since that ugly conflict.

I obviously overcame that, in time.

I was cured of my ignorance about Vietnam eventually, too. By the time I myself was a soldier, many of the senior NCOs and most of the field-grade officers were Vietnam veterans. Until Operation Urgent Fury (Grenada), the most recent combat American troops had experienced was in Southeast Asia. Some of the jargon I picked up dated back to American occupation of Germany or Korea. But most of the Airborne Creole I learned (and remains a component of my dialect, to the chagrin of my family) was of French-Vietnamese origin.

I once had the opportunity to meet General Westmoreland. He was retired, but in uniform. We shook hands. I was young and dumb…but not so dumb that I dared ask him what was on my mind: “Yo, General, how did it feel being Johnson’s stooge? Was it worth the cost of so many American lives over there to accomplish absolutely nothing?”

OK, it would be unfair to hold him solely responsible, I know. But I never met Johnson, Nixon or Kissinger, who should have been held responsible. I might have been dumb enough to ask them some tough questions.

When something causes me to think about Vietnam, depending on my disposition at the time, I either become depressed or infuriated. So I have to be in just the right mood before I'm willing to read a book or watch a movie about that historical debacle. Since I've been in that mood from time to time over the years, I've read a few Vietnam war novels. One of the best was one I reviewed here on the 2-Fisted Blog not long ago: The Return by Charles W. Sasser.

Even more recently, I've had the pleasure of meeting (via the Internet) a friend of Sasser's, and a renown writer in the military fiction AND nonfiction universes: Jim Morris. I was somewhat familiar with Jim Morris' work by reputation; also because I'd read some of his articles and a very fun semi-parody of men's fiction called Breeder. But now his books are being re-released digitally for E-readers, and I've just finished his Vietnam war novel Above and Beyond.

This is a novel Morris began writing in the hospital in Japan in 1968 while recovering from wounds that ended his military career. His right hand in traction, he wrote the first draft left-handed. It took 36 years before Above and Beyond saw print. (Geez, Hell and Gone took eight years from completion to published and that was maddening.)

Morris won three Purple Hearts before the first combat troops were deployed to Vietnam and before the first anti-war demonstration. There have been a lot of Vietnam veterans who became authors, but Morris was in the first wave. You could even say he blazed the trail for others to follow.

Above and Beyond’s protagonist, Neil Thompson, was a third-generation West-Pointer. He was booted from the then-prestigious military academy for failure to report a roommate who cheated on an exam. As the story opens he is a Special Forces “Green Beret” in Vietnam, having had to claw his way, tooth-and-nail, into a deployment that so many others wanted desperately to avoid. Now he wants to go to OCS and receive a commission before his former classmates get theirs and outrank him (enabling them to make his life a living hell, as small-minded officers can).

Thompson was born to be a soldier—or at least he’s convinced himself of such. He’s a likeable guy, with some perhaps heroic qualities, but Morris kept him real. He’s got some cognitive functions that are not quite as noble as an action-adventure hero’s. They’re more like what you’d find inside the brain of a real-life human being.

Thompson and his zany team leader Shoogie are part of Project Theta. Theta’s mission is similar to that of the LRRPS (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols), and, later, SOG (Special Operations Group/Studies and Observation Group)—basically snooping and pooping inside the enemy’s back door. Like author Morris did, they work closely with the Montagnards—the ostracized hill people of Vietnam.

In an army of unwilling cannon fodder the only elite volunteers were the paratroops; in the airborne the most elite were the highly-trained, independent men of Special Forces; and within the Forces the absolute crazies inevitably gravitated to the reconnaissance projects.

While in-country, Thompson meets and falls for Juliana, an International Volunteer Service worker. ( IVS was kinda’ like the Peace Corps…only the Peace Corps wasn’t in Vietnam.) You would think a dope-smoking progressive and a minion of the military-industrial complex wouldn’t last long beyond a one-night stand, yet what drama they do suffer is rather typical of military families.

There is just enough combat depicted to show what this aspect of the “police action” in Vietnam was like. Any more might have mired the reader down in the minutia of a tragically futile conflict with no sensible strategic objective.

When a leg general arrives to take command in Project Theta’s Area of Operations, Morris’s storyline struck a chord. What followed was illustrative of, not Vietnam, really, but the US Army’s officer corps dating back possibly as far as the Civil War…or farther.

