Word: troop
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...military issue in the war--an issue which symbolized the fraudulence of our effort in Vietnam. Because, unlike in previous wars, we were fighting to hold ("pacify") territory, not seize it, the determining factor in our success or failure was the level of opposition in the south; Wallace called troop infiltration to the south "the most critical factor in the war." The Vietnam era--the go-go '60s, when the computer embodied all that was sleek and modern about America--had an obsession with numbers, and Robert S. McNamara installed his B-School brand of systems analysis in the Pentagon...
Such distortions led to top-level government decision-making that had little basis in reality. Former CIA agent Sam Adams, whose disclosures prompted the CBS investigation, recalled reading a captured document indicating enemy troop strengths ten times higher than U.S. estimates. The bankruptcy of the reporting system helped tint the rose-colored glasses which could allow President Lyadon Johnson to declare in March 1967: "General Westmoreland's strategy is producing results [and] our military situation has substantially improved...
...administration, a draft could be used to smooth the way toward ill-advised U.S. adventurism along the lines of Lyndon Johnson's Southeast Asia strategy of 1966 and 1967. Volunteers became rarer during that period, but LBJ could depend on a steady flow of conscripted bodies to keep the troop planes full...
...first to make it through was Sygma Photographer Henri Bureau, 41, who was on assignment for TIME. He had photographed Solidarity's last meeting at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk just before martial law was imposed, then made his way back to Warsaw, taking pictures of troop movements through the window of his car. Leaving all his equipment behind, Bureau stuffed 30 rolls of film in his snow boots and rode an unheated train in subzero weather to Berlin with L'Express Correspondent Jacques Renard. Said Bureau: "The East Germans searched everything. They looked under seats with flashlights...
Throughout Saturday evening there had been ominous signs of the trouble to come. Reports reaching the Warsaw headquarters of the trade-union movement Solidarity from regional offices warned of an unusual amount of troop activity throughout the country. Tanks were seen on provincial highways. In late evening, telephone and telex lines between Poland and the outside world were suddenly cut. And then, at midnight, eleven police vans appeared on Warsaw's Mokotowska Street, where the local headquarters is located, and blocked the thoroughfare. Moments later dozens of steel-helmeted riot police stormed the building, where they arrested union members...