Like most of the great turning points in history, it was obvious and yet no one saw it coming.
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...
Vivá Colombia! We have just killed Pablo Escobar!
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.
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...
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...
It was the way he lived. He could walk out of that building at a moment’s notice and leave behind no personal trace.
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...
McRaven’s thesis, which would become part of the curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School, set out the core concept of special ops: that a small, well-trained force can deliver a decisive blow agai...
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...
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...
Never had a general so effectively willed away the facts.
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. Trust those who approach the world with humility and cautious insight. The
Regular users know nothing about program languages or varying exchange protocols. They just want the thing to run. So Microsoft invented a way to bundle executable programs and data, the DLL, that all...
Prepare for a great push to be called Tong-Tan-cong-Noi-day (General Offensive, General Uprising). It would take place during Tet, which in 1968, according to the Chinese calendar, was to be Mau Than,...
Somalia) was a watershed, said one State Department official, The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish lea...
Beware of men with theories that explain everything.
Remember the two signatures of modern war: (1) You never win, exactly; you claim victory. (2) Perception is paramount.
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