Word: fightingly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...incredible that this illegitimate Committee, whose contribution to justice consists of purging Harvard of those who most effectively fight injustice, accuses them of cowardice and labels us "pawns" and "hostages". The Committee's eagerness to believe the Administration line about concentric "circles of students" (Dean Ford in Harvard Today, Fall 1968) and the Administration's falsification of what happened, rather than what we actually saw, shows that they are the pawns of the Corporation that pays them...
...more or less quietly on top. of Ap Bia when the 101st discovered them and moved to dislodge them. Ap Bia, replied the adviser, fell into a "gray area"-it was one of the few times in the war when the U.S. had been able to make opposing troops fight when they had not chosen...
...only do sting-ray tactics unsettle the Communists, U.S. commanders in Viet Nam claim, but they also keep down casualties better than the defensive war that some critics would prefer the U.S. to fight now. A recent study shows that the ratio of Communist to U.S. casualties is 12-1 when U.S. troops take the initiative. When they remain in defensive enclaves, the ratio drops to 3-1. Those figures may have an "illusionary nature" too, but they doubtless have some basis in fact. Sting rays also keep the Communists away from cities and reduce civilian casualties, Saigon argues...
...Administration argues plausibly that military pressure must be maintained in Viet Nam in order to assure progress at the peace table-although there is room for dispute about this. The question remains whether the right kind of pressure was presented by the battle for Hamburger Hill: a costly fight for a piece of real estate that was to be abandoned before the blood had hardly dried on it. There are U.S. officers who will privately admit that, given hindsight, Ap Bia should have been handled differently. Perhaps, they say, the 101st moved up too close before ascertaining how many Communists...
What is left afterward is the impression of a few feverish laps around the laboratory, an oppressive feeling that the spreading bacteria may be less of a threat than the organized technology necessary to fight it. The book remains essentially a great short story, distended to novel length, that closes on a dying fall...