I got a real surprise earlier this week when I opened a package from John H. Taylor, an author from Yorba Linda, CA, who enclosed his new book, Jackson Place. Jackson Place is a fictional account of what happened when Nixon chooses to undergo a Senate impeachment trial instead of quitting. Nixon declares himself temporarily incapacitated due to preparation for the anticipated impeachment trial and takes a leave of absence while Ford assumes the duties of office under Section 3 of the 25th Amendment. I’m not going to tell you how it ends.
Taylor served on former President Nixon’s staff in San Clemente, New York and New Jersey form 1979-90, including six years as chief of staff. He traveled with Nixon to the Soviet Union, China and many other countries, helping him with six of his books. He was director of the Nixon Library from 1990 until it became part of the federal system of presidential libraries in 2007.
Taylor was one of two executors of Nixon’s estates and oversaw  President and Mrs. Nixon’s funerals in 1993 and 1994. He was ordained as an Episcipal priest in 2004 and has served since then as vicar at St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church and School in Rancho Santa margarita, CA. He wrote a previous novel, Patterns of Abuse (1998) and is married to Kathy O’Conner, Nixon’s last chief of staff.
One of the characters in Jackson Place is Frank Szabados, fictional secretary of the National Security Council in the Nixon administration. In Taylors’s book, Szabafdos is sent by the self-exiled but still politically involved Nixon to make a clandestine trip to Vietnam in 1974 to gather intelligence on the state of the conflict. Szabados visits his mother and father-in-law, An and Ty, in Saigon and makes surreptitious inquiries about the North Vietnam state of mind while recalling his own service as an Army Corps of Engineers officer several years earlier.
Taylor wrote to me:
I am enclosing a copy of my novel about Richard Nixon (my former boss), Watergate and the Vietnam war. As I say in the author’s note, I consulted your monograph about your wartime experiences when I was imagining work as an Army engineer for one of my characters, Frank Szabados.
Thank you for your service as well as your thoughtful reflections about it.
In the “Author’s Note” at the end of the book, Taylor wrote:
A monograph by Richmond, California, City Council member and Vietnam veteran Thomas K. Butt, “Before and After Vietnam 1969-70” provided insights about the life of a U.S. Army engineer in and around Saigon.”
As I read the book, I was amazed and flattered to see how closely Taylor had used some of my accounts to describe his character’s experiences.
Here are some examples (underlining is mine to pick out key references):
On 23 May 1969, I wrote:
I took a good trip yesterday to a little town on the coast about due east of Saigon (Ham Tan). It was just a slow and sleepy as another world and sure would make a fabulous resort. We checked some construction at a MACV facility and toured around the village centered around a lagoon at the mouth of a river. They had a fantastic fish market, and I couldn’t resist eating a big gob of raw snails (oc in Vietnamese – escargots in French). They were dipped in a kind of salt-red pepper mix and delicious – maybe even better than Louisiana crayfish – and washed down with the local Hai Muoi Ba (33) beer.

On pages 71- 74 of Jackson Place, Taylor wrote about a clandestine meeting arranged by his father-in-law with a relative with connections to North Vietnam:
Ty steered east, toward the coast. He said they were headed to a fishing village called Ham Tan. Frank remembered it. He’d supervised a couple of construction projects in the same district…
At about one in the afternoon, they left the main road and drove along a river for a kilometer or so until they came to the village, which was built around a lagoon. The South China Sea spread out in front of them, glittering, blue and peaceful…

“I suppose if the war ever ends,” he said, looking at Frank, “the Americans will want to build one of their resort hotels for rich capitalists, with beautiful Vietnamese women serving cocktails around the pool…
Ty smiled. A minute later he pulled around a corner and parked. They got out and walked along the alley to Ham Tan’s bustling fish market. The passed stalls piled high with black tiger shrimp, blue crab, Vietnamese catfish, and Pangasius. If the pale, skinny American looked out of place, nobody appeared to notice. By midday the vendors were eager to sell the rest of their wares, get home before the afternoon rains, and go to sleep so they could be back at three the next morning.

They sat down. The waiter brought three bottles of “33” beer and a big bowl of raw snails, a delicacy Frank had avoided while in the army, which warned soldiers that they’d contract roundworm that would multiply in their brains and drive them insane. This didn’t seem to be a time to be cautious. The snails came with bowls of salt and red pepper. He followed the Nguyens’ lead in dipping them in the mixture and washing hem down with beer. They were delicious.

On March 25, 1969, I wrote:
We landed at Cam Ranh Bay yesterday AM early – processed in-country in about two hours and had the rest of the day off while assignments were being made from Saigon. I kind of wish I’d never seen Cam Ranh – the vision will linger and spoil me. It’s a beautiful spot on a peninsula of land surrounded by huge mountains – a lot like Honolulu – and has one of the finest white sand beaches I’ve ever seen with Hawaii-type surf, etc. Everything was quiet and resort like, hot but with a refreshing sea breeze. Nobody carries weapons – it looks more like a war at Ft. Polk than Cam Ranh.

But then all good things end. I got an initial assignment to the 20th Eng. Brigade with hdqtrs [headquarters]. In Bien Hoa so we flew in there at 4:00 AM this morning. This part of the country is an entirely different story in appearance. The Bien Hoa-Long Binh complex sprawls for miles and miles in every direction – dust, red clay and thousands of slum looking temporary buildings, miles of barbed wire, bunkers, etc.
Taylor described Frank Szabados’ impressions of arriving in Vietnam on page 74:
“When you first come to Vietnam it was through Cam Ranh Bay,” Ty said as he steered carefully through the narrow streets at village center.

