This entry is from 1993 and, again, deals with the legacy of the Vietnam War. The feature is Ms Tree Special (formerly Ms Tree Quarterly, but DC changed the publication frequency) #10, the final issue in the series.



Now, for the most part, this is a typical Ms Tree hardboiled detective story, in the vein of Mickey Spillane, as Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty, essentially, created the premise that Mike Hammer and Velda married and Mike was killed. Velda goes after revenge, for his death and then continues as a private investigator. Although never a huge commercial success, Ms Tree had a long, critically acclaimed life across several publishers, including Eclipse, Aardvark-Vanaheim, Renegade Press and DC Comics, with Titan releasing trade collections and the Hard Case Crime Library releasing a prose novel, by Collins. Within the series, it was established that Mike Tree, Ms Tree's late husband, was a Vietnam Vet (as Mike Hammer was in the Stacy Keach tv series)and one of her supporting characters, Roger Fremont, served with him, along with the brother of another associate, Dan Green. Dan's brother Vic was with Mike and Roger, in Vietnam, but was left behind, declared MIA, presumed dead. That is the topic of this story.

The story begins with Roger Fremont reliving the nightmare of Vic Green sacrificing himself, in Vietnam, to provide covering fire for the medevac of Fremont and a wounded Mike Tree. Green, armed with an M-60 machine gun, keeps up a heavy rate of fire, as V move in to intercept the soldiers, as Mike is loaded in the helo. Roger tries to go back for Vic, but is stopped by a crewman....



Later, at the offices of Tree Investigations, Inc, Michael Tree (the Ms of the title) finds her partner Roger, in a heated argument with Dan Green. She notes Roger is smoking, when he usually doesn't and he says he did, "over there." He tells her of the argument, about the money Dan and his family have spent, searching for his missing brother. He details the various scams that have been perpetuated on MIA families....



Faked photographs, counterfeit dog tags, "eyewitness" sightings, money given to recon and rescue groups. Now, the latest scam is the selling of human remains, purported to be those of the dead MIA. In many cases they are animal bones, or else Vietnamese remains passed off as American. However, there have been some remains recovered, which suggest they were store above ground, in a warehouse of some kind and that this is being used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the US government. Dan has been approached by someone claiming to provide proof of the location of his brother's remains...for a price. ms Tree visits Dan and offers to fund the meet, so long as she accompanies him to it and any subsequent meetings or travel. The meeting is arranged, at a restaurant, in Chinatown, in Chicago. There, they meet Mguyen Van Lam, a lower member of a criminal group, known as The Ring. He presents Vic Green's dog tags, in exchange for $5000. For another $5000, he can arrange for the remains to return, through his underworld and government contracts....



When he leaves the restaurant, Lam is gunned down by a blond Vietnamese (!) woman, in a red trenchcoat. The woman flees and Ms Tree gives chase. With Roger's help (he trailed them to the meeting), they locate her trail, which leads to a small, seedy apartment, which turns out to have been Lam's. The woman is there and is revealed to be Dinh Ti Lan, aka Sally Lan, international high fashionmodel. Lan was a prostitute, to survive, at age 11 and Lam had photos and pornographic films of her, which could damage or destroy her career. He blackmailed her to buy a set of prints, then the negatives. She didn't trust him to turn them over and killed him and is searching for the negatives. Roger has found them and burns them, to gain her trust. Ms Tree strikes a deal to cover for her, in exchange for getting them in contact with The Ring, in Vietnam. She agrees and Tree feeds the police a false description. The group then travels to Vietnam and Lan sets up a meeting, with an old friend, Van Le, a pimp and former member of the Mike Force.

MIKE Force, or Mobile Strike Force, was a Special Forces formation, an outgrowth of the CIDG (Civilian Irregular Defense Group) program, which trained local militias to fight the VC, from fortified camps. MIKE Force was a mobile version of that, who would be a reaction force, brought in to reinforce the camps, at short notice. They were primarily ethnic minorities, particularly Chinese Nung tribesmen, who were paid as soldiers, by the CIA and Special Forces. van Le was one such soldier.

Van Le knew Lam and that he was thrown out of The Ring, because of his schemes and because his gambling made him a liability. He also indicates that a rival faction from Hong Kong has been moving in on operations and he puts them in touch with a man named Johnny Wu, from the Hong Kong group. They meet him and he tells them of a meeting with the Number One, of The Ring, and foreign interests, at the International Hotel, where they are staying.

Back at the hotel, the next morning, they spot Don Donnie, of the Muerta Family, in Chicago. he is supposedly taking them legt, but is tying up loose ends. Van Le tells them that their invitation to meet Number One was mysteriously withdrawn and Tree goes over and corces Don Donnie into taking her and Dan in with him, to the meeting. They accompany him to Number One's suite and receive a shocking surprise....