“Frenier never admitted to being wrong about anything in his life. He won’t stop the attack, or go up the reverse slope. He’d throw away his whole brigade first.”

Brigadier General Frenier just happens to be the same officer (a bird colonel, then) who kicked Thompson out of the Point, too. He’s an unimaginative, vain, pompous ass. He does show a couple redeeming qualities after sacrificing his troops on the altar of his self-importance; but there’s no mistaking what kind of commander he is. And as far as the novel goes, the joke’s ultimately on him: He berates the marines once or twice as sacrificing their men needlessly, and knowing no tactic other than the frontal assault. Can you spell H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E? And in case you aren’t sure what kind of father this egotistical boob would be to his children, we find out later that his son eschewed West Point for Annapolis and branched USMC.

One more interesting point about Frenier: Another character described him as “trying to fight World War Two with helicopters,” or something very similar.

I’ve seen this sentiment a lot in fiction. And if you hang out with people interested in military science, you’ll eventually hear the old adage: “Generals spend their peacetime careers planning to fight the previous war.”

There was an attitude in many circles during the ‘80s that conventional forces were just about useless; and future wars would be won or lost solely by special operations. Frankly, I found that idea about as cockeyed as Billy Mitchell’s notion that, after WWII, air power alone could win conventional wars. Morris purports nothing so extreme in this novel, but his characters rightly hint that the conflict in Southeast Asia (at least with the limitations placed on US forces by Washington) required a whole different combat doctrine.

Shoogie pointed off in the distance. "Who burned that village over there?"
The driver glanced in that direction. "We did," he said. "The people was supposed to be Cong sympathizers."
Shoogie drawled, "If they weren't before they sure as shit are now."

Police actions, by definition, allow little room for victory in any reasonable sense. Whatever his faults, MacArthur was a commander willing to do what was necessary to achieve victory. You know: like the war he’d just helped win in 1945. But in 1950 he faced an enemy with many fellow travelers in Washington whose concept of victory had (and has) nothing to do with America (or any representative government) prevailing in any given struggle. The MacArthurs had to go. All hail the Westmorelands.

Ahem. I warned you what Vietnam does to my mood. I’m choking back my instincts to rant on about politics and military strategy.

By the time of Vietnam, the MacArthur/Patton-type officers (represented by McLeod in Above and Beyond) are a shrinking minority. Frenier is a picture of the new breed. Or, at least, the favored breed. And to win a war with the limitations the Johnson State Department imposed, it would have taken 30 years…or a couple more Tet Offensives until the NVA wiped itself out charging into the meatgrinder.

Despite my own political commentary, Above and Beyond is politically ambiguous. It’s poignant and almost ecclesiastical in its dichotomies: love and hate; war and peace; passion and indifference; loyalty and betrayal; selflessness and selfishness. Like the composer of a symphony, Morris weaves together a variety of notes, chords and tempos to give the audience (reader) an experience that engages the emotions, yet rings true.

To read my interview with the author about this book, visit Virtual Pulp Press.

Another Triumph For Truth, Justice, and Automatic Weapons

Americans love a great comeback story, don't we? Whether it be John Elway, Sugar Ray Leonard, Frank Sinatra, Douglas MacArthur, Superman II or Rocky III, we're all suckers for heroes who suffer reversals but come back swinging. Heck, Arnold Swarzenegger's superstardom began the moment he uttered "I'll be back" from the silver screen.

 
As a Special Forces officer in Vietnam, Jim Morris suffered a significant setback in the form of a  combat wound which forced his retirement. But that didn't keep him away from Indochina or from the Montagnards he'd lived, fought and trained with so extensively--he returned as a war correspondent. In fact, he covered several Third World hot spots after that.

And lucky for literate, red-blooded males, he began writing books, too. War Story, The Devil's Secret Name and Fighting Men earned him the respect of servicemen, veterans and lifelong civilians. He wrote some dang good fiction, too.

Time marched on. Books went out of print. Self-appointed soothsayers in the publishing industry decided for us what we were willing to read...and it wasn't the kind of books Jim Morris wrote. Oh yeah--there was also a movie called The Rookie which helped supplant the identity of the man associated with that name in the popular consciousness.

