Word: platoons
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Kind of Caesura. The North Vietnamese, said Nixon, are weaker militarily now than at any time since the war began. That is probably true, for enemy troops in South Viet Nam are operating in units of no more than platoon strength. Military action is near a standstill. One bored briefer at U.S. military headquarters in Viet Nam complains that the daily press release has been reduced practically to a single sentence: "Yesterday, U.S. aircraft flew B-52 missions in the Republic of Viet Nam during the 24-hour period ending at noon today." The lull may mean that...
...American officer in Viet Nam called it "a piddling platoon action." But to the millions of Americans who saw TV film clips of the daring attack by a Viet Cong demolition squad on the U.S. embassy in Saigon, the Tet offensive of 1968 was something more impressive than that. "What the hell is going on?" CBS Correspondent Walter Cronkite fairly shouted when he first saw footage of the raid. "I though we were winning the war." So did many of his countrymen, who had taken at face value General William Westmoreland's expansive claim, a few weeks before...
...rows and seats of college football memorabilia. After having dealt with the early gridiron heroes and glamor boys in former quizzes, this autumn the sports cube staff focuses on the '50's and '60's, when fans witnessed the rise and fall and then rebirth of a strategy called platoon football...
...uprising. It was he who encouraged a delegation of Hungarians to meet with top Soviet officers in Budapest to talk about a withdrawal of Russian troops; two days later, when a settlement seemed near, General Ivan Serov, then head of the KGB, burst in on the parley with a platoon of agents and arrested the rebel leaders, many of whom were later executed. In 1967, Andropov became head of the KGB, and thereby master of the most formidable power complex in the Soviet Union outside the armed forces...
...normal robot, a kill-crazed misfit who took out all the frustrations of a life of failure and rejection on the people of one South Vietnamese hamlet. News accounts have played up Calley's lack of command ability, his feelings of inferiority, the supposed unfitness of his whole platoon. The campaign to make Calley into stupid sub-human reached its absurd climax three weeks ago in an essay by William Styron in the New York Times Book Review in which Styron compares Calley to Eichmann, and with this smug analogy, casts the full blame on him for what happened...