Remember the two signatures of modern war: (1) You never win, exactly; you claim victory. (2) Perception is paramount.
Thomas Paine’s The Crisis—These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country . . .
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...
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...
Pretty girls were not perceived as a threat in the city. They moved around freely. They could watch the military and police posts, mapping entrances and exits, defenses, and gun positions, and noting...
It was the way he lived. He could walk out of that building at a moment’s notice and leave behind no personal trace.
In this peaceful city, during Tet, it was traditional to send cups of paper with lit candles floating down the Huong like flickering blossoms, prayers for health, for success, for the memory of loved...
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...
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,...
While in the United States and Europe revolution was an excuse to sell pop music, stage protests, and hold festivals, it was being played for keeps in Asia. Young people were not just challenging thei...
Westmoreland’s body counts were bogus. He believed them—he was not the first general to welcome statistics he wanted to hear. But, in practice, there was every incentive for field commanders to inflat...
John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of antiwar, which he felt, and I’m paraphrasing him here, was like being anti-food or anti-sex, since war was such an essential element o...
Enemy morale has not been broken—he apparently has adjusted to our stopping his drive for military victory and has adopted a strategy of keeping us busy and waiting us out (a strategy of attriting our...
The joke Colombians told was that God had made their land so beautiful, so rich in every natural way, that it was unfair to the rest of the world; He had evened the score by populating it with the mos...