Notes

PROLOGUE. LIGHT

1. Bernard Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (New York: Da Capo Press, 1966), 28. General Henri Eugène Navarre commanded the French forces during their disastrous defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh in the valley of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

2. Thomas L. Hagel, telephone interview by Daniel P. Bolger, October 4, 2016.

3. Charles T. Hagel, telephone interview by Daniel P. Bolger, September 12, 2016.

4. General William C. Westmoreland, U.S. Army, “Progress Report on the War in Vietnam,” State Department Bulletin (Department of State: Washington, DC, December 11, 1967), 785.

5. I know that handshake. I met General Westmoreland quite by accident in the summer of 1986 on the day my wife and I moved into our quarters at West Point. I was just another captain joining the faculty. Westmoreland was the guest of a colonel who lived nearby. As I walked out to meet the moving van, the general strode up to me, stuck out his hand, and said, “I’m General Westmoreland.” Indeed he was.

6. Edward B. Furguson, Westmoreland: The Inevitable General (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968) and Lewis S. Sorley, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

7. Sorley, Westmoreland, 18. Otto Kerner Jr. later served as the governor of Illinois (1961–68).

8. This comes from a Bill Moyers account quoted in Sorley, Westmoreland, 69.

9. Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1981), 55. Colonel Harry Summers served in Vietnam. His trenchant critique of the U.S. war effort pulled no punches.

10. For Westmoreland’s early doubts about Rolling Thunder, see William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 141. For an assessment of the bombing campaign in both North and South Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia, see John Morocco, Rain of Fire, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1985), 177, 179. For comparisons to World War II bombing, see Micheal Clodfelter, Vietnam in Military Statistics (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995), 225. Of 7,662,000 tons of bombs dropped in the Vietnam War, just over a million fell on North Vietnam. In World War II, the United States dropped 623,418 tons on Germany and 160,800 tons on Japan, including all the incendiary raids and the two atomic bombs.

11. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 185. Westmoreland went on to add that “since the World War I battles of the Somme and Verdun, that has been a strategy in disrepute, one that to many appeared particularly unsuited for a war in Asia with Asia’s legendary hordes of manpower.” That sentence speaks for itself.

The names Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were American terms. Viet Cong comes from Viet Nam Cong-san, “Vietnamese Communists,” a pejorative label applied by the Saigon authorities. The Hanoi government called these guerrillas the People’s Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, the military arm of the National Liberation Front. The North Vietnamese Army called itself the People’s Army of Vietnam. As this is an American account, for clarity, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army will be used.

12. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 172. The phrases in quotation marks are written in the same way in Westmoreland’s memoirs. It’s unclear what document or message the general is quoting.

13. Ibid., 160–61, 171–72.

14. Shelby L. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle (Washington, DC: U.S. News Books, 1981), 333.

15. Mao Zedong, Strategic Problems of China’s Revolution (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1954), 96.

16. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 188. A West Point graduate who completed his military service as a lieutenant colonel, Krepinevich earned his doctorate from Harvard and remains a well-known defense analyst. He later headed the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Krepinevich’s book is considered a key work in evaluating the U.S. Army’s inability to defeat the communist insurgency in Vietnam.

17. Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History 1946–1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988), 364. Davidson retired as a U.S. Army lieutenant general. He served in MACV in 1967–69 as the intelligence chief for General William C. Westmoreland and then General Creighton B. Abrams.

18. Ibid. Page 360 has the VC/NVA number. For the U.S. casualties, see U.S. National Archives, “DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File Record Counts by ncident or Death Date (Year) as of April 29, 2008” in Military Records at http://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics.html, accessed May 4, 2016.

19. For the crossover point, see Davidson, Vietnam at War, 390. As the MACV intelligence chief, Davidson kept the books on assessed enemy losses. For counting enemy forces, see Davidson, Vietnam at War, 360–61. See also Sorley, Westmoreland, 163.

