Jon Sable #12
Jon (and Mike) returns to Vietnam!
Indicia Gaga: (following the trademark notice, with the main character) Just in case, even the not so prominent characters are trademark First comics, Inc. So, there!
Creative Team: Mike Grell-story & Art, Ken Bruzenak-letters, Janice Cohen-colors, Mike Gold-editor
I was on credit autopilot, on the previous two reviews; Ken Bruzenak started doing the lettering, with issue #10.
Synopsis: Since the letters page is on the inside cover now, we will start there. A reader criticizes Mike for showing a naked Sable, when Trina turns up in his home, but his genitalia is conveniently covered in shadows. They felt if he is going to be depicted naked, he should be Dr Manhattan-ing it. Mike Grell's response is, "My only reply is is that to have included genitals would have simply sparked endless debate and commentary as to relative size. Besides, we all know it shrivels in the shower." You didn't see that type of commentary in X-Men!
We start in 1969, as a group of American POWs are released by the North Vietnamese, as a token gesture. They carry letters from other POWs, to their families, which the State Department wants to have President Johnson deliver to the families. The peace activists involved in the release want to prevent the letters from being used as war propaganda and have arranged to divert them and put them in new envelopes, addressed to the families, which is then put into the mail system, one step ahead of Federal agents, looking for Frankie Abbott, the ac4tivist with the mail.
We cut to 1970, Phan Rang Air Base, Republic of Vietnam, as Airman First Class Jon Sable is busing working, as a clerk typist, and responds to a query that he is 3 days short. Elsewhere on the base, another airman is processing out and is carrying his orders, when a rocket attack hits the base. The rocket explodes near the airman, who is killed instantly. Sable is one of the people who react and the man's orders are found. The dea man's name was John Sayble.
In the present, Jon Sable wakes from a nightmare and is consoled by the woman he is with (not Myke, could be Eden, but I don't think so). Sable doesn't go back to sleep and just stares at the ceiling, reliving Vietnam. The next morning, Jon get's a phone call and heads out somewhere. We see him with Mrs Feldman, Sonny Pratt's landlady, where she shows him Sonny, passedout, drunk, in a chair. She got Jon's number from Sonny's address book. She says he has been this way since the holidays.
Jon learns that Sonny has had no visitors and lied about staying with relatives. He looks through the address book and calls the one name in New YorK: Hollis Pratt, the person who slammed the door on Sonny, last issue. Jon reaches Hollis and she says she is Sonny's daughter-in-law, and at first is concerned that something has happened, but when she hears about his condition she is less sympathetic and hangs up. Jon puts Sonny to bed and asks Mrs Feldman to look after him, while he goes to learn more.
Jon goes to see Hollis Pratt and she lets him in, after he tells her that Sonny did not send him. She asks who is he and he responds, "I happen to care about that old man." Hollis remarks he always had that charm, but lives in a world of Hollywood endings and the real world is different. Jon asks what sent him off the deep end and Hollis shows him a photo of her husband, Bill, Sonny's son. He and his co-pilot, Rusy Olsen, ejected from their F-4 Phantom, during the Tet Offensive, in 1968. They were listed as Missing In Action and their status never updated. Later, when some POWs were released to rennie davis, they carried letters from other POWs, claiming sightings of Americans who did not appear on POW lists, including Rusty Olsen. Hollis says if he survived, Bill might have, as well. Hollis still holds out hope, but Sonny gave up a long time ago and urged Hollis to move on with her life, which created the friction between them.
Sable goes to see a State Department official, who speaks of the rumors and heresay of undocumented American POWs still in the hands of the Vietnamese; but, in the absence of proof, there is little they can do. Sable seems to think that proof may be coming.
Jon wakes from another nightmare where he is in the place of the dead airman, with the similar name. Jon gets dressed and goes out to a seedier part of the city, to a building that has a sign that says, "Rooms, Cheap." He flashes back to New Year's Eve, 1970, at Than Son Nhut Airbase, where an Australian band is playing "Waltzin' Matilda," and a grouo pf airmen holler to pipe down and bring back the girl entertainment. The Australian contingent in the crowd takes offense and proceeds to open a Foster's-size can of whoop-ass on the flyboys. Sable dives under a table, but is about to have his head bashed in by a Bruce, when a Green Beret knocks the guy out, with one punch. He gives Jon a hand and calls him "Arc Light." He is the man Jon has come to see, in New York, in 1984. He softly calls to the man, named Jerry and gets grabbed by the hooks of a prosthetic arm and nearly gets a jungle knife shoved through his chest, before Jerry recognizes Jon.
