These problems have been here so long that the only way I’ve been able to function at all is by learning to ignore them. Else I would be in a constant state of panic, unable to think or act constructi...
Hue had become a city of the dead.
One of its analysts was Daniel Ellsberg, who at the time was back in the States compiling the report that—after he leaked it to the press in 1971—would become known as The Pentagon Papers. The study s...
He was convinced that men lost their nerve in combat when they allowed themselves to think too much. The part movies never got right about war was all the waiting, and all the effort it took not to th...
He was not the first general to welcome statistics he wanted to hear—but the numbers emerged from an intricate origami of war bureaucracy: South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and American. The truth w...
The river’s name, Huong, evokes the pleasing scent of incense or the pink and white petals that float downstream in autumn from orchards to the north. The Americans called it the Perfume River.
If there was one ideological rationale that had broad appeal, it was nationalism, which for many boiled down to a fervent desire to be left alone.
From the perspective of nearly half a century, the Battle of Hue and the entire Vietnam War seem a tragic and meaningless waste. So much heroism and slaughter for a cause that now seems dated and near...
Excited. In a good way. I've been training my whole life for this.
Do me a favor, okay? Tell my parents that I fought well today. And tell them that I... that I... that I fought hard.
Sitting cross-legged on the rug, puffing on a pipe, wearing a fat gold Rolex on his wrist, Khamenei asked the colonel, If we were to release all of you now, without any conditions, how long would it b...
Osama bin Laden’s ideas were neither new nor compelling outside his relatively small circle of followers. They belonged to an ugly cul-de-sac of history, an era where witches and heretics were burned...
In April 1967, Johnson had dispatched General Creighton Abrams to Vietnam as Westy’s deputy. Abrams, a famous tank commander in World War II, had more combat experience than any other officer in the u...
Whirlwind of war.
The city was shredding them block by block. No place was safe. The air was alive with hurtling chunks of hot metal. They heard the awful slap of bullets into flesh and heard the screams and saw the in...
Leadership was partly showmanship, and Westy neglected no means of projecting confidence, strength, and moxie.
It was terribly risky, maybe even hopeless. But one or two properly armed, well-trained soldiers could hold off an undisciplined mob indefinitely. Shughart and Gordon were experts at killing and stayi...
He knew the sound of an AK-47. It made a high-pitched, more mechanical crack than the American rifle, the M16, which made a deeper, rounder sort of pop.
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and...
And yet these Americans, with their helicopters and laser-guided weapons and shock-troop Rangers were going to somehow sort it out in a few weeks? Arrest Aidid and make it all better? They were trying...