His only cause, ultimately, was himself.
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. Dawkins argued that they play the same role in cultural evolution as genes play in biology, getting passed along from person to person, surviving and adapting as they move.
They were called Ontos, after the Greek word for “thing,” in part because they were ugly.
History is not easy,” Hue told me. “People are still confused why a huge force like the United States was defeated. But if you don’t know your enemy, you will lose every time.
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.