Word: sloan
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...Sloan left Harvard, "with no respect for pro forma education." hoping that the Army would teach him how to improve his Harvard performance. After serving in Korea and Vietnam, he returned to Cambridge and in 1968 garnered a magna for a history thesis on Nixon. Except for scientists, Sloan admires few academicians, imagining the thoughts of the professors who gave him his magna: "Here's a promising young off-shoot of our own bull-shit...
...SLOAN'S war is sadistic, culminating in his killing of an entire Ranger unit that is attempting to rape the survivors of a napalm attack on a village. Pulling his carbine's trigger, he observes with curiosity the jerking marionette-like motions of his victims: "It never ceases to seem incongruous that real guns make only a vague clack rather than the bang and echo represented in movies," Receiving the Cross of Gallantry, he returns to the States...
...Sloan observes in his book, is no longer tied down by facts and has become metaphysical. "War is no longer waged merely to achieve ends; it is waged as proof of its own possibility." Sloan's war-a small war, as a colonel laments to him, but the only war we have-is a brutally mechanistic game which feeds upon its own data and upon the bodies of the data-collectors. Within the game's gaunt stupidity individuals play only peripheral roles, stepping quietly here and there so as not to disturb the data. Sloan the amoralist believes himself only...
...individual, Sloan's hero is a quietly brash, intellectually aloof fighter compulsively plotting the means to exploit the corruption and stupidity of the "midgets" he has been deployed to defend. For him, the war is no more than a hastily-built bureaucratic contraption within which the warrior must eke out a petty and sadistic existence profiteering promotions, medals, and love-making. Wry but bitter, Sloan's hero constantly visits the base's dentist while worrying about continual gonorrhea, and enjoys pissing into the flak around his helicopter gunship. Amid the war's psychic viciousness the hero maintains his uneasy sanity...
...Sloan, the powerful delude themselves in their reliance upon facts and systems. They receive most of Sloan's simple and finely-crafted sarcasm. In one incident, Sloan accompanies a congressman newly arrived in Vietnam and compares the man's admiration of the military equipment with the attitude of small town tourists who are impressed with the furniture, rugs, and woodwork of a New York hotel...