Vic Green is alive and is Number One, of The Ring. Roger had tried telling Tree that Vic was not a saint and he was involved in black market drug dealing, during the war and was captured and lost a leg. He gave all the information he had, but stayed in the country, because he was useful to people and rose to power, in the underworld. The reunion is interrupted by a hit team from the Hong Kong faction and Vic is killed, though Van Le, Sally Lan and Roger help wipe out the killers. Dan is able to return home and bury his brother on American soil.

The story has the usual surprise twist you would expect of a hardboiled mystery and a somewhat obvious one, if you are familiar with the conventions at play here. Of course, Collins is a top name in this genre and Ms Tree features excellent writing and well developed characters. At the heart though is a plot ripped from the headlines and Collins points out a lot of the issues at play.

Since 1973, there have been stories of prisoners left behind and lobbying on the behalf of MIA families, for a full accounting. This has been a political subject in negotiations with the government of Vietnam and the issue has led to Congressional hearings and investigations. More importantly, it has led to confidence schemes, by opportunists and a lot of burned families, who have mostly been sold a lie and political and financial opportunists have fed the lie, for their own purposes.

As the US was withdrawing its forces and negotiations went on in Paris, the Nixon administration started reclassifying servicemembers lost in combat from Killed In Action/Body Not Recovered to the more nebulous Missing In Action. Secretary of defense Melvin Laird referred to a number between 500 and 1300 (later raised to 1400) POW/MIAs. The Nixon Administration was using the return of US POWs as a way to change the narrative of the war, for political purposes, at home, by casting the US as the victim. In references to MIAs, it used language that implied that these were 1300 actual prisoners, held in North Vietnamese POW camps and prisons, or in Laos, Cambodia, China or even the Soviet Union. There was a story that a small group of Americans were brought to Moscow, but that turned out to be American deserters. No credible evidence was given for the presence of prisoners in Laos or North Vietnam, other than those officially recorded, through the Red Cross. However, the unaccounted numbers allowed the Administration to cast North Vietnam as a cruel state that secretly tortured American prisoners, without adhering to the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. It ignored the 100,000 civilian prisoners in South Vietnamese prisons, mostly buddhist monks and followers, who were imprisoned after the uprising against the South Vietnamese government, who were tortured and abused, without trial.

The Nixon Adminstration orchestrated Operation Homecoming, a military celebration of the return of US POWs, with televised landings of aircraft and the emergence of the freed men, met by their families and military and government VIPs. 587 POWs returned home, which led to questions about the other 1000+ (as the Nixon number had risen to 1600). Ronal Reagan used this for political hay in his first run for national office, in 1976. A whole industry grew up around the MIA issue, with wristbands being sold, with MIA names on them, purporting that they also had medicinal properties. The POW/MIA flag was created, the image trademarked and then numerous flags sold to individuals and organizations, including VFW posts and the like. The image was marketed at sporting events and fundraising appeals, on tv and in print.

Other scams were perpetuated. Lt Col Jack E Bailey, a retired Air Force officer, created Operation Rescue, a group dedicated to locating and freeing US prisoners, in Southeast Asia. He kept a former smuggling boat, the SS Akuna and raised funds to carry out recon and rescue missions. During that time, the boat was routinely seen docked in Thailand, having never left port, except for a minor rescue of some Vietnamese Boat People. Operation Rescue proved adept at fundraising, using Eberle Associates, a conservative direct mailing company, used to raise funds for Conservative causes. It was revealed that 85% of funds raised by Operation Rescue went towards further fundraising. It was, essentially, a giant pyramid scheme.

Former Special Forces Lt Colonel Bo Gritz carried out fundraising efforts for recon missions into Laos and Vietnam, which largely involved women selling commemorative t-shirts in border village markets and lots of unconfirmed stories. CIA officers testified before Congress about leads, gained through payment, that turned to dust when followed down the line.

Politicians continued to use the issue in negotiations with the North Vietnamese, to their disbelief, as thousands of Vietnamese were lost during the war, their fates unknown. No credible evidence of Americans being held prisoner or storehouses of American remains have ever been offered, yet the US position has been for Vietnam to prove they don't hold prisoners or remains. That is like arresting someone for murder and forcing them to prove their innocence, rather than the state having to prove their guilt.

In the wake of the lies surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Watergate, the secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia, the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam, the invasion of Cambodia, the MIA issue was easily believable, as distrust of government was at an all time high. Conspiracy theories abounded, thanks, in large part, by actual criminal conspiracies, like the Watergate Break-In and cover-up, and subsequent lies told on the campaign trails, of welfare queens, October Surprises, and CIA operations in Latin America. At the heart of it are poor families who just want closure for their lost loved ones, who are most likely dead and their remains long claimed by Nature or the elements, because they went down in the China Sea or in remote areas of the Vietnam jungle. These conspiracy theories would go on to fuel other conspiracy ideas, like 9/11 Truthers and Deep State lunatics, like Q-Anon. Yet another legacy of the Vietnam War: irrational paranoia and government distrust

Here, at least, Collins and Beatty deal in more logical conclusions, that Vic Green didn't want to return as may have been true of a very small number of deserters, but certainly not 1000+ or more servicemembers.

