Word: viets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During the late '60s, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr. commanded the "brown-water navy," the fleet of small craft that patrolled the rivers and canals of South Viet Nam. He did such a good job that in 1970 he was appointed chief of operations for the entire U.S. Navy. Zumwalt was the right man in the wrong place at a bad time. An unpopular war was turning odious. The air was full of politics and protest; belowdecks there were racial tensions and poor morale. The admiral swept in with a mandate to give the most traditional of military services...
...surgically corrected; a mild but frightening case of polio, from which he fully recovered; and a hard time getting good grades at school. Yet he persevered, graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1968 and going into the family business as a swift-boat commander in Viet...
...suggested in this intimate book about national and family tragedy, Admiral and Mrs. Zumwalt would have preferred a safer line of work for their son. Swifts, part of Dad's brown-water navy, were fast and well armed for their size, but in South Viet Nam's network of narrow waterways, these craft were extremely vulnerable to ambushes. Hidden in the dense vegetation that grew along the banks, the Viet Cong killed and wounded sailors with unnerving regularity. To serve a year on a river patrol boat meant a 70%-to-75% chance of becoming a casualty...
...Viet Nam settled uneasily into memory. The first sign that the war was not over came in 1977 with the birth of Elmo Russell Zumwalt IV. The boy's slow development was eventually attributed to "sensory integration dysfunction," an inability to discriminate sounds and sights. Then, in 1982, Elmo III learned he had cancer of the lymphatic system. Two years later he had developed Hodgkin's disease, a more aggressive form of lymphoma...
...keynote address opening the conference, Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Robert Mugabe sought to sound a statesmanlike note. He expressed dismay at rising world military expenditures and attacked foreign interference in all parts of the world. Mugabe called for an end to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Viet Nam's occupation of Kampuchea, while attacking the U.S. for supporting Nicaraguan contras and rebels in Angola. He urged his fellow heads of state to provide economic aid if needed by the black African "frontline" states that are seeking to cut off trade with South Africa. In a television interview...