Word: numbah
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...sixties, the professor could say, when Brigid Bardot and I were at our summer place in Antibes, and an urgent call came through from the White House, from Lyndon Johnson's special assistant, Mike Montaigne. Victor Charlie was on the warpath. The Tet offensive had just erupted. Numbah Ten! The President needed the me in Saigon, yesterday!, to cut orders from MAC-V to I-Corps and retake the Imperial City of Hue. The President himself came on the line: "Son, you tell Westy he can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." I took the next Huey...
...choppers lifting off the American embassy roof, Marines hammering the fingers of desperate Vietnamese trying to cling to the skids, and then the millions of dollars' worth of helicopters being pushed off the flight decks of carriers into the South China Sea to make way for more incoming helicopters. "Numbah Ten," as they said in Vietnam, the rout of the Dollar People...
...lives taken, not land 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...
Gloria Emerson grabs hold like the Ancient Mariner. With an obsessed eye, she recalls the war that Americans lost, now receding in the collective memory -old glossaries of "hooches," "lurps." "fraggings" and "Numbah Ten." or, at home, the Armies of the Night, sheep's blood spilled on draft records, Veterans Against the War hurling their medals at the Capitol...
...portable pump, developed by Baylor's Dr. Arthur C. Beall Jr., fits into a suitcase, weighs little more than 50 lbs., and can operate on batteries. In bed, little Phan Thi Truong pointed happily to her chest, saying again and again "Numbah One"-thanks both to the surgeon's skill and to an ingenious mechanical Numbah...