Jerry's wife, Sheila told Jon where to find the man and says she told him Jerry stopped going to therapy. He says there is no cure for what's killing him. Some nights, the screaming won't stop. Jon says he knows and starts to leave, but Jerry stops him, wanting to know why he came. Jon tells him he is going back to Vietnam and Jerry thinks he is nuts. Sable explains.
Jon's intent is to infiltrate Vietnam and find hard evidence of the existence of American POWs and bring it out. he doubts he can find Rusty Olsen or Bill Pratt, but he might find evidence of others. Jerry asks why he thinks he can do what Bo Gritz couldn't. he's not sure he can, but he is going to try, near Quang Tri province, where Bill Pratt's plane went down. jerry asks what the job pays and Sable starts to rebut that there is no job, then stops and tells him $20,000, half in advance, plus a $100,000 insurance policy. Jerry asks about the backer and Sable says he is anonymous. Jerry says they will need an interpreter and he knows a guy.
Jon talks to Sonny at his place, and asks him to look after it, while he is away on a job. he doesn't tell him what the job is, and just asks him not to turn the place into a bordello or sell it to gypsies. Later, Sable meets Jerry, who takes him to meet an interpreter, Col Nguyen Van Tran, late of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, a weapons expert, demolitions and with contacts among the montagnard (the mountain tribes, in Vietnam, who are racially different from the Vietnamese) communities. Tran could use the money to live the American dream, rather than his current American reality, of a job as a dishwasher.
The men make their plans and Tran tells them of a weapons cache, hidden near the Thai-Laotian border, by his team. It includes an FN-FAL battle rifle, an M-60 machine gun, an M-16 rifle, and a Colt Woodsman .22 cal pistol, with noise suppressor (a gift from the CIA). Sable tells them the money will be deposited in their bank accounts, by the next morning and they will meet up in Bangkok, on the 3rd of the next month. They wil head along the Laotian border and pick up the weapons, then cross into Quan Tri province, in Vietnam.
Jerry asks about their extraction. Jon says there is a gap in the Vietnamese radar coverage and a fishing boat, out of Hong Kong, will lie offshore, every third night, from 2200 hours until 0100 (10:00 pm to 1:00 am), starting on the 15th.
The men meet again on the 3rd, claim the weapons, and head across the border into what was once the DMZ...
Thoughts: Mike's dedication says, "Dedicated to those who fought the war... over there and at home." This is a very personal issue for him and Mike Gold. Mike Grell served in the US Air Force, stationed in Saigon, where, as an artist, he drew up charts for press briefings. In Mike Richardon's book, Comics: Between The Panels, there are some quotes from Mike and stories about him (which he corrects). He mentions the charts for the briefings and said they revolved around the proposed force draw down (the "Vietnamization" of the war), with timetables, strength figures, projected casualties and other data. He saw all of that info, which was being with held from the troops fighting in Vietnam and from the people back home, as well as the Vietnamese. He said he carried a guilt about that, for years. It may sound a bit like he attaches too much importance to his role; but, you can see how that information, about fellow soldiers and airmen expected to die, while the US slowly withdraws its forces and abandons the war, might affect someone who had been living it. The guilt stems from knowing and not being able to share it with others, possibly saving some of the lives that would be lost.
Mike Gold was involved in the peace movement in the Chicago area and the events at the Democratic National Convention and the Chicago Seven. Rennie Davis, mentioned in the flashback, was one of the Chicago Seven, charged with disrupting the convention, in one of the most notorious trials in US history. The opening section is partially based on a truth and partially on fiction.
In 1968, Rennie Davis, who was one of the leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society and National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, was approached by the North Vietnamese government, with a proposal to release a small group of POWs to peace activists. Three activists, Stewart Meacham, Anne Scheer, and Vincent Grizzard, were recruited by Davis and traveled from Paris to Hanoi to meet the officials, who released three American pilots: Maj James F Low, Maj Fred N Thompson (not the senator and actor) and Capt Joe V Carpenter. I can find no mention of them carrying letters home from other POWs, but there were instances of POWs smuggling letters out of prisons. I also cannot find a mention of a peace activist, named Frankie Abbott. the only person of note I can find is a character from a British tv series, Please Sir, which was spun off from the series, The Fenn Street Gang. Somehow, I kind of doubt that was the source of the name; but, stranger things have happened.
