Opposition to the war was becoming fashionable. Popular figures – intellectuals, athletes, musicians – stepped up to announce their opposition.
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 the bags and looking at the pale, lifeless faces.
The great hope of the Tet Offensive was that its very size and daring would trigger a surge of nationalism that would transcend barriers of ideology, class, and faith.
Hue had become a city of the dead.
He was convinced that men lost their nerve in combat when they allowed themselves to think too much. The part movies never got right about war was all the waiting, and all the effort it took not to think.
We do not doubt the outcome,” he said. “The duty of peace is burdensome. It is a duty many generations of Americans have chosen as their own. It is a duty many other young men have borne as you bear it now. In the discharge of that duty, none have honored themselves – none have honored their nation – so nobly, or so bravely, as the United States Marines.
Against the certainties of the American command, the truth never stood a chance.
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 retribution an official stamp of approval. It tapped a deep vein of savagery. In.
Today police have new tools for old crimes. DNA testing offers seemingly magic solutions to decades-old mysteries as long as physical evidence has been preserved.
Anything was better than waiting in that hole trying to figure out what to think about in his last moments on earth, waiting to be plumed or slaughtered. He’d rather die trying to live.
Mileski had once been caught in a home burglary and had been shot in the leg by police. Afterward, he limped.
He had spent his first day in Hue as scared as he had ever been. The fear had started when they were shot at on the chopper coming in, and had then just stayed at full throttle. He realized he had adapted to it. It surprised him. Fear, because it was everywhere and everyone felt it, receded in importance. It was still there, but when you realized there was nothing you could do about it, it ceased to matter. It just became your new reality.
The pace and urgency of war have always accelerated the development of technology and encouraged novel uses of devices that already exist.
Do you truly hate them? Or is it more the feeling you get when you’re around them that you hate?
The name of the game in warfare is to learn faster and act faster than the enemy.
A secret Rand Corporation study for the Pentagon had concluded in 1966 that while the bombing had caused widespread hardship and even food shortages in the North, “there is, however, no evidence of critical or progressive deterioration or disruption of economic activity.
A CIA report completed in 1968 found similarly: “The war and the bombing have eroded the North Vietnamese economy, making the country increasingly dependent on foreign aid. However, because the country is at a comparatively primitive stage of development and because the bombing has been carried out under important restrictions, damage to the economy has been small.
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 artillery commander in World War II.
The United States had complete control of the air over all of Vietnam, and could presumably deliver a decisive blow at will. The failure to do so was blamed on the very notion of “limited war.” America was fighting with one hand – or so the story went.
The river’s name, Huong, evokes the pleasing scent of incense or the pink and white petals that float downstream in autumn from orchards to the north. The Americans called it the Perfume River.