Word: lai
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Through the fusillades of criticism and volleys of praise, Bunker moved unscathed, to the surprise of many who felt the agonies of My Lai more strongly. Asked to sum up his chief, a high-ranking aide said: "One thinks of the grace and courtliness with which he treats everyone he meets, but that does not mean he is uncritical. There is a flinty Vermont look sometimes that makes people realize very clearly that they have not done things the way he expected them done. He has dominated our country's largest operation overseas without ever raising his voice...
...Brien's powerful description of his year in Vietnam does much more. Not surprisingly, it confirms many of the stories that have filtered back from hamlets like My Lai (where O'Brian frequently patrolled). Civilians are randomly murdered. Officers are routinely fragged. But more hysterically than any previous war, Vietnam evoked fear in her combatants, and the various ways the war tested O'Brien's courage is what his book is about...
...body weight to be a carefully considered move. No place, no hour was safe. After O'Brien had watched a few friends placed in plastic body bags, his sensitivity gave way to a determined indifference. A corpse became merely someone he had "clobbered in ping pong back in Chu Lai." Like other wars, there were too many challenges to what was perceived as a man's courage for more than grim sentimentality. "Watching friends die gnaws at you," O'Brien says. "If I had gone through World War II, I probably would have written much the same book...
...shattering moral issues in the Watergate case is the revelation that the Haldeman-Ehrlichman-Colson-Dean staff operation was, for the most part, a tragic failure. Legislative achievements were almost zero. Congress and the federal bureaucracy were systematically alienated. Trouble was rarely detected in the early stages-My Lai, Carswell, Cambodia, Watergate. When it arrived full-grown on the President's doorstep, the energies of these men were directed not at solving the problems but at ignoring or minimizing them, which in the end only magnified the difficulties. Building understanding, nurturing belief, and preserving the integrity of the presidency...
...rhetoric and portentous declamatory style remind one of Maxwell Anderson scaling his molehills of dramatic verse. An intermittent sidebar monologue features an innocuous-looking Manson-family girl casually relating the horrors of the Sharon Tate murders with a lubriciously contented purr. Together with the repeated cue name of My Lai and references to the slaughter of innocents, of whom Iphigenia is the first, Rabe's intent is clear to the point of didactic overkill-to make the curse and crimes of the House of Atreus appear to be the inevitable pattern of all human behavior...