Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic world of Mel Gibson’s Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armed thugs. They were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanity and civil...
Like most of the great turning points in history, it was obvious and yet no one saw it coming.
And while each death would echo loudly halfway around the world, hurling families and even whole communities into grief, often with shattering consequences for generations, in Hue there wasn't even ti...
They were called Ontos, after the Greek word for thing, in part because they were ugly.
The Viet Cong were not the idealistic warriors of American antiwar propaganda; they were vicious. They relied on terror.
Opposition to the war was becoming fashionable. Popular figures—intellectuals, athletes, musicians—stepped up to announce their opposition
Beware of men with theories that explain everything.
Although it is true that after three weeks of heavy fighting the enemy was driven off, it was the impact of the initial blow that resonated most loudly.
You could send in your bleeding-heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the big-e...
When he got back to Phu Bai, one of the walking wounded, he was ordered to look through nearly a hundred body bags and identify those he recognized. It took him two days to complete the job, unzipping...
They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
Instead of being assembled by genes, the worm was assembled by memes, a word coined by British scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are original ideas. Da...
He would think about this a lot later, and the best he could explain it was, his own life no longer mattered. All that did matter were his buddies, his brothers, that they not get hurt, that they not...
Garrison wrote in his memo to Hoar. There is no place in Mogadishu we cannot go and be successful in a fight. There are plenty of places we can go and be stupid.
But what if the death toll—which despite the distortions clearly favored the Americans—was having the opposite effect? What if heightened punishment by US bombs and guns actually fueled Communist resi...
Anyone who uses Windows on their home computer is familiar with routine security updates, which Microsoft issues on the second Tuesday of each month. In the Tribe it has become known as Patch Tuesday.
The Tet surprise was regarded by Westy as proof of Hanoi’s weakness. Nowhere in his understanding of the war was there room for the size and quality of the force that had taken Hue. So the MACV in Sai...
Remember the two signatures of modern war: (1) You never win, exactly; you claim victory. (2) Perception is paramount.
There were splits within families over the present war, where one son had sided with Saigon and the other with Hanoi. The liberation of Hue suspended law and order and upended basic decency, giving re...
The fifty-three-year-old former Eagle Scout from South Carolina didn’t drink, smoke, or swear; the most colorful expletive in his vocabulary was dad gum.7 He was a West Pointer and had been an artille...