Word: buchananism
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...U.S.S. Buchanan, a guided missile destroyer, rolls gently in the waters of the Tonkin Gulf, 5,000 yards offshore of the Demilitarized Zone. Overhead, a full moon slips in and out of wispy tangles of cloud. Crew members who are not needed to fire the guns or run the ship are down in the mess deck watching Jane Fonda in Barbarella...
...Buchanan's two automatic five-inch guns, with a maximum range of twelve miles, is trained to starboard. A voice rasps over the ship's loudspeaker: "Stand by. Mount 52. Two salvos." Five seconds later, the gun shreds the night. A pale orange flame shoots from the muzzle, and a 70-lb. shell whistles through the air en route to a target more than three miles inland from the Vietnamese coastline...
...house, the officer of the deck watches the flight of the projectile on radar. Then a second round is fired. "Bore's clear," comes the voice on the loudspeaker. "Next target is Number 17." So it goes until 5:30 the next morning, when 200 rounds of the Buchanan's "H and I" (harassment and interdiction) fire will have been spent on 25 targets inside the DMZ. Another night in the U.S. Navy's long war off the coast of Viet Nam has ended...
Normally, though, war aboard the Buchanan and other destroyers is an impersonal war. The chief ingredients are radarscopes, computers, control panels, microswitches and radios-plus movies in wide-screen color. The only time the ammunition is touched by human hands is when it is loaded into the automatic hoist. Deep in the bowels of the ship, Fire Controlman Second Class Jim Fagan of Miami holds the portable trigger in his hand, nonchalantly squeezing the lever when he gets the signal over his headphones. "I don't feel like I'm part of this war," says one sailor...
...next book will, hopefully, be the historical novel which was to have taken the place of Redux as his main output for 69-70. Based on the life of James Buchanan--interestingly enough, the only president to have been born and raised in Pennsylvania--the novel is meant to explore the tensions of a man of personal integrity thrust into a position of national power at a time when his actual strength was limited--and threatened by the cataclysms of pre-Civil War America. Buchanan had successfully risen above personal traumas in his love-life and in a tawdry Pennsylvania...