Next up, we look at something from an old master and a veteran...of World War Two, as well as government publications: Will Eisner and Last Day in Vietnam.

And...we're back.

Sorry it's been a while: I had to fight off an incursion on my base camp and then abandon it for a new sector.



So, I promised that I would cover The Other Side, by Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart. Well, I kind of wish I hadn't.



I chose this series, because it sounded like an examination of both sides of the war; but, it ended up not exactly being what was advertised. It is really a psychological horror work, set in Vietnam, rather than a Vietnam War story. As such, it is kind of in the same realm with DMZ, which I had decided not to do, as that is more using Vietnam as a setting for something else. I lump The Creature Commandos and The Viking Commando into that same kind of thing, where they aren't really about WW2, just set within that period and locale. This does sort of deliver on the dual examination; but, unfortunately, through a very streaky lens.

First, a bit of background. Writer Jason Aaron was born in 1973, at the end of direct US involvement in the war, in Alabama, but he learned of the war, from his cousin, who was a veteran of the USMC. That cousin was Jerry Gustav Hasford, who was a combat correspondent, with the Marines, much like Captain Dale Dye, the technical advisor on Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. Combat correspondents were Marines who were carrying out journalistic work for official military publications, like Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, as well as things like Leatherneck Magazine. During the Vietnam War, both were official publications, within the control of the Department of Defense (Stars & Stripes) and the USMC (Leatherneck Magazine). Active duty personnel were assigned to duties on those publications. Theoretically, Stars & Stripes was independent of the US military; but, in practice, it was subordinate to the DOD's Public Affairs mechanism and was used as much as propaganda as reporting, due to the editorial slant of the paper. They might highlight injustices within the military; but they were not going to openly challenge command.....at least, not without a lot of evidence and some senior muscle to back them up. As such, they were hardly any more objective than civilian journalists in theater.

After his time of service, Hasford worked with the Clarion Workshop and the Milford Writers Workshop, where he submitted a manuscript of a novel, to Frederick Pohl, who was an editor at Bantam, who purchased it, published as The Short-Timers, in 1979. In 1982, after talking with Michael Herr, Stanley Kubrick optioned the book to adapt into a film.....Full Metal Jacket......



And therein lies the problem I have with the work.

The mini-series features the parallel tales of Billy Everette, of Russellville, Alabama; and, Vo Binh Dai, of the village of Nam Phong, near Hanoi. Billy receives a draft notice and is inducted into the US marine Corps. Dai answers the call of the People's Army of Vietnam recruiting team, at his village.





Billy goes off to Paris Island, where he becomes a frequent target of his drill sergeant, as he is a bit hapless. However, Billy is also see visions of dead soldiers, with the corpse eaten by carrion and maggots and pieces blown away by mines or mortars or artillery.

Daitrains on the site of an old French plantation, a symbol of the European enemy driven out previously, just as they will the hated American war mongers. Dai writes in his jouranl, as his fellow soldiers talk of the atrocities of the South, of American cannibals, who eat the dead and feed their entrails to their dogs.

Billy continues to see ghosts and starts hearing his rifle talking to him, telling him to put the barrel in his mouth and blow his head off. he goes to see the chaplain, who tells him "Stow that crackpot BSand get your ass squared away most ricky-tick.Jesus don't abide a crybaby, son, and neither does the US Marine Corps."

And I call bull#$%&.

A chaplain is a spiritual guide and counselor, not a mouthpiece for the Corps. Maybe one in a thousand might be a jerk like that; but I ain't buying it.

The whole first issue, from Billy's side, reads like a rehash of The Short-Timers/Full Metal Jacket. I haven't read the book; but, from what I have read, the first act of the film pretty closely mirrors the book and that is what we get here...to the point of just being on the safe side of plagiarism.

Billy continues to be tormented by nightmares of dead soldiers and monsters in the jungle, while Dai suffers nightmares of failing his comrades and his people. Billy is shipped off to Vietnam, Dai and his cadre begin the long march South, to join the freedom fighters of the National Liberation Front. Dai and his comrades are cheered in the villages, as the people offer them food and weapons, which they have stored for them. Little ones cheer, as they proudly march on, to join their brothers in the South, against the imperialists and the gangsters in Saigon.

Billy is sent to Da Nang, where his unit has low morale and he is another FNG. The people hate him and the Marines hate the people. Everything and everyone is for sale.