Time kept marching. As tends to happen, changes in technology and culture take place. First came POD publishing. Then e-publishing. Then the Two-Fisted Blog! Maybe not in that exact order, but the point is, some great books and great authors will be fighting their way back into the literary landscape.

I've already got some teasing tidbits on my Virtual Pulp Press site, while more and better morsels are in the works. Jim's got some great stories to share, both within and without his books, and I'll be passing some of them along in months to come.

PROMIS # 2: Rhodesia by Jack Murphy

The love affair with my Kindle rolls on. I have kicked off this Thanksgiving by finishing Jack Murphy's latest installment in the PROMIS series.

Sean Deckard is back. Last we saw him, in PROMIS: Vietnam, he was a One-Zero on a SOG team. He made some mistakes fatal to his career in the US military: he assumed the top brass in his chain-of-command wanted victory in Vietnam (an assumption so many people still make), and he went berserk on a room full of field-grade officers.

Despite that most un-soldierly conduct in his past, Deckard is a soldier through and through, with no desire to be anything else. I'm tempted to compare him with the main character in "The Hurt Locker." War is all he knows and seemingly all he wants to know...the family he acquires in this tale notwithstanding. But Deckard isn't just an adrenaline junkie. He cares about more than just the rush of death's presence--namely achieving the long-term, big-picture objectives that win wars. IOW what western politicians allegedly send young men to war for.

What happened in Rhodesia is a sadly familiar story to anyone familiar with what's been happening in Africa from 1945 to the present. The betrayal of the men sacrificing for duty, honor and country by fat cats and chairborne commandos with hidden agendas is also tragically reminiscent of what Deckard glimpsed in Vietnam. If allowed to pursue victory on a strategic level, the Rhodesians probably would have prevailed, and the author shows that (or at least Deckard's perception of it) without getting bogged down in the geopolitics.

The action is fast and heavy, but never without purpose and impact on the flow of the plot. We are also teased along with Deckard by another encounter of the "predictive algorithms" of the PROMIS project. We can't help but imagine (especially given the title of the series) that Deckard is on a collision course with PROMIS, which will play a larger and larger role in future installments. This e-book could use some editing, but is a good, fast read.

The Return: a Novel of Vietnam by Charles W. Sasser

I've read a couple of Sasser's autobiographical works, as well as 100th Kill--his other Vietnam novel. While I appreciate his perspective (he's a vet of the Special Forces Reserves, an author and a rancher, among other things), I've always found his writing to be competent, but not stellar. By his own admission he is not the most talented writer...but he is hard-working at his craft (if any of you remember the paramilitary magazines of the '80s competing with Soldier Of Fortune, he wrote many articles for them). So I wasn't quite prepared for the caliber of this novel.

The Return is one fine work of fiction--probably Sasser's best, though I haven't read all his books to state that emperically.

The narrator is Jack Kazmarek, a widower with miriad health problems on top of his PTSD. For many years he has been neighbors with another Vietnam vet, Pete Brauer. Both of them were mustang officers--having taken their lumps as enlisted men prior to being commissioned. Kazmarek was a platoon leader in the 9th Infantry, while Brauer had been a Navy SEAL. Although both of them spent a tour in the same AO during the same time, they never met until retiring in the same Florida trailer park decades later.

The story opens on the loss of Kazmarek's closest friend. Pete dies alone in his trailer, clutching a photo of a beautiful French-Vietnamese woman. Jack has noticed the portrait in his friend's house over the years (even finding her face familiar), but Pete rarely talked about it. His only mention of the woman in the image was cryptic: "May God forgive me."

Jack is almost as intrigued as I was. Eventually he begins investigating, to find out who the woman was and where she might be now. The investigation leads Jack back to Vietnam where he must confront some of his own long-buried demons.

The story is filled in with flashbacks--some of Jack's own, but most by the people who remembered Pete and Mhai (the woman in the photo). All the reader's curiosity is satisfied by the end, as we learn just how extensively Jack and Pete crossed each others' paths during that insane conflict.

