Word: battlefield
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...shouted battlefield orders in a bellow that rattled the Halls of Montezuma. He stalked about under enemy fire as though he were daring anyone to hit him. He had an abiding love for the enlisted man who did the killing and the dying, and a sneering hatred for the staff officer who did the sitting and the meddling. He thrived on combat until he became a legend to his troops-the toughest fighting man in the whole United States Marines. His name was Lewis Burwell ("Chesty") Puller, and when he was retired in 1955 as a lieutenant general...
...cite his unwillingness to delegate authority, the inefficiency of his administration, the low morale of his officer corps. The charge most often made is that President Diem is alienated from the 14 million people of South Viet Nam. Says a U.S. officer in Saigon: "This country is less a battlefield than a political arena. No matter how much military help the U.S. pours in, the war cannot be won without the support of the people...
This is a dead city, a battlefield where vultures circle overhead and the smell of panic is stronger than the stench of the unswept, palm-fringed boulevards. The shops are barred, the restaurants deserted. Hour after hour, day and night, the tomblike hush is broken only by the distant crump of exploding mortar shells, the whoom of bazookas, the crack of anti-aircraft cannon, and the short, chattering bursts of machine guns...
...fighting, his U.S.-equipped army had not been badly whipped by the much smaller Russian-equipped Pathet Lao. A U.S. official gave his version of General Walter Bedell Smith's diplomatic axiom: "You don't win at the conference table what you've lost on the battlefield...
Samurai v. Optimist. One of Toland's most effective devices is to flash from the misery of a hopeless battlefield to the wild unrealism of cables from Washington that demanded impossible resistance in high-flown language designed to impress world opinion. Commanders themselves could be dispiritingly callous: MacArthur, arriving safe in Australia as his troops made their last stand in Bataan, declared airily: "That's the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die-and the difference is just an eyelash." Too often, the difference was between the dedicated professionalism of the samurai...