Word: battlefield
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...other hand, it is conceivable that both the Americans and South Vietnamese are inclined to rely a bit too much on airpower. "This attitude prevails in every corner of the battlefield," reports TIME'S Stanley Cloud. " 'Don't worry,' commanders and G.I.s alike keep saying, 'if things get too bad, we'll just bomb the hell out of them.' " But over the years it has not always worked, and it still may not. The inability of the South Vietnamese army to make headway against the Communist invaders on the ground seems to illustrate...
...politicians continue to assume it is a science, a matter of vectors and the measurement of force. The irrational must be made rational before men can feel themselves in control of events. Perhaps that is also why war is so often portrayed as a game or sporting event, the battlefield as an extension of the playing fields of Eton. Nixon the poker player is seen raising the stakes; General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Communists' superquarterback, is seen fading back for a last-second touchdown pass...
...bombing targets. (Although "people sniffers" can now distinguish between Americans and Vietnamese--meat-eating Americans have different chemicals in their perspiration--no sensors have yet been developed to distinguish between the "enemy" and the civilian population. As the head of the Defense Department's special project on the electronic battlefield admitted, "A group of wood-cutters...might look like a squad to (the sensors); you could make a mistake, I think...
MITRE--an MIT spin-off--provides the brains behind the electronic battlefield. It calls itself the "systems engineer behind the Igloo White (electronic battlefield) sensor exploitation program." In other words, it figures out how many sensors to use, how many planes, and in what arrangement to maximize their effectiveness in destroying anything that moves. Domestically, MITRE uses this systems-engineering sophistication to coordinate police communications. However, the military insist that the majority of its work be military-oriented because MITRE provides "a degree of expertise unobtainable elsewhere in the country...
...until Hummel explodes. "Look at me! I'm different! I used to be an asshole, I'm not an asshole anymore!" But Pavlo abandons himself totally and blindly to the military ethic that has finally given him a positive identity--so that he becomes a maniac of the battlefield and brothel. He swaggers blustering until a soldier he bullied throws a hand grenade that wounds him fatally. What do you think of those people who say that soldiers are robots, animals, Argall asks. "They shit," Pavlo replies. Like him they will admit only one morality and dehumanize all who fail...