Word: conge
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...lecture and tells his story. A few months ago, a veteran named John Murphy described how just 72 hours before he was to rotate back to the States, he found himself in a fire fight. He and a dozen buddies survived, in part because Murphy attacked a Viet Cong with the only weapon left, his teeth, which he sank into the guerrilla's neck. Soon afterward Murphy was flown home, and was making some travel arrangements in a phone booth in Seattle when he looked up to see "a hairy bastard," presumably an antiwar activist who did not like people...
When all the cultural prisms were laid one upon another, the effects of distortion and mendacity and ignorance made a clear view of the war extremely difficult. For the Viet Cong, often serving the Americans by day and killing them by night, duplicity was the chief weapon of survival. Lyndon Johnson never leveled with the American people about his intentions in the war. He wanted his Great Society too much, he wanted to win both the War on Poverty and the war in Southeast Asia. And Johnson's problem remained America's problem for years: the nation somehow never quite...
...taken). Viet Nam gave rise to an elaborate language of deceit. Officialese was done in the Latinate: incursion, attrition, pacification, termination with extreme prejudice. The linguistic underside of that was the flip, sinister slang that the American G.I.s contrived: dinky dau (crazy), numbah ten (the worst), Charlie (the Viet Cong), grease (kill). The antiwar movement built a massive vocabulary of rhetorical excess about "fascist Amerika." Officers lied in writing up citations for their men and themselves. The Viet Nam Memorial is, in a sense, the most purely true thing that can be said about the American war in Viet...
...Viet Cong prisoner stood with his hands tied behind his back. General Loan, director of South Viet Nam's national police, coldly raised a revolver to the man's head and fired. The picture of that summary execution during the 1968 Tet offensive (see page 22) horrified Western audiences. The photographer, Eddie Adams, learned later that the prisoner had slaughtered a police major who was a friend of Loan's, as well as the officer's wife and their six children. "I just took the picture. And all of a sudden I destroy a guy's life," Adams said...
...spent 48 hours in a pouring monsoon helping to load the dead of the South Vietnamese 5th Airborne Battalion onto helicopters," Wilde remembers. "There were 453 of them, including six U.S. advisers. All of the corpses were rotten with rain. We were scared; we could feel the Viet Cong watching from a nearby tree line. The stench of death massaged my skin; it took years to wash away...