Dai's cadre suffers on the long march, from malaria, snakebite, injury and fatigue. The jungle is a harsh environment and only the strong survive. Their eyes are swollen by mosquito bites, they barely sleep and their rations become more and more meager, as the go further South. Their morale falters, as they wonder why the Southern "bumpkins" can't fight their own war. Dai sees the Americans try to "bomb their way out of the mess they created," but then is alerted that one of their dead, for whom he is digging a grave, is gone. He finds the body dragged off into the jungle and runs into a tiger. Billy witnesses a wild boar eating the charred remains of a Vietnamese, killed by a napalm strike.

Billy finds himself sent of to Khe Sanh, as reinforcements, while Dai and his men continue South, with NLF guides, each worse than the last. They come across a village, where the NLF are executing the civilians and berate the PAVN soldiers, telling them to move on.

It all culminates in the final efforts to breach the defenses of Khe Sanh, as Dai is part of a sapper team, while Billy is part of the defenders, hearing rats talking to him, through the walls of his barracks bunker. Billy is on the defensive wall, firing at the charging PAVN and NLF soldiers. He kills Dai and survives the war, but never leaves hell behind, as even in Alabama, he is haunted by the image of Dai.

My problem isn't the writing, as much as it is the cliche and the appropriation of material from The Short-Timers. The scenes of Khe Sanh mirror the latter part of the book, which wasn't used in the film (it reaches its climax in the battle for Hue, where Hasford was in the fighting). So much of this is Hasford's material. The cliche is on Dai's side, as Dai is fully devoted to Party doctrine and propaganda. I;m sure there are many who were; but it seems less three-dimensional. It is only in others, like his comrade Xuan, that we see doubts in their fight, or poor strategies from their leaders. I suppose it is forgivable, as Dai witnesses things that disillusion him, just as the Marines and GIS did. The Vietnamese people hate them, as outsiders and their leaders have fed them nonsense. Dai finds that his leaders have fed them nonsense and that the old divide of North and South is more than ideological. The NLF killing the villagers tallies with some tales that the NLF would often target those that were more educated and had more wealth than they had and that it was as much a class fight, as it was an ideological or revolutionary fight. The South Vietnamese government was massively corrupt; but, so were many NLF cadres, as they spent more time settling old scores thandriving out invaders and uniting with the North.

Mostly, this is a frustrating work, as I never really feel like Dai and his comrades are realistically portrayed and, at times, come across as more serious versions of Phred, the VC soldier in Doonesbury, who befriends BD. The only real difference is the sense of irony and satire.

Mostly, I get a sense of hero worship from Aaron, towards his cousin. Nothing wrong with that; but, Hasford wasn't exactly what you would call a credible source. The Short-Timers is influenced by Hasford's experiences, but it is also highly fictionalized and written for drama. As a combat correspondent, Hasford wasn't a front line Marine and there was a difference between troops in garrison, like him, and those in the field. Hasford also seemed to have psychological issues after the war (who didn't?), as he later faced charges for grand theft, for thousands of dollars of stolen library books and magazines, relating to the Civil War. His defence was that he was researching for the writing of a Civil War novel, but he had tons of books from not only the California Polytechnic State University at San Louis Obispo (discovered in a storage locker, by camps police), but also boks from libraries across the US, as well as Australia and the UK. He plea bargained for a 6 month sentence and restitution of the books (having to pay for the shipping, for their return) and served 3 months, blaming the situation on persecution by "Moral Majority fanatics and the Fascist State." He ended up living, in poverty, of a Greek Island, where he died from complications related to untreated diabetes.

That is not the picture of a healthy mind.

The book is filled with profanity, far beyond what I experienced in the military and beyond what seems reasonable, to me, for Marines in the field. Soldiers, sailors and Airmen swear...a lot...; but, not everyone and not in every situation. Hollywood writers like to latch onto it because they think it makes the characters seem colorful. R Lee Ermey is the obvious model for the DI in issue 1 and he improvised much of his profane dialogue, in the film. DI's, despite claims by the military, did use profanity and did strike recruits, in that era (and later); but, Ermey is probably more accurate in his performance in The Boys in Company C, as the DI's job is to turn recruits into Marines, to survive on the battlefield. In Vietnam, the training got truncated, which made some of it more intense, and the methods more extreme; but, Ermey's character, in the film, is based on the DI, in the book, while his character in Boys in Company C seems less of a cartoon of a DI and more like a real person, putting on a display, then being honest with an African-American recruit, who was a street fighter. He tries to get him to help the others, because he will be able to survive in combat and the recruit can help teach the others. The recruit doesn't care, as he is in it for himself, but slowly comes to bond with the others, while still working with drug runners to smuggle heroin out in GI bodybags.

