Word: zippo
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...read when it was not there?those malign black headlines of Tonkin and Tet and moratorium, of Khe Sanh and presidential abdication and Chicago. It was, in Critic Michael Aden's phrase, "the living-room war." The evening news on television imaged forth the village ignited with a Zippo lighter, the director of South Viet Nam's police matter-of-factly blowing out a man's brains near the An Quang pagoda, the Buddhists burning themselves to death. In a sense, all Americans became veterans; the war was mainlined electronically straight into the national bloodstream...
Killing was the reality for which the G.I. invented the largest number of euphemisms: zapping, fragging, offing, greasing, waxing, hosing down a village (or using a Zippo Squad to set it afire). When Lieut. William Galley testified that he had been ordered to attack My Lai, he did not say that he had been told to kill but to "waste" everyone in sight...
...court which affirmed this guilt was a curious one. The prosecutor, a brilliant young lawyer just starting his career, had never been to Vietnam. The jury, however, was wholly made up of high-ranking veterans of our criminal war, men who had been at home with free-fire zones, zippo squads, and search and destroy. That Calley was found guilty is certainly a sign that, influenced by an eloquent and implacable prosecutor, they decided that Calley had gone too far. But it was also a sign that they were under tremendous pressure to do something about the massacre, to show...
...fish-in-water" base. People were warned by leaflets or loudspeakers to leave; all those remaining were presumed to be enemies and subject to attack in "free-fire" zones. Air raids, artillery shelling and chemical crop destruction ensued. There followed search-and-destroy infantry sweeps, including gunship bombing and "Zippo" burning of villages from which troops had received sniper fire...
...very blatant. There are flashing lights, Zippo lighters, Agfa cameras, labyrinthine corridors. All the Alphavillagers walk around deadpan. If you weep when your wife dies or say words like "Why" or "Conscience," you get shot. There is this Big Brother named Professor Von Braun (can't miss that) who runs the computer. And Von Braun's picture is everywhere. The Von Braun's daughter Natasha (Anna Karina), will say to Caution, "Love? What is love...