Word: viets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...across the river to Manhattan, is not remembered so clearly. The only daughter of a civil engineer, she grew up middle class; she is backyard-wise, not streetwise. Giacalone was an anomaly in the neighborhood; she wanted to go to college. At New York University she protested against the Viet Nam War, but was otherwise apolitical. Even though she opted for law school at N.Y.U., she was never sure that she wanted to be a lawyer. Later, while in Washington with the Justice Department's tax division, she began to do some work with the U.S. Attorney's office...
...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...
...admiral occasionally pulls rank and echoes broadsides from his memoir. He rehashes service politics, finds the racial attitudes of the previous Chief of Naval Operations contemptible, and the Viet Nam War "worse than futile": "The Navy men killed in the river war meant a proportionately greater saving of lives for the Army and the accelerated pacification of the delta. But all that was accomplished for nothing, so all these soldiers and sailors died in vain." Bitter truth does not come easily to him; the Naval Academy did not teach no-win decision making...