So, we learn why Sonny is not staying with family, as Hollis still holds out hope that her husband might still be alive, while Sonny resigned himself to the idea that he was dead. Realistically, Sonny is probably right (as Sable points out, to still be alive, 16 years later, is pretty long odds). However, until Hollis has proof that he is dead, she cannot let him go. This was the anguish of most MIA/POW families, who looked for any definitive proof that their loved ones were alive or dead. There was a precedent for the Vietnamese to hold prisoners past release dates set in treaties. They had done so with French soldiers after their war of independence. Vietnamese refugees brought out many stories of white men still being held prisoner. Some 1600 men were listed as MIA. The National League of Families of American prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia grew out of a group of POW families, organized by Sylvia Stockdale, wife of Cdr (later Adm) James Stockdale, the VP running mate to Ross Perot, in 1992. That group has pressured the US government and the Peoples Republic of Vietnam for an accounting of the missing. It had grown to a major issue, by the early 1980s, as America started to come to grips with the legacy of the Vietnam War.
Sonny was Jon's fencing coach and mentor; but, as we will learn later on, he was also a father figure for him and he wants to bring peace to him and Hollis. He also wants to put his own ghosts to rest. So, he goes back to a place that he was lucky to leave, before, along with two other men who lost something in that war.
Jerry was a Special Forces soldier. During the war, they operated with ARVN units and montagnard people, against the VC, carrying out a counter-insurgency, designed to undercut the propaganda of the VC. The montagnards were ethnically different from the Vietnamese and had a deep hatred of them, because of racial oppression in Vietnamese history. they prove effective fighters, though they weren't choosing about the distinctions between the North and South Vietnamese. Tran was with the ARVN, but is sounds likely he served with Vietnamese Special Forces: the Luc Luong Dac Biet Quan Luc Viet Nam Cong Hoa, aka the LLDB. They were trained by and worked alongside US Army Special Forces (there were also naval commandoes who worked with the US NAVY SEALS, the Lien Doi Nguoi Nhai, or LLDN). They were often parts of covert operations, too, such as the infamous Phoenix Program, a CIA-run operation to assassinate suspected Viet Cong leaders. They were also part of the Special Operations Group (Later Studies and Observation Group) special missions, and the Shining Brass long range reconnaissance teams, who operated deep into Laos, Cambodia and even into parts of North Vietnam and China, if some stories are to be believed. The Colt Woodsman was a .22 cal target pistol that was fitted with an integral noise suppressor ("silencer") and used by CIA units, to quietly kill sentries and dogs and for assassination at close range (though long range sniping was preferred). That detail suggest Tran was part of a Phoenix Program team or other CIA operation and Jerry's knowledge of him would likely be related to Special Forces missions with such groups.
Jon was a clerk typist, not a combat soldier. As we saw in the origin story, he had never killed a man, until Africa, when he shot a poacher. We see he hides from trouble, then; now, he seeks it. Much has changed, as he tells Jerry. Jon's nickname, Arc Light, is a reference to the military's code-name for B-52 bomber missions, in Vietnam. Arc Light missions included the bombing of Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam, which signaled an escalation of US military operations, which further added to anti-war protests, especially in light of North Vietnamese propaganda (true and otherwise) about civilians deaths. This included infamous trips to Hanoi, by peace activists, that I will not rehash.
Jerry mentions Bo Gritz. James Gordon "Bo" Gritz is a retired US Army Lt Colonel, who commanded a detachment of the 5th Special Forces Group, in Southern South Vietnam. After the war, he became notorious for several private missions to locate alleged American POWS in Laos and Cambodia, which were highly publicized and equally dubious, including sales of t-shirts, along the border. He was later involved in conspiracy theory groups.