“The most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen. It was six miles long, ringed by mountains and palm trees,” Frank said. “It looked like a movie. We had only a few hours in the afternoon and evening. Some of the guys who were stationed there were having a barbecue, and they gave us beers and hot dogs and chicken A few of the Californians were surfing. We were all wondering why nobody wanted to come to Vietnam. The next morning it was into the choppers and on to Long Binh Post.”

“I take it that’s when you found out why nobody wanted to come to Vietman,” Ty said.

Frank said, “You know what I mean, dad. It was paradise. There was no evidence of the war except soldiers, and they were in swimming trunks. They didn’t even bring their weapons to the beach.”

I described my partly cynical and partly ironic theory of why engineer casualties were low:
I arrived in Vietnam at the height of the American commitment in March 1969 when 543,000 U.S. military personnel were spread throughout the country.[1] But it was also the beginning of “Vietnamization,” when the U.S. commitment rapidly wound down by order of President Nixon. Although the U.S. presence was rapidly dwindling, the years 1969-1970 saw 14,000 of the nearly 50,000 total U.S. military deaths in Vietnam. This was nearly 20 fatalities a day, compared to the approximately two per day currently experienced in Iraq in mid-2004. Very few of these Vietnam fatalities, however, were Army engineers. The Corps of Engineers is recognized as one of the Army’s “combat arms,” and the secondary mission of the Army Engineers is to “fight as infantry,” but Army engineers in Vietnam were engaged far more in construction and land clearing than actual combat. I came to believe that the Viet Cong knew the country would belong to them someday, so why impede the construction of infrastructure?

Like me, Taylor’s Frank Szabados came to the Army through ROTC and was stationed at Long Binh Post, supervising the construction of infrastructure. His theory about the Viet Cong avoiding destruction of infrastructure was the same as mine(Page 57):

In 1967, he had been stationed at Long Binh Post, 25 kilometers northeast of the capital. He was a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Engineers, commissioned after serving in the ROTC out of Fordham University in the Bronx. He supervised thousands of troops who cleared jungles and built highways. The duty wasn’t especially dangerous. One of Frank’s buddies joke that since the Viet Cong would end up the country anyway, they had no interest in blowing up the brand-new American infrastructure.

Somewhere along the line, Frank Szabados, married a Vietnamese woman he met in Vietnam who had worked as a switchboard operator and was going to law school.
I wrote about a girl who was a telephone operator and attended law school:
This photo was taken by Al Tolbert of Nha, a Saigon girl who worked as a telephone operator and attended law school.  I liked the sound of her voice on the phone and somehow talked her into going out with me.


Taylor describes how Frank Szabados met his future wife, An (Page 57):
One night An (she changed the spelling and pronunciation after they were married) came with a friend to a party at the bachelor officer’s quarters. They were bright women in miniskirts who worked as switchboard operators at the American embassy. An, who was also going to law school, wondered if Frank had ever met Bob Dylan, Jackie Onassis or Harper Lee.

On April 1, 1969, I wrote:
Everything is fine after completing my first week in this great place. Not much excitement, but I have been doing some more sightseeing. Went down to Saigon Sunday afternoon and spent the night. I looked up Al Tolbert who worked with me at Ft. Polk. He gave me a tour from top to bottom. It’s quite a place. It’s dirty, congested and smells bad, but so full of life that you can’t help liking it. Al, being a city planner, is just eating it up. He’s learned quite a bit of Vietnamese in two months and seems to know the back alley system by heart as well as most dealers on the black market and various other semi-shady endeavors. We had a fabulous dinner at a floating restaurant on the Saigon River then proceeded to check out other sites of cultural and educational interest.

I didn’t take Nga to a floating restaurant (As I recall, it was the officers club on a Saigon rooftop), but I did write about meeting an old friend at a floating restaurant my first time in Saigon. On page 57 of Jackson Place, Taylor writes:
After he’d taken her to a candlelight dinner at a floating restaurant on the Saigon River, she told him with her delightful smile that if there was to be a second date, it would be at the home of her father, deputy vice minister of defense, Nguyen Thanh Ty.

About guard duty at Ling Binh, I wrote:
Perimeter guard duty at Long Binh was allocated so that each organization had charge of a sector and was responsible for manning that sector each night. The responsibility was further delegated to and rotated among smaller units, so that our headquarters company might have the assignment once a month. For each sector, there was also an “officer of the guard,” who was responsible for constantly checking the sector all night long to make sure those on guard duty were awake.

I think I pulled guard duty only once when our company was tapped. I remember one of the spec 4s who was supposed to drive me around was checking his weapon, a .45 caliber pistol, when it went off and missed his foot by a hair. Along our perimeter sector were about a dozen guard bunkers, each with a fixed M-60 machine gun and a “starlight scope” (night vision device). Each bunker was manned by several soldiers. It was real spooky running the perimeter checks. The jeep light had to be turned off, and of course, there was no light in the bunkers. I usually found the guards asleep, and I was concerned that someone might wake up in confusion and start shooting. So, before entering each bunker, I would try to make enough noise, but very carefully, so as not to jolt anyone awake.

When Long Binh came under rocket attack, sirens went off, and we were supposed to head for a bunker. After a while, I figured out that the maximum range of the 122 mm rockets nearly always launched from a nearby hill (“Rocket Ridge”) was a few hundred feet short of my hootch, typically exploding on impact at the bottom of the hill below our area (fittingly called “Rocket Gulch”), so I stopped going to the bunker.

On Page 70 of Jackson Place, Taylor writes:
Ty saw Frank scanning left to right, as though he were on guard duty back at Long Binh Post. He’d only pulled it once in a year, but it had been eventful. A round of rocket attacks hit within 50 feet of the perimeter fence.

Jackson Place was a quick and entertaining summer read. I recommend it.