Word: vietcong
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After six years in a Vietcong prison camp, John McCain knows all about the Domino Theory. And three decades later, the Arizona senator still appears to have trains of chips on his mind, hoping that his win in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary is the first one to fall on the way to the Republican presidential nomination. There's just one problem with this metaphor: Domino trains work only when the pieces are evenly spaced. A small piece collapsing into three or four chips stacked together is stopped short. Likewise, the McCain Express could run into a dead stop...
...Harvard-Radcliffe Republican Alliance obviously aren't authoritarian enough for these brutes, to say nothing of the "liberal" Undergraduate Council or President Clinton. It seems as if Peninsula is still fighting the Cold War, making cracks about Clinton "guarding the hallowed halls of Oxford University from a Vietcong sneak attack" and the council's political slicksters opting under a hypothetical transplant to "communist" China "to curry favor with the butchers of Beijing." This is how out there the Peninsula is, how so removed it is from the modern political scene that it cannot comprehend the fundamentally conservative policies...
...days later, Nixon--reportedly feeling energized after watching the movie Patton--decided to send troops into Cambodia to clear out Vietcong sanctuaries, Rather and Gates write...
...Kennedy authorized the use of U.S. helicopters in Vietnam, which began to use their superior mobility, devastating firepower and napalm to help the flagging ARVN. Enormous American armored personnel carriers called M-113s, impenetrable to Vietcong weapons and armed with terrifyingly powerful machine guns, began hauling ARVN troops around. There were no American ground troops, and Kennedy steadfastly refused to commit any, but Americans were piloting helicopters, fighter bombers and APCs, and serving in that most ambiguous of roles, as military advisors. Beyond hardware, the Kennedy Administration never came to grips with the true politics...
...larger consequence of the new policy for the United States is that it signals the end of decades of misguided hatred toward the Vietnamese. American policymakers never fought North Vietnam and Vietcong; for muddled officials caught up in the hysteria that was the Cold War, these were just a proxy for the real enemy--the Soviet Union...