Too much of this comic, to me, feels like the end result of watching Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now too many times and thinking that was the real thing. By contrast, Don Lomax's Vietnam Journal is able to occasionally be profane, brutal, and gory; but, it never feels cliched. The Nam had to operate under stiffer restrictions, as far as language and gore, but, still managed to convey a portion of the real experience. This feels like if I had tried to write Band of Brothers, based solely on seeing Battleground and Patton.

Now, removing that aspect, it is a pretty effective piece of psychological horror, which fits within the Vertigo oeuvre. It is the stuff of nightmares, within a war setting, a Weird War tale, taken to a non-Code Approved extreme. It was nominated for an Eisner and if you can separate out reality and influence, it is a fine work; but, I have trouble distancing those elements from it. I also think it is more interested in shock and horror than relating the reality of Vietnam, which is why I am kind of down on it, as it feels more like a bait-and-switch, in the selling of the series.

What I do see is that is representative of how comics are treating war, now, as a psychological tale, rather than a historical or adventure vehicle. We don't get the gung ho Fightin' Army and GI Combat stories of the past, but stuff like this, and DMZ, and Catshit One, where the war is a setting, rather than a subject. Vietnam is ancient history, to the modern comics generation. Thankfully, not all of them. My next feature is a bit more of the historical record/fiction mode, as Joe Kubert, comic book legend and master, returns, in part, to his work on Tales of the Green Beret. However, instead of propaganda war adventures, with heroic Special Forces super soldiers, he writes and draws a tale of the real thing, in 1965, at the battle of Don Xoai. The work is influenced by real events and people and is the result of interviews with surviving members. It has more in common with something like We Were Soldiers Once, than The Short-Timers, or Platoon. It falls within the revisionism of the War as winning the battles, but losing the political will, a narrative which ignores that driving off the enemy is not the same as "winning the war." Unlike Tales of the Green Beret, Kubert is doing his own writing and this reflects more of his perspective on things.

If that's what the kids are calling it these days...

I have read The Other Side exactly once and it was back when the TPB came out (2007), so I remember very little of it. What I do remember, is that the artwork was nice, that it was a little underwhelming story-wise, and that it reminded me of an updated Weird War Tales issue. I really must revisit it one of these days.

No, I haven't forgot this thread. I am getting down to the end of things, though...but not quite yet.

This entry is about Joe Kubert's Dong Xoai, Vietnam, 1965 graphic novel, published in 2010, by DC Comics. It was one of Kubert's last original works and one of his last solo projects. In many ways, it kind of brings us back to the beginning of Vietnam, in the comics, since it takes Kubert back to US Special Forces....The Green Berets.

We have talked about the Green Berets and, more specifically, the syndicated newspaper strip, based on their roles and exploits, originated by Robin Moore, the author of the novel, inspired by his time observing the Green Berets. Moore had little to do with the strip, as actual writing was done by others, while Kubert (and assistants) handled the art chores. Kubert tweaked the scripts, here and there, to cut down on some of the propaganda, in favor of the adventure elements. It is no surprise, then, that this reads like an unused series of strips from the comic, with Kubert plotting as well as drawing. Really, the only major difference is that Kubert tells the story via what looks like a sketchbook journal, rather than a comic strip or comic book page. Each page features anywhere from one to 3 images, with text dialogue and narration and other than being a bit more explicit with some of the montagnard customs and dress and battle scenes, this could have easily been a sequence in the origial strip.

The story follows an A-Team detachment, sent into the Bu Gia Map area, in the Phuoc Long province, near the Cambodian border. It's a deeply rural area, in Southeastern Vietnam, with Nha Trang and Cam Ranh Bay to the East and Saigon to the South.

The series starts out by introducing us to the A-Team detachment, as they travel by C-118 cargo plane to South Vietnam, instead of a 707, as originally briefed. This is just the start to the change in mission. They are to land in Nha Trang, to be briefed by the area commander, then be transported to the CIDG camp, in Bu Gia Map, to take over the training of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group, overseeing the improvements to the existing camp and conduct offensive operations against the VC. The team have been together for a while and 5 members of the team have had tours in Vietnam. The change in aircraft is their first notice that things aren't going to plan and the second is that their Intelligence NCO, Daniels, has been reassigned, before they have even begun their transit to the camp. The team is transported by Australian C-7 Caribou, a smaller cargo plane, to their destination. They decide to take advantage of some parachutes on board and conduct an airborne jump, to the site....



They get orientated with the team they are relieving and the local CIDG personnel, which includes mainly montagnard families and some Cambodians. The montagnards are tough, spirited fighters and they get along well with the Americans, as they are respectful to their culture and customs, even if it means loading up on anti-viral meds, before partaking in a celebration that involves drinking a murky fruit concoction, through a communal bamboo straw. The drink has an intoxicating effect and the soldiers cut loose with the montagnards in their celebrations....