20. Sorley, Westmoreland, 154. General Fred Weyand admitted he was the source after both Apple and Westmoreland were dead.

21. Clark Dougan and Stephen Weiss, Nineteen Sixty-Eight, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1983), 69.

22. Samuel Zaffiri, Westmoreland (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 5.

23. Westmoreland, “Progress Report on the War in Vietnam,” 785–88.

CHAPTER 1. THE HOLE IN THE PRAIRIE

1. Unforgiven, directed by Clint Eastwood, Warner Brothers Studios, 1992. Sheriff Little Bill Daggett, portrayed by Gene Hackman, was the cruel antagonist in this classic western. Hackman served as a U.S. marine in China in the late 1940s, during the concluding years of that country’s long civil war. Director Clint Eastwood, who played protagonist Will Munny, served as a draftee in the U.S. Army at Fort Ord, California, from 1951 to 1953.

2. For the origin of the name Sioux, see Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn (New York: North Point Press, 1984), 87. For Nebraska, see John E. Koontz, “Etymology,” Siouan Languages at http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/faq/etymology.htm, accessed May 7, 2016. Borrowing from the Indians, early French explorers and fur traders named the major waterway Rivière Plate (Flat River), anglicized as the Platte River. In addition, zoologists remind us that the well-known American buffalo is, in fact, a bison, not to be confused with the true African and Asian variants. The more common designation “buffalo” was used by both the Indians and the European peoples who displaced them, and remains the common name today.

3. U.S. Congress, An Act to Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain, 37th Congress, 2d Session, May 20, 1862.

4. Robert Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 3, 99, 100.

5. For the number of engagements, see Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 267. For the details on reported losses, see Utley, Frontier Regulars, note 19, 423. Utley compiled these numbers from U.S. Army adjutant general casualty records. Of 948 U.S. Army soldiers killed in the 1865–1891 Indian campaigns, 258 (27 percent) of them died at the Little Big Horn on June 25–26, 1876.

6. Don Russell, “How Many Indians Were Killed?,” American West (July 1973), 43–44. The U.S. Census of 1890 recorded 248,253 Indians. The 1910 census reported 265,683.

7. Utley, Frontier Regulars, note 20, 423.

8. Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 13.

9. Nebraska includes all or part of six Indian reservations. Four are wholly in Nebraska: the Omaha (established 1854), the Ponca (est. 1858), the Winnebago (est. 1863), and the Santee Sioux/Dakota (est. 1863). Parts of two other reservations also extend from Kansas into Nebraska: the Ioway (1861) and the Sac/Fox (1836). All predate the Plains Indian campaigns after the Civil War, and all six were there before Nebraska became a state. The estimated Indian population of Nebraska as of 2015 is 26,547 (1.4 percent) of 1,896,190 total population. See https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/31, accessed May 14, 2016. For the connection between Vietnam and the Indian conflicts, see Davidson, Vietnam at War, 319. Davidson noted that defeating the Indians required “grinding attrition” in a military sense, but more so in the economic and demographic spheres.

10. L. Douglas Keeney, 15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 49.

11. U.S. Department of the Interior geological survey, Geographical Centers of the United States (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, 1964), 2.

12. For the naming of Offutt Air Force Base see A. I. Hansen, OAFBP 210-2: The History of Fort Crook (1888)/Offutt Air Force Base (1976) (Offutt Air Force Base, NE: 3902nd Air Base Wing, 1981), 1. The base was originally the U.S. Army’s Fort Crook, named for Indian-fighting Major General George Crook.

13. U.S. Department of the Interior, Historic American Engineering Record: Offutt Air Force Base, Glenn L. Martin-Nebraska Bomber Plant (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, 2002), 37–38, 40–41. The United States produced 3,760 B-29s in World War II.

14. Keeney, 15 Minutes, 174, addresses nuclear bombs and targets, and page 118 includes the quote regarding the planned destruction of the USSR. For bomber numbers, see Phillip S. Meilinger, Bomber: The Formation and Early Years of Strategic Air Command (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2012), 339.

