The smallest pleasure, like a mouthful of canned fruit or the chance to bathe in an ice-cold river, was a luxury, something to be savored.
It is harder to defend a computer than to attack it.
Four specific missions were assigned: to spy on the nguy and American forces in the city; to recruit civilians to join the uprising and provide support; to train them with weapons and tactics; and to build a committed core who, when the battle began, would carry the wounded to medical stations in the rear and help feed the army. Weapons, ammo, food, and medical provisions all would be smuggled, stockpiled, and made ready.
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 the enemy’s numbers and routines.
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 upper ranks of the US military, and some saw his appointment as a hint that LBJ was not entirely satisfied with Westy’s progress.
Nobody ever tells you when you go into police work that it will require dishonesty.
Westin celebrated the New Year by shooting off some hand flares. Orders were “no fireworks,” but you couldn’t expect several hundred thousand men in a war zone, armed to the teeth with explosive devices, to follow an order like that.
Both had white hair but still looked hale.
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 their elders but pushing them aside, expelling, imprisoning, and in many cases executing them, all the while extolling the young as the righteous vanguard, their very youth a badge of purity. They were, by definition, forward-thinking. And in Hue they were armed.
He was so out of step with the youthful antiwar fervor of the period that he enlisted in the army at the height of the Vietnam War, only to be thrown out for lying about his age, education, and criminal past.
Isolated remnants of the county’s bucolic past remained in blocks of older wood-frame houses stranded between acres of parking lots, strip malls, and big retail outlets. Its population was mixed in every way.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not a party of preachers and missionaries but rather of divine enforcers,” he wrote. “Its mission is to blot out, by force if necessary, oppression, moral anarchy, social disorder, and exploitation so as to finish the so-called divine role of self-styled gods and replace evil with good. ‘Fight them,’ the Koran says, ’until there is no more oppression, and all submission is made to God alone.
There were none of the card games marines usually played in downtimes. They were too tired to concentrate, and poker was serious business.
Profit is the universal trigger of innovation.
They were all running on adrenaline, which cannot just be turned off. So even when they had silent hours and felt reasonably safe with their backs against a wall, most could not fully sleep. They would nod off with their head between their knees, a rifle in one hand and a grenade in the other. It was more like being temporarily not awake than sleep.
What mattered in combat, what really mattered, was not only understanding why you asked men to risk their lives, but making them understand. Men would willingly risk their lives, but they needed to know that it counted. And they needed to know they had a chance.
If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help. – John F. Kennedy.
All had had close calls. They lived in what combat correspondent Dale Dye would later call “the high weirdness of survival when the odds say you should be stone dead.
It was hard to overestimate the desire of a man living in isolation to talk.
The perfect wound was one that was not mortal, debilitating, or disfiguring, but that was bad enough to get you out.