Sasser is not your typical war novelist who portrays American involvement in Indochina as one huge Mai-Lai massacre. And yet he does depict atrocities committed by Americans. And there is surprising depth to all the main characters, including the Viet Cong, who are treated as even-handedly as any reasonable person could hope for. Sasser's Vietnam is not black or white, but a convoluted, maddening mess of grays. Perhaps the Cong sympathizers (which comprise most of our government, media and education establishments) would even enjoy how, in the novel, US forces suffer a significant tactical defeat--something that didn't happen but makes the VC seem more heroic in retrospect. Everyone conveniently forgets that failure to achieve victory in Vietnam was mandated by the very government that put Americans in harm's way to begin with. The VC and NVA didn't defeat the US military--the "war" was lost in the Oval Office.

There are a few plot twists Sasser has in store, and I didn't deduce all of them beforehand correctly. Characters are complex and believable. Narrator Jack Kazmarek has political opinions, but the story "he" tells lets the chips fall where they may, regardless of who it may please or offend (in fact, it reminds me somewhat of The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna). There's enough action and conflict to keep you turning pages, and even a few tugs at your emotions here and there.

This is a very good novel.

Where There Were No Innocents by Thomas Drinkard

This novel offers an officer's perspective on SOG during US involvement in Vietnam. I understand this is a prequel to another book, but this was my introduction to the author and character.

Mack Brinson is the type of officer every good soldier wishes was in charge. Though his duties in MACV-SOG seem rather nebulous, he voluntarily tags along with SOG teams that go behind the fence, and earns enough respect to be invited to the one-zero table more than once after a mission.

No Innocents provides a fascinating glimpse into the pseudo-secret SOG command structure, administration, and even some operations. It overlaps nicely with Jack Murphy's PROMIS Vietnam, which was written from the perspective of a one-zero, or SOG team leader.

After his tour begins, Brinson is targeted almost immediately by VC assassins, and has numerous close calls. The reason for his targeting really struck me as plausible, too. In fact, though I'm at least a generation too young to have ever been to Vietnam, most of this book smacked of authenticacy, thanks to the author's experience in-country. Especially the geography and character interaction...with one exception.

That exception is Brinson's whirlwind relationship with the beautiful Song. I know love-at-first-sight does happen, so it's not that that bothers me, really. But these two decide to get married after one date. I know that happens, too, especially during wartime. I just think, story-wise, it could have been milked for a lot more suspense/conflict. Some suspense did get added to the mix by way of Song's father--an influential man in South Vietnam's intelligence organization, though.

In any event, the guts of this novel is SOG's part in the war up to and including the Tet Offensive, and it was presented so well as to outweigh my issues with the romantic subplot.

PROMIS: Viet Nam

Jack Murphy's novel Reflexive Fire is due to come out any time, now, and I'm looking forward to it. In the meantime, he's begun a series of short stories which comprise the mercenary career of his Reflexive Fire protagonist's father, Sean Deckard. In Issue #1,we find Sean Deckard on a SOG team snooping and pooping in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, during the post-Tet chapter of US involvement in the region.

The innocent-sounding "Studies and Observation Group," more widely known by the SOG acronym, is surrounded by far more secrecy than I once assumed: I heard some of the old-timers talking about it (though never in specific detail) when I was a lowly grunt. Now I wonder if those people had any actual knowledge of it, or were just passing on vintage scuttlebutt from the pseudo-mythical CIA operations in southeast Asia.

Both the CIA and Special Forces branched out from Wild Bill Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) of WWII fame. During the tragic fiasco in Vietnam, the two organizations came full-circle to reunite in the form of SOG. As I mention in my Elite Forces pages on my website, special operations/unconventional warfare forces are most effective when operating with their own intelligence-gathering capabilities organic to their organization(s). Futile sacrifices of the lives of elite warriors like Pont du Hoc; or just plain wastes of effort and resources like the Son Tay raid demonstrate this principle. SOG, therefore, should have been a force to be reckoned with. Though still shrouded in secrecy, by all accounts, they were. But like the entire Vietnam experience (and, arguably Korea and other military misadventures), tactical success after resounding tactical success all are rendered meaningless, along with their cost in human lives, when the command structure that put our men in harm's way is not committed to achieving strategic victory. Jack Murphy gives us a short glimpse into this insane mess through the eyes of Sean Deckard.

Deckard was recruited into SOG from the LRRPs (Long Range Reconnaisance Patrols--later organized into Ranger companies), and he is a hard-charger. Whatever his inner motivations might be, he is the ideal soldier, dedicated to his mission at the cost of most everything he might hold dear. However, he is on his way to some hardcorps disillusion when he proves just a little too effective at what he does.