15. Keeney, 15 Minutes, 250.

16. Omaha reported a population of 251,117 in 1950. See http://www.biggestus cities.com/1950, accessed May 13, 2016.

17. The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, Committee of State Security) was the Soviet Union’s national foreign intelligence service, and also carried out a major role in providing domestic surveillance and repression. The GRU (Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie, “Main Intelligence Directorate”) was the military intelligence organization of the Soviet Armed Forces. During the Cold War, the KGB’s American counterparts were the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, foreign intelligence) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, internal security), although the KGB employed much more ruthless measures abroad and at home. For KGB and GRU surveillance in and around Offutt Air Force Base, see Loch K. Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence: Understanding the Hidden Side of Government (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 3; and Scott D. Sagan, “SIOP 62: Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy,” International Security (Summer 1987), 31.

18. Walter Kozak, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2009), 280.

19. James Carroll, House of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 17–21. Carroll knew General Curtis LeMay. His father, Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll, U.S. Air Force, served under LeMay.

20. Ibid., 19–20.

21. Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 597, 592–93.

22. Ibid., 599. For LeMay’s words, see Carroll, House of War, 19.

23. Kozak, LeMay, 197.

24. Larrabee, Commander in Chief, 617.

25. Ibid., 619–20.

26. Ibid., 620.

27. Marshall is quoted in Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 164. The Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763 pitted Great Britain and Prussia against France, Austria, and (for most of the war) Russia. The American phase was called the French and Indian War (1754–63). Battles also occurred in India and the Caribbean Sea.

28. Carroll, House of War, 94–95. Carroll’s prose is sobering.

29. Chuck Hagel with Peter Kaminsky, America: Our Next Chapter (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 3–4, 218.

30. U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, History of the 42nd Bombardment Squadron (Heavy) (Fort Shafter, HI: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, April 1944), 3–4. For an account of the attack on Hickam Field on December 7, 1941, by a soldier of the 42nd Bombardment Squadron, see Barbara Belt, interviewer, and Evelyn Kriek, transcriber, Oral History Interview Attilio F. Caporiccio, Douglas County Libraries, Denver, CO, September 14, 2004, 28–31. Charles Dean Hagel arrived in Hawaii after the Pearl Harbor attack.

31. Ibid., 7–11.

32. U.S., Headquarters, Army Air Forces, AAF Manual 50-12: Pilot Training Manual for the Liberator (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Army Air Forces, May 1, 1945), 4, 7, 20. The B-24 featured a unique double bomb bay, each segment covered by two metal tambour-panel doors. These panels looked like the cover of a roll-top desk. When opened, the four doors rolled up into the aircraft. This design reduced aerodynamic drag and thus permitted more speed during a bombing run.

33. Ibid., 9–12.

34. The Mitsubishi A6M Type Zero navy carrier fighter was the most well-known and widely produced Japanese interceptor. Officially, the United States referred to the plane as a “Zeke,” following a pattern that gave male names to fighters and female names to bombers. American fliers, army or navy, routinely called the plane a Zero. There were other similar single-engine Japanese fighters, such as the imperial army’s Nakajima Ki-43 Type 1 Hayabusa (Peregrine Falcon) fighter (code name “Oscar”) and the Nakajima Ki-84 Type 4 Hayate (Gale) fighter (code name “Frank”). The capable Type 4 Frank proved a menace to B-29s at high altitude. With some modifications, it served as a night fighter, too. All of these single-engine types were often misidentified as Zeros, too. See Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005), 78–79, 89–90, 479–80.

35. HQ, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, History of the 42nd Bombardment Squadron (Heavy), 13–16. For the crash of U.S. Olympian Louis Zamperini and his crew, see Lauren Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (New York: Random House, 2010), 125–26. Zamperini’s story was made into the movie Unbroken, released in 2015.