Mike is tackling a topical, yet sensitive subject and he does it with equal sensitivity. He is a veteran and his sympathies are with the families of those listed as MIA, who just want proof that their loved ones are alive or dead. He shines equal light on the peace movement, who sought to end the war and bring home those soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. He doesn't classify the motives of one over the other. At the same time, he highlights what many veterans live with, every day, regardless of the war: those that didn't come home, the things they did in the war, the things they didn't do, and the death and destruction. For the Vietnam generation (and to an extent, the Korean war generation) the wounds were very deep, given public sentiment, for some time. As I said before, in the early 1980s, America was just starting to come to terms with the legacy of Vietnam. Many veterans of the war did not broadcast their status as veterans, because of stigma in the media and Hollywood, with caricatures like John Rambo snapping, and committing violence, justified or not. The failure of the US to win decisive victory often cast the Vietnam veterans as "losers" and they were sometimes ostracized by local veterans groups. The VA was not well funded and the mental health aspects were probably the least funded and staffed and it took veterans support groups, who took it upon themselves, to try to bring healing. By my time in the service, and the victory in the Persian Gulf War, much of the view within the military of the public sentiment to "Support the troops," and the parades and "welcome home" events was in part guilt, for how the Vietnam generation had been treated. Before that war, you did not here people say, "Thank you for your service." the WW2 generation had been (rightfully) lauded, but the subsequent veterans definitely felt like they were perceived differently. Much of the healing came about thanks to things like the Vietnam Memorial, in Washington, DC and the Moving Wall, a replica that travels the country to the people who cannot travel to Washington. When I was a midshipman, at the Univ of Illinois, the Moving Wall was brought to the campus and the ROTC units provided guides for the public. We helped families locate the names of loved ones, who were killed or Missing In Action, during the war. It was a very somber, yet uplifting duty. People would do rubbings of the names, to take home with them. For us, we were honoring those who came before us. For them, they were touching a part of those they lost.
The subject of POW rescues was becoming popular, in fiction and Hollywood. In 1982, former Special Forces and SOG team member JC Pollock published the bestselling novel, Mission MIA, where a former Special Forces captain, who had served in Rhodesia, learns of evidence that a former team member of his is alive and a POW, in Vietnam, along with several others. He recruits his former A-Team to train and go back into the area and carry out a rescue, along with financial backing from the father-in-law of the missing comrade. Along the way, the CIA disrupts their mission and they are forced to improvise. A tear later, the movie Uncommon Valor, starring Gene Hackman, was released. hackman portrays a Marine colonel whose son went missing in Vietnam, during a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol mission, when he is wounded and left behind, during a helo extraction, while in a running firefight. Hackman assembles the men from the team, plus a pair f helicopter pilots to go in and find them and bring them out, after receiving evidence they are alive, corroborated by high altitude recon photos that show a message from his son, relating to his unit's designation. The team heads in from Thailand, but their weapons and equipment are seized by the Thai government, under the direction of the CIA. They are forced to buy antiquated weapons, from an arms dealer and improvise. That film's script had been originated by actor Wings Hauser, though he lost control of the project. John Millius came on board as one of the producers. the basic premise is very similar to Pollock's novel, though the characters are very different, as is the mission. That was followed, in 1985, by Rambo: First Blood, Part II, where John Rambo is part of a recon mission to find evidence of American POWs, before being betrayed and captured by the Vietnamese and Russian advisors. That was, then, followed by the Canon Groups Missing In Action film series, starring Chuck Norris.
As we will see, in part 2, sneaking into a foreign country, particularly a still hostile one, is not an easy thing (Bo Gritz was allegedly ambushed, in Laos, while on a recon mission) and even the US Army failed to execute a POW rescue mission, in 1970, during the raid on the Son Tay prison, when it was discovered that the prisoners had been moved, weeks before the mission was carried out. Sable is looking for proof, not to pull off a rescue; but, this is hostile territory and 2 white men, skilled or not, stand out. The mission will have consequences for Jon.
ps the FN rifle being part of the arms cache is a bit convenient, since the only units that carried the weapon, in Vietnam, were the Australians (and New Zealanders), though many of them used the M-16 because it was lighter to carry in the jungle. Grell likely includes it because it is the weapon that Sable carried in Rhodesia and he was familiar with it (plus it looks deadly). The M-16 and M-60 make more sense, since they would have been carried by US units and the ARVN. However, in the panel where they collect the weapons, Jerry appears to be carrying a Belgian FN-MAG machine gun, which, ironically, later replaced the M-60, in the US Army. It has a similar layout to the M-60, but a much different silhouette and what Grell draws looks a heck of a lot more like it, than the M-60.
(compare to the image of the trio, above)
It's a bit unusual for Grell to make a mistake, about a weapon, which makes me wonder if he mixed up his reference or changed his script, at some point after the art was done. The next issue features drawings that look closer to the M-60, though still a bit off, in some panels.
pps we have debated the reality of a surname like Sable, but, I find it impossible to swallow the idea of someone else on the same base being named John Sayble. If he goes to Amsterdam and meats a Dutch man, named Jen Saabel, I am out of here!
