Two hundred and fifty American marines and soldiers were killed, and 1,554 wounded.75 Another 458 ARVN soldiers were killed and an estimated 2,700 wounded. The Front’s losses are estimated to have bee...
They were called Ontos, after the Greek word for thing, in part because they were ugly.
Sometimes the fate of an entire nation can hinge on the integrity of one man.
Opposition to the war was becoming fashionable. Popular figures—intellectuals, athletes, musicians—stepped up to announce their opposition
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
The bar on business communication is set so low that there are almost no entry-level requirements other than being a living human being
The Viet Cong were not the idealistic warriors of American antiwar propaganda; they were vicious. They relied on terror.
Steele gave the unapologetic impression that he could break you with his bare hands if it weren’t for his strict devotion to Jesus and army discipline.
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...
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...