36. HQ, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, History of the 42nd Bombardment Squadron (Heavy), 19–20.

37. U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, October Monthly Summary (Apana Airfield, Guam: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, November 1, 1944), 1–9; U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, November Monthly Summary (Apana Airfield, Guam: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, December 1, 1944), 1–8; U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, December Monthly Summary (Apana Airfield, Guam: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, January 1, 1945), 1–9; U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, January Monthly Summary (Apana Airfield, Guam: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, February 1, 1945), 1–4; U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, February Monthly Summary (Apana Airfield, Guam: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, March 1, 1945), 1–10; U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, March Monthly Summary (Apana Airfield, Guam: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, April 1, 1945), 1–3; U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, April Monthly Summary (Apana Airfield, Guam: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, May 1, 1945), 1–3; U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, May Monthly Summary (Apana Airfield, Guam: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, June 1, 1945), 1–3; U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, June Monthly Summary (Apana Airfield, Guam: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, July 4, 1945), 1–3.

38. U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, July Monthly Summary (Okinawa: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, August 6, 1945), 1–2.

39. George Lauby, “From the Platte to the Potomac: Hagel Recalls His Roots,” North Platte Bulletin, January 16, 2013.

40. Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

41. Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel. See also Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 13. In addition, see Myra MacPherson, “The Private War of Chuck and Tom Hagel,” Salon.com, April 30, 2007, accessed May 15, 2016. Chuck Hagel recalled that he began paying into Social Security at age eight.

42. Charlyne Berens, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 11–13. See also Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel and Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

43. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 14. For the Hagel lumber company and its several locations, see http://www.centurylumbercenter.com/locations.aspx ?location=Ainsworth, accessed May 16, 2016. The company began in 1883. In 1972, the firm took the name Century Lumber.

44. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 15–16. For Charles Dean Hagel’s employers, see Lauby, “From the Platte to the Potomac: Hagel Recalls His Roots,” 1.

45. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 15; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

46. MacPherson, “The Private War of Chuck and Tom Hagel.” Chuck Hagel in his book America: Our Next Chapter, 251, attributes his father’s death to a heart attack. Charlyne Berens in Chuck Hagel, 19, describes the death as the result of a brain aneurysm. The two causes are not mutually exclusive.

47. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 20–23; MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 13–14; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

48. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 23–24. See also Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

49. Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 13–14; Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 153.

50. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel. See also MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 13; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 16–17, 24–25. By volunteering for the draft, both Hagel brothers kept their service obligation to two years. Had they enlisted, they would have had to sign up for a minimum of three years.

CHAPTER 2. THIS MAN’S ARMY

1. Peter Tauber, The Sunshine Soldiers: A True Journal of Basic Training (New York: Ballantine, 1971), 243. An army reservist, Tauber completed his basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas. He did not deploy overseas.

2. Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 118–23, 129, 136, 424. Suid’s book is the classic study of how the military has worked to present itself through movies. All the examples listed were in circulation in 1967. Richard Widmark played a Fort Bliss training sergeant in Take the High Ground (1953), filmed at the installation.

3. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 24–25. For Hagel’s own account, see Mike Perry, interviewer, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel,” Experiencing War: Stories from the Veterans History Project (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, August 2002) at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp-stories/loc.natlib.afc2001001.02230/transcript?ID=mv0001, accessed May 27, 2016.

4. Terrence Maitland and Peter McInerney, A Contagion of War, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1983), 27.

5. Perry, “Interview with Senator Chuck Hagel”; Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 151.

6. For more on Sergeant First Class William Joyce of Alabama, see Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 151–53. See also Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel” and Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

7. John M. Collins, “Basic Combat Training: Flashbacks and Forecasts,” Army (August 2004), 47–48. Collins entered the U.S. Army as a private in 1942 and retired as a colonel after wartime service in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. For the history of basic training in the U.S. Army, see Weigley, History of the United States Army, 371–77 (World War I), 400–3 (1918–1940), 428–30, 436–39 (World War II), 503–4, 528, (1945–1963).