They are not impressed with their ARVN counterparts, as they seem to lack good leadership and have contempt for the rural tribes. At one point, an ARVN Aspirant (a sort of warrant officer) refuses to give permission for ARVN forces to join a recon mission, to scout out VC activities. He defers to the absent ARVN lieutenant. The team bypasses him and goes to the CIDG chief and recruits members from it to join two members of the team, on the mission.

The team is then assigned to strengthen a camp in Dong Xoai, to the south, which is at a cross section of major roads and is of interest to the VC and PAVN, for moving in men and supplies from across the Cambodian border.



The team arives and gets a briefing. The camp had been harassed by intermittent mortar attacks, but no sustained attack. Another camp was hit by VC attack and the ARVN withdrew, while the advisor team remained. The VC made no move to try to occupy the camp. They fear Dong Xoai is a prime target. They set about assessing the camp defenses and note many things that need work. They set about strengthening the earthen defensive berms and barb wire entanglements, as well as servicing the artillery and crew-served machine gun and mortar positions. A detachment of 9 Seabees joins them, but without heavy equipment.

The team conducts recon patrols and spots plenty of evidence of VC activity, including a burned out village, wiith villagers and foodstuffs gone. They meet with their counterparts to try to prepare for the inevitable attack, and find cooperation with the LLDB detachment 9ARVN Special Forces), but not with the ARVN commander of an armored unit, that they feel will be needed to protect the camp. They work with what they have, instead.

They receive reports from montagnards of VC activity and capture a VC spy, who is subjected to harsh interrogation.

At this point, I question Kubert's objectivity, as he acknowledges that prisoner abuse occurred on both sides of the conflict, but he says the SF soldiers were only observers and not participants. I have no idea whether or not this was true with the real team, but there is a ton of evidence that US personnel engaged in torture and mistreatment of prisoners, or at least cooperated with the ARVN units conducting it, with the CIA actually training them in methodology. It is no secret that the infamous School of the Americas, which was noted for training counter-guerrilla tactics to friendly Latin American nations (such as Honduras and El Salvador) is located at Ft Bragg (both of which have since been renamed), along with the 5th Special Forces Group. Special Forces were not angels, then or now. Generally speaking, the interrogation methods taught are more psychological than physical, as experience has shown that physical torture can strengthen the resolve to resist, or lead to intelligence of questionable value. However you want to sugarcoat it or spin it, the US Army and the US Government has engaged in the torture and harsh interrogation of prisoners and trained others in such techniques.

After calls for increased support and air assets, a small ARVN detachment is sent by helicopter to assess the situation. The officer in charge disagrees with the Americans and refuses additional supplies or support. Mortar harassment continues, in a build-up to an attack. An LLDB patrol encounters a small VC force and captures one, killing two others. The CO gathers his men and assesses their strengths and weaknesses. They expect the atatck to come from the forested area, in the West and concentrate on reinforcing their defenses in that direction. They lack sufficient heavy weapons and air support.

Heavy rains come and the VC gather for the attack, some 500 strong, with 75mm artillery, flame throwers, pole charges, grenades and small arms. The VC launch their attack with preliminary mortar strikes, targeting the masonry buildings in the camp, with the command hut and team & striker billets seemingly scoped out with great accuracy, suggesting inside information (as expected). The CO is wounded, but ambulatory. The radio wire has been cut and a mortar barrage hits teh team hut. The CO's leg collapses and the others have to support him....



The CO is set up at a machine gun position and the other members attend to the crews manning the walls, to bolster their courage and lead the defense. The mortar barrage slows and the attack begins in earnest. Sgt Allison leads the defense, calmly ignoring the blare of the VC bugles and returning sustained fire. he is hit in the chest and head, but keeps firing and his men fight on, following his example. One of the Seabees emerges from a destroyed billet to meet a VC horde charging at him and fights them until he is killed. Another American mans an 81 mm mortar, alone, and keeps up fire, in an exposed position, until he is overrun and killed.

Sgt barton continues to direct the defense along the walls, moving here and there, providing encouragement and direction, oblivious to the rounds hitting around him. Barton becomes a rallying point for the defense.

The CO is able to use his weapon sparingly, but effectively. Most of the team has been hit or killed and the CIDG personnel have scattered. Two of the Seabees slide out of the camp, to safety. Two Seabees join Barton, in mounting a continued fight, against overwhelming odds. The stubbornly fight their way towards District HQ, sustaining wounds, but alive, unlike their comrades. They get the CO to the command hut, but have no morphine to treat him and they have to leave him there, at his order. The VC have penetrated the perimeter at multiple points and are pouring in. The Green Berets keep fighting and encourage the Vietnamese to stand their ground and fight. The defenders are outnumbered and low on ammunition, but Barton keeps them fighting. One of the Seabees is hit and taken to safety. The radio is working and they call for help, but the weather affects flying. Daylight does not bring hope, as the ARVN start abandoning their posts, leaving the Americans and a few others maintaining the defense. The VC start to penetrate the inner perimeter, ordering men to lay across the barbed wire so that others can cross it. The A-Team fires through gaps in their building to keep the VC at bay. They receive word that help is in the air and inbound.