In the interview segment below, the author provides a link to some information about PROMIS. It is spooky stuff, if true, and evidently not easy to explain well in simple terms. This process, shrouded in even more mystery than SOG, provides the subsurface impetus for the surface action in this series. I'm already fascinated to watch how this technilogical monstrosity is unveiled throughout the series.

But even without all that, Issue #1 of PROMIS is a great read. I would have finished it in one sitting if life hadn't got in the way. The action is fluid, visual, and at no point made me groan in disbelief. Jack did his research well enough that I had nothing to nitpick. On top of that, he's a veteran and knows how to write about combat operations without sinking into shellshocked introspection. He knows how to tweak real-world scenarios to make an entertaining read without interrupting our suspension of disbelief.

PROMIS is short, but packs a wallop. At 99 cents, you can't beat it. I've spent much more for fiction not nearly as good. I plan to buy the whole series as he writes it.

INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

2FB: Let's start with some biographical info.

Jack Murphy: I’m originally from New York and enlisted in the US Army at age 19. I went straight from infantry basic training to Airborne school and then to the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP). Upon graduating, I was assigned to 3rd Ranger Battalion at Ft. Benning, GA. While there, I served as an Anti-Tank gunner, Sniper, and Team Leader. After my second deployment with Ranger Battalion I attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) and got picked to go to the Special Forces Qualification Course. After about a year of training I was assigned to a HALO (military free fall) team with 5th Special Forces Group at Ft. Campbell, KY. I completed three combat tours and graduated from Ranger School, Sniper School, SERE, HALO, and other courses too numerous to mention here. Last year I decided to leave the military and attend college. Currently, I’m working towards a degree in international business.

2FB: First of all, thanks for your service to our country, Jack. BTW: The man I dedicated my first novel to was in 5th Group during Vietnam. He was an old-school NCO, and probably the best one I've ever known. Anyway, though there have been some notable combat veterans who authored books about war, it's still kind of unusual to encounter an action-adventure writer who earned both Ranger and SF tabs and served back-to-back tours in Injun Country. How does that happen?

Jack Murphy: I started writing when I was a teenager, mostly short stories. I was a big fan of action-adventure novels and started writing about the types of things I would want to see in one of those books. I suppose not much has changed in that regard. I wrote a little here and there while I was in the Army but it wasn’t until I left that I felt comfortable really sitting down and hammering our fiction for public consumption. Special Operations has it’s own type of culture and none of us really talk to civilians about what goes on “behind the fence” so to speak.

2FB: It strikes me that you've noticed some of the same sad states of affairs I did in our military.Few Americans could even imagine it--especially those who support our deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jack Murphy: Most Americans try very hard to ignore that we are even fighting a war, or if they do, have no idea how it impacts them. I can understand the second point because I’m not sure that it does. Sadly, I have to say that the US military has put career advancement ahead of victory in Afghanistan and Iraq. The bureaucracy and risk adverse attitude of commanders, even in Special Forces units, is completely unreal. That’s a message you won’t be hearing from the mass media anytime soon.

2FB: And it was surprising to me how far back it goes. Even our "great patriotic war," WWII, the last declared war we fought, when everyone from the top down was earnestly seeking victory, some of this garbage was going on. But nowadays it's the rule, not the exception. Ahem. Were SOG operators still on US Army (or whatever branch) payroll, or were they "officially" civilians working for the CIA?

Jack Murphy: From what I have read it appears that SOG operators were always under the Army's chain of command.  SOG was commanded by an Army Colonel and fell under the Army's Table of Organization and Equipment.  However, SOG drew from all branches of service and combined them with the unique capabilities of the CIA.  This fusion of Special Forces combat troops and intelligence gathering seemed particularly effective, and to be frank, well ahead of it's time.

2FB: Back to you and your books: Tell us about your fiction.

Jack Murphy: I wrote a novel called Reflexive Fire which I am still preparing for release, but what I have out as of now is a short story called PROMIS. It is the first issue which I hope to serialize into a longer plot that follows the career of a professional mercenary through the 70′s and 80′s. I was inspired to write this series because of the research I have done into unconventional warfare, a hobby as well as my former profession. Through my research I discovered some of the most amazing accomplishments in the history of Special Forces, accomplishments that the public at large has little if any knowledge of. In this sense, PROMIS is like historical fiction and brings factual events and histories to new audiences, or so I hope.