8. For the location of the U.S. Army training centers during the Vietnam War, see Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 361. For more on training centers, to include both draftee and voluntary enlistment numbers, see also Ellen R. Hartman, Susan I. Enscore, and Alan D. Smith, Vietnam and the Home Front: How DoD Installations Adapted, 1962–1975 (Champaign, IL: U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, December 2014), 41, 60–61. For the number of voluntary enlistments, see Clark Dougan and Samuel Lipsman, A Nation Divided, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1984), 76. A half million young men enlisted from June 1965 to June 1966. For the number of draftees trained, see U.S. Selective Service System, “Inductions,” at https://www.sss.gov/About/History-And-Records/Induction-Statistics, accessed May 27, 2016. Inductions totaled 382,010 in 1966, 228,263 in 1967, and 296,406 in 1968, the height of the draft calls. Depending on the month and year, draftees made up from 40 to 60 percent of all army inductions. Of note, like Chuck and Tom Hagel, about 10 percent of draftees volunteered to be drafted.

9. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

10. Hartman, Enscore, and Smith, Vietnam and the Home Front, 54–57.

11. Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

12. For excellent, if hilariously cynical, descriptions of the first day or so at Basic Combat Training at Fort Bliss, see Tauber, The Sunshine Soldiers, 29–35. For a useful half-hour video summary of Basic Combat Training, see U.S. Department of the Army, The Big Picture: The Men from the Boys, The First Eight Weeks (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Information, 1967). Actor and U.S. Army Air Forces World War II veteran Gary Merrill narrated this program. For Chuck Hagel’s role as a peer leader, sometimes by force of threat thereof, see Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.” Hagel recalled: “So it was kind of just like you’d pick out the biggest, toughest, smartest guy in the bunch. And you say, ‘Okay. You’re in charge. Now do something with it.’ And I remember in basic training—it didn’t ever happen in AIT [Advanced Individual training], but I had a couple of guys come at me with shovels and—guys in my own unit.”

13. Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny (New York: Dell, 1951), 116.

14. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 25.

15. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

16. For marching and running rates, see U.S. Department of the Army, Field Manual 22-5: Drill and Ceremonies (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, November 30, 1966), 11. For the M14 rifle, see Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 276.

17. R. P. Carver and F. R. Winsmann, “Analysis of the Army Physical Proficiency Test in Terms of the Fleishman Basic Fitness Tests” in Perceptual and Motor Skills (April, 1968), 203–8; Whitfield B. East, A Historical Review of Physical Training Readiness and Assessment (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, March 2013), 129.

18. For an entertaining summary of M14 rifle training, see Tauber, The Sunshine Soldiers, 48, 113–14, 153–54. See also Department of the Army, The Big Picture.

19. Department of the Army, The Big Picture: The Men from the Boys.

20. Tauber, The Sunshine Soldiers, 191–93. Even anti-war satirist Tauber found the night infiltration course exhilarating and challenging.

21. Ibid., 248–49; Department of the Army, The Big Picture: The Men from the Boys.

22. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.” For a more cleanly edited version of this quotation, see Tom Weiner, ed., Voices of War: Stories of Service from the Home Front and the Front Line (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2012), 19.

23. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 25–26; Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 152; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

24. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), 212–16. Gitlin was a leader of the anti-war movement as well as one of its most articulate chroniclers.

25. Dave Grossman, On Killing (New York: Back Bay Books, 1995), 253–57. Grossman, a former U.S. Army infantry officer and former West Point instructor, looked closely at the psychology behind military training and its relationship to actual combat. See also Hartman, Enscore, and Smith, Vietnam and the Home Front, 59. Tom Hagel noted that the E and F targets depicted men with Asian faces wearing conical straw hats.