Help comes in the form of 2 B-57s and a helicopter gunship, which fire rockets and drop bombs, but morning fog prevents accurate targeting. The effect, however, gives pause to the VC attack; but, not for long. A .51 cal machinegun, positioned in the old district school, opens fire on them. a couple of soldiers take a rocket launcher and work to get in position to take it out. They are successful, but the Seabee, Adams takes further wounds, while the Green Beret, Kelly is hit in the shoulder. He calls for help to get Adams to safety. Finally, helicopters bring in an ARVN force, but they are ambushed by the VC....



The ARVN take heavy losses and the rescue fails. They continue on the radio and patch wounds, but Adams needs a medevac.

Barton and his team work to take out a VC flame thrower. They finally spot the man carrying the tank and target their weapons on the tank itself, finally piercing it and spraying the inflammable mixture across the defenders, who are then engulfed in flames.

The inner group has to evacuate the HQ building and move to the howitzer pits, taking the wounded first. Their ammo is dwindling and they are being concentrated into a small area. The howitzer pit is their final stand. Barton and Smith finally meet up with them. They all prepare for the final firefight. They pour it on, as the VC attack en masse...



They keep fighting, until the sound of "whooping" causes pause in the attack, as Hueys move in and start engaging the VC from the air, with door guns, and gunships with rockets. The men prepare for extraction as the helos make their runs across the VC horde. a helo lands and the men move rapidly to load the wounded and get aboard, while the other helos keep the VC at bay. They lift off. The two Seabees who had taken refuge in the village are still under cover and wounded and miss the choppers, but are able to get out, on foot.

A counter-atatck is assembled and a helo-based assault is launched on the VC occupiers. They are able to overwhelm the VC and recover the dead and missing wounded and retake the camp.

The Battle of Don Xoai, in 1965, was precipitated by the instability within the Republic of Vietnam government, in 1964. General Khanh had ousted Gen Van Minh as leader of the ruling junta and tightened controls and censorship, leading to mass protests. His favoritism of the Buddhists drew anger from the Catholics and unsettled the US government, as the Buddhists sought a political resolution with the Communists, rather than a military defeat, leaving the Communists in some form of power, in a coalition or similar arrangement. Khanh was eventually deposed and went into exile.

The North increased offensive operations in the South, seeing the instability as the perfect distraction, that would allow them to flow in and cut off parts of the country, isolating Saigon from the rest. Dong Xoai was a key traffic point for this effort, leading to the battle to take the CIDG camp. The ensuing battle was pretty much as Kubert depicted, with some slight differences. The ARVN 52nd Ranger Battalion was able to push out the VC, but at a high cost. Intelligence assessments suggested that the VC still had great strength in the area and could launch further attacks. gen Westmoreland ordered in a battallion from the 503rd Infantry regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, to reinforce the area. After 5 days, it became clear that the VC had completely withdrawn and the battalion was withdrawn.

In the actual advisory detachment, consisting of 11 Green Berets and 9 Seabees, all received Purple Hearts for wounds, 2 Green Berets and 7 Seabees were awarded Bronze Stars, 4 Berets and 2 Seabees won Silver Stars, 3 Berets wond the Distinguished Service cross, and one Beret and one Seabee were awarded the Medal of Honor. It doesn't take to much math to realize that some receievd multiple awards for their actions. The two Medal of Honor winners were Lt Williams, of the Special Forces team, and and Petty Officer Third Class Marvin Shields was a member of the Seabee detachment. They went out under heavy fire, with a rocket launcher, to try to take out the VC .51 cal machine gun. Shields was badly wounded and died of his wounds during the air evac. Williams had assumed command of the defense after the team captain was incapacitated by his leg wounds. He was all over the camp, directing the defense, bringing ammo and encouraging the defenders, under constant enemy fire. Williams was present his medal of Honor in a ceremony, in Washington, by President Johnson, with the surviving members of the team present. Charles Williams remained in Special Forces, serving in staff billets, at Ft Bragg, until his retirement, in 1978, as a major. He died in 1982, at the age of 49. He was wounded 4 times during the Battle of Dong Xoai.

