Word: viets
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Owen named them, "the old Lie," few periods of history seem to have relished war more, or taken to it more readily. From the array of wars that have ravaged Europe, the Middle East, the Congo, Korea, Malaya, Viet Nam and Central America in our times, with new sites added almost daily, one might conclude that the main characterizing idea of the past 60 years was war itself. (Who could have dreamed up the war in the Falklands?) It follows that what will have mattered most about these years is the apparent universal desire to knock each other...
...sort of transitional conflict, a civil war enacted with all the panoply of conventional battle, each side supported with allies and joining on an open field of battle. But then war tended to fade into jungles and a thousand ambiguities of costume and faction and political subtlety. Viet Nam was America's painful education in this new form. Overarmed and under informed, the Americans came onto the battlefield and found that it was all quicksand and fog. Viet Nam was morally impenetrable as well. Americans could not tell enemies from friends. The war became a terrible waste of idealism...
Though ominous harbingers of trouble had been in the air for days, most of South Viet Nam lazed in uneasy truce, savoring the happiest and holiest holiday of the Vietnamese year. All but a few Americans retired to their compounds to leave the feast of Tet to the Vietnamese celebrators filling the streets. Thousands of firecrackers popped and fizzed in the moonless night. The Year of the Monkey had begun, and every Vietnamese knew that it was wise to make merry while there was yet time; in the twelve-year Buddhist lunar cycle, 1968 is a grimly inauspicious year...
Through the streets of Saigon, and in the dark approaches to dozens of towns and military installations throughout South Viet Nam, other Vietnamese made their furtive way, intent on celebrating only death. After the merrymakers had retired and the last firecrackers had sputtered out, they struck with a fierceness and bloody destructiveness that Viet Nam has not seen even in three decades of nearly continuous warfare. Up and down the narrow length of South Viet Nam, more than 36,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers joined in a widespread, general offensive against airfields and military bases, government buildings, population...
...near the DMZ in the north all the way to Duong Dong on the tiny island of Phu Quoc off the Delta coast some 500 miles to the south. No target was too big or too impossible, including Saigon itself and General William Westmoreland's MACV headquarters. South Viet Nam's capital, which even in the worst days of the Indo-China war had never been hit so hard, was turned into a city besieged and sundered by house-to-house fighting...