2FB: How would you classify this series, and how does it differ from other work in the genre?

Jack Murphy: If I were to assign a genre to PROMIS, I would put it under military fiction. It is an action-adventure short that follows the career of a Sergeant serving in America’s Studies and Observations Group (SOG) , a highly secretive Special Forces unit that conducted cross border operations during the Vietnam War. Very little has been written about SOG, and if you read between the lines of what has, I suspect a lot of their activities are still highly classified to this day. PROMIS is unique because it draws upon source material and speculates on subjects related to espionage and Special Forces missions that most people have never even heard of.

2FB: Where does the title PROMIS come from?

Jack Murphy: PROMIS is the name of a controversial computer program developed in the 1980's by a company called INSLAW.  PROMIS stands for Prosecutors Management Information System.  Back in those days the Justice Department was losing cases because they couldn't keep track of the files in the primitive computers they had.  PROMIS was developed and sold to the government to allow various computer systems to cross talk and communicate between each other.  The software was eventually stolen by the CIA and allegedly used to launder millions of dollars of drug money.  This is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the PROMIS software scandal and any investigation into this subject will inevitably lead down a road that takes the researcher into subjects like Iran-Contra, the October Surprise, and the murder of a journalist named Danny Casolaro to keep it all quiet.  I can't do the subject justice here but those who are interested should read "The Last Circle," by Cheri Seymour or for a primer read the following article: "http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/052401_promis.html"

I named this series PROMIS because the over all story arc will cover the development and intrigue surrounding the PROMIS software scandal.  In issue one we see the very beginnings of a fictionalized PROMIS in Leon Petraska's formulas.

2FB: Every book presents a challenge of some sort when writing it. What was that challenge with this one?

Jack Murphy: My greatest challenge in writing PROMIS was getting the details correct. Although I served in Special Forces, things were a little different back in 1970 when this short story takes place. I went through great pains to “get it right” but really I have Paul over at ModernForces.com to thank for really keeping me honest. His group does Vietnam reenactments, including SOG, and has spent a huge amount of time communicating with Vietnam vets and putting together uniforms and equipment with an extreme degree of attention to detail.

2FB: Expound, if you would, on the scene where Sean flips out on the top brass. Not just their reaction to Petraska's predictive algorithm, but the business of the Soviet military advisors in the COSVN.

Jack Murphy: The existence of Soviet military advisers and the Viet Cong's headquarters, called COSVN, is highly controversial to this day.  From my research, I believe that SOG came damned close to catching up with several Soviet advisers.  If you read about the dirty little wars of that era, you find communist advisers from Russia, China, Cuba, and East Germany all over the world.  Western intelligence agencies were playing chess with the Third World and it would be naive to think the Soviets were not doing the same.  In regards to COSVN, I think it existed, SOG certainly did, but probably not the way I wrote about it in my short story.  COSVN was probably a fairly small command and control element that stayed highly mobile and coordinated certain actions along the Ho Chi Minh trail.  We see the same thing happening today in Iraq and Afghanistan where the enemy maintains a command and control node across a border into an adjoining country, hopefully out of American reach by their logic.  Although terrorists operate in a decentralized manner, they still have some higher functions coordinated by well placed individuals or groups.

In PROMIS, the brass reacts poorly to Sean Deckard's discoveries, in regards to the subjects mentioned above, because they are in denial and also because acknowledging the issue would mean having to do something about it.  In 1970, something that explosive could have potentially led to World War Three.  The sub-context of course, is that such a discovery could have led to the end of the Vietnam War, something that certain vested interests were in no hurry to have happen.

2FB:  It surprises nobody, I'm sure, to hear that Vietnam was a dirty war. Still, every time I hear or read about specific dirty details of it, I get pissed all over again. I'm gonna cut myself off right there or I will turn this blog post into an ugly, angry rant.

Thanks, Jack, for taking the time to answer my questions.

Jack has his own blog, Reflexive Fire, linked in the blog roll to the left, with many posts of interest for military/paramilitary enthusiasts. You can buy the PROMIS ebook by clicking the links on his blog. And, of course, you can click on the one below.