The story here is a fictionalized version of events, but it gets the main points right. Like more later works on this area, it chooses to ignore the politics of the war and focus on the role of the men and their heroism during the fighting. Kubert was a master of the war comic and his pencils were adept at capturing the humanity of the characters and it is on fine display here. his technique is similar to his work on Yossel, looking like a sketch diary, rather than a comic narrative. It lends an authenticity to the piece that a standard color comic might lack and given that it is based on fact, it is very appropriate. it also allows the power and mood of Kubert's pencils to shine through. Kubert doesn't break any new ground with his narrative, as it could have easily been a Tales of the Green berets strip. However, he does a fantastic job of introducing us to the team and their mission, their day-to-day activities, the culture of the montagnards, the lack of professionalism and leadership in the ARVN officers, the ineffectiveness of the AVN forces in the absence of strong leadership, and the desperation of battle. He also helpfully supplises layouts of the camp, to give you an idea of the geography and defenses; but, if you have no background in the history or the tactics employed, it can be a little hard to grasp the flow of battle. wisely, Kubert focuses on individual actions to keep the narrative flowing.

Here are sketches of the camp and the area....





In the first, you can see that the camp and the local village were separated by two intersecting roads, a key reason why it was targeted by the VC, as it would give them avenues for further troop transport and attack. The camp is surrounded by open field, preventing an enemy from sneaking up on the perimter, but you can see the forest area that would hide the VC force, when the time came.

The compound itself is split into two sections, the Special Forces camp and the CIDG section. The walls you see are berms, made up of earth, compacted to strengthen it. You can see that their main weapons emplacements are aimed at the forest area, with machine gun bunkers at the corners, to allow a wide field of fire. You can see the two pits for the 105 mm howitzers, that provided the artillery support, until they were knocked out, in the attack.

Mortars hit their HQ building and troop billets, then other areas of the camp. Men manned the walls on the forest side, with team members there providing leadership and steadying the defense. As the battle raged, the advisory team was forced to retreat to the main compound and the District HQ building, until the VC pierced the walls at several points and pressed their attack. The defenses were in layers, as there were further barbed wire entanglements inside the compound and defenses around the buildings. The idea was to create strong points where the enemy would try to move and hit them with heavy fire, preventing their movement, ultimately allowing for flanking troops to cut them off and decimate them. If that is not possible, the strong points delay the attackers and try to inflict as many casualties as possible, to whittle away at them. It becomes a battle of attrition and resolve. If the resolve of the defenders wanes, the attackers can overwhelm the strongpoints and pour through. If the attackers lose their resolve, they withdraw and redirect their attack or flee the scene.

As the battle became more desperate, the VC were able to set up the machine gun in the village and direct long range fire at the HQ building. Lt Williams and Petty Officer Shields; or, as named here, Lt Kelley and Petty Officer Adams, use a recoilless rifle to take out the machine gun position, with Shields/Adams mortally wounded. They fall back to the artillery pits, to get out of the building, which has them trapped. At this point, they have nowhere to retreat. They have walls on two sides and the attackers coming from the building areas. The VC can come at them from three main points, though they could try to outflank them by getting men up on the berm walls. Finally, air support arrives and slows down the attacks, then decimates them, with strikes, while the slicks land and load the team. They had to maneuver in to an area large enough and close enough to land, get the wounded and the other men aboard, while the gunship provided cover, keeping the VC from advancing.. They then lifted off and left the camp to the VC.

The two Seabees had gotten cut off in the fighting and were able to get to the village and hide out and remained there until the ARVN launched their counter-attack to retake the camp. All of the dead were recovered and the base was retaken.

This is Joe Kubert doing what he did best, depicting human beings, in conflict, and giving it a personal point of view. It doesn't overly glorify, though it doesn't give the truly grim details, either. It lacks the personal experience of Doug Murray and Don Lomax, much as Sgt Rock lacked the personal experience that Sam Glanzman brought to the USS Stevens feature. Kubert draws mostly WW2 Era weapons, and I didn't see anything resembling an M-16, which was in wide issue, at that point. The book ends with pictures and detail from the real team and the weapons seen in the photos consist of M-16s and at least one or 2 M-1 carbines. He shows one of the team using a Thompson SMG, which would have been unlikely. An M-3 Grease Gun or Swedish K SMG would be more likely. The CIDG and ARVN would have been armed with M-1 carbines, Garands and other weapons like that, plus some armed with M-16s, as the war progressed (or M-14s). The VC would be armed with a combination of French, American, and Chinese weapons, depending on what they got their hands on.

Kubert is a fitting end to discussion about the fighting during the war, as we next pivot into those displaced by the war, with two different works that examine the people caught up in the war and their suffering and escape. The first which we will examine looks at the lives of those forced to flee the area and seek new lives, on the other side of the world, both in the United States and in France. The second examines the life and experiences of a Cambodian pop icon, who found herself being used as a symbol, during the conflict, and a prisoner, after the Khmer Rouge came to power and her fate. Both of these works originated outside the US, which gives us a different perspective on both the war and the people who lived through it and survived it.