Word: combats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...strangeness of Viet Nam to freshly arrived U.S. troops and the frustrations of guerrilla warfare do not adequately explain My Lai. In March of 1968, most members of C Company of the Americal Division's 11th Infantry Brigade had never been tested in direct combat with any large numbers of the enemy. Trained together in Hawaii, they had been in Viet Nam only one month. Yet as part of Task Force Barker, their assignment in March was a fearsome one: to clear the Viet Cong out of Quang Ngai province?an area long known as "the cradle of revolution...
Those conditions breed fear and paranoia, in which the young soldier sees all Vietnamese as threatening. When he is also weary from hours of trudging through swamp and jungle and then sees a friend killed beside him ? and friendships are highly emotional bonds in combat ? a soldier can easily go wild. At My Lai, however, the rampage was a group affair rather than individual breakdowns, something much harder to understand...
...violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths in Viet Nam, Americans needed time to grasp the fact that these particular deaths, caused by these particular young Americans, represented a very tragic difference...
...with Pinkville. It sears the generous and humane image, more often deserved than not, of the U.S. as a people. Whatever else may come to light about Pinkville in the weeks ahead, the tragedy shows that the American soldier carries no immunity against the cruelty and inhumanity of prolonged combat...
...deploy nuclear weapons without the approval of the Japanese. The U.S. will remove its nuclear weapons from the island before Japan takes control. If the Viet Nam war is not ended by then, the U.S. reserved the option to ask Tokyo's permission to fly combat support missions from Okinawa, where most of the B-52s are now based...