Word: evens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...defeat remotely akin to Germany's humiliation in World War I, which the German generals blamed on treacherous politicians and civilian softness. Nor is Viet Nam likely to prove quite as bitter a military experience as the French abandonment of the Algerian war, in which some French officers even threatened to attack Paris in their rage against De Gaulle's pull-out orders. In fact, the U.S. military harbors a new, scarcely admitted optimism about the present battlefield situation in Viet Nam (see THE NATION). This, however, only makes more galling the thought of any outcome short...
...would unleashing the Air Force have achieved that? While there is heated argument even within the military about the effectiveness of the U.S. bombing that was permitted, many officers contend that U.S. airpower, properly applied, could have ended the war in about six months. By the spring of 1966, this argument goes, the Air Force had ample bases in South Viet Nam and the Navy had enough carriers in position to carry out a systematic destruction of the enemy's power plants, transportation network and military facilities in the North. But, officers complain, instead of being able...
...even more basic argument against any stab-in-the-back theory is that the military only belatedly made the case for an all-out effort. Especially in the conflict's early years, the professionals of war were thinking in the old way of victory on the battlefield, and troops conventionally trained by the U.S. were a little like the British redcoats fighting in lines as they engaged in forest skirmishes against the American colonists and their Indian allies. Clumsy U.S. battalions in the mid-1960s were out of place in the jungles, swamps and highlands of South Viet...
...even earlier, asserts TIME Pentagon Correspondent John Mulliken, top military officers should have exercised "their responsibility of advising the civilian leadership in military matters." Instead of automatically embracing President Johnson's proposition in 1965 that U.S. combat forces might go into Viet Nam, the Joint Chiefs should have warned with greater insight-and greater force-of the difficulty of waging guerrilla warfare against an enemy that could match U.S. manpower...
...dates were among the first third drawn are virtually certain to be called. Those in the middle third have a fifty-fifty chance of receiving induction greetings. Barring a national emergency, those in the last third are home free, though some local draft boards warn that they cannot guarantee even that, so low are their manpower pools...