Among his works, Butler uses reference to one small military intelligence unit working near and in Saigon in several ways. His first published novel The Alleys of Eden (1981) follows the life of Clifford Wilkes, an enlisted man from the MI unit, who deserted and lived in hiding with Lanh, a bar girl in Saigon. Fleming, the captain of the MI unit, is the lead character in On Distant Ground, and Wilson Hand, the enlisted man held for a week by the Viet Cong, then freed when Fleming raids the hut in which Hand is a prisoner, appears briefly as a witness at Fleming's court martial, but is the main character in Sun Dogs (1982)—not "a Viet Nam war novel"—in which he is a New York based private eye hired by an oil company to investigate the theft of documents from a records center...