26. Maitland and McInerney, A Contagion of War, 30; Hartman, Enscore, and Smith, Vietnam and the Home Front, 66. For a very readable account of infantry Advanced Individual Training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, see John Sack, M (New York: Signet, 1967), 9–71. In 1968, infantry Advanced Individual Training was extended to nine weeks to accommodate additional Vietnam War techniques.

27. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 28. For Officer Candidate School policies, see Ron Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 18–23. Milam served as an officer in Vietnam.

28. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 28. For the Redeye, see Mary T. Cagle, History of the Redeye Weapon System (Redstone Arsenal, AL: U.S. Army Missile Command, May 23, 1974), 146, 192–94.

29. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 33.

30. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 28–29, 33.

31. Gitlin, The Sixties, 255; Carroll, House of War, 293–97. Both authors were active protestors in the 1960s. Carroll was present at the Pentagon on October 21, 1967.

32. Weigley, History of the United States Army, 431–40; Dougan and Lipsman, A Nation Divided, 72–76.

33. B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History (Dallas, TX: Verity Press, 1998), 51–52. Burkett served as an officer in Vietnam with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade. Whitley is a prominent Texas journalist. This book is controversial, as Burkett aggressively exposes numerous phonies claiming to be Vietnam veterans. That aspect aside, the book contains some authoritative and thought-provoking demographic data derived from reliable, annotated sources. For corroborating data, see Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, Veterans and Agent Orange: Health Effects of Herbicides Used in Vietnam (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1994), 74–79.

34. Dougan and Lipsman, A Nation Divided, 76. Those who served expressed particular respect for the conscientious objectors who served in Vietnam without carrying weapons. Most were medics, and many earned decorations for valor. Corporal Thomas W. Bennett and Specialist 4 Joseph G. LaPointe Jr. both earned the Medal of Honor. Both were killed in action.

35. Gitlin, The Sixties, 291.

36. Ibid. Among those who chose a religious vocation was James Carroll, son of a U.S. Air Force lieutenant general. The younger Carroll left air force ROTC at Georgetown University to pursue the Catholic priesthood. Carroll resigned as a priest in 1974. The draft ended in 1973. See Carroll, House of War, 336–40.

37. Ibid., 291–93; Dougan and Lipsman, A Nation Divided, 76.

38. Ibid. For Johnson’s unwillingness to call up the National Guard and the service reserves, see H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 316–17. West Point graduate and armor/cavalry officer Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster served in Iraq I, Iraq II, and Afghanistan. His book is a very damning indictment of the senior U.S. military leadership of the 1960s. Although no significant mobilization of the National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve occurred, a call-up in 1968 sent 7,040 guardsmen to Vietnam. See John D. Stuckey and Joseph H. Pistorius, “Mobilization for the Vietnam War: A Political and Military Catastrophe,” Parameters (Spring 1985), 35–36.

39. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 346–47; Morocco, Rain of Fire, 179; John S. Bowman, ed., The Vietnam War: An Almanac (New York: World Almanac, 1985), 358. The navy lost 628 air crewmen; the air force sustained 1,472 dead fliers. Those who opted for the navy sometimes ended up under fire on the ground in Vietnam. Martin J. Mayer, a Rutgers graduate, joined the navy to avoid carrying an M16 as a soldier in country. Selected for Officer Candidate School, he ended up on a riverine patrol boat (one played a key part in the film Apocalypse Now) and, yes, he carried an M16. Mayer eventually advanced to command the USS Enterprise Carrier Battle Group and, after thirty-seven years of service, retired as a vice admiral (three stars) in 2003.

40. Burkett and Whitley, Stolen Valor, 48, 52. Some 7,000 U.S. women served in Vietnam. Eight nurses were killed in action. See Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, Veterans and Agent Orange, 83. For the draftees in combat arms, see also Dougan and Lipsman, A Nation Divided, 78.

41. Colin L. Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine, 1995), 99, 135. Powell advised a South Vietnamese unit in his 1962–63 deployment; he was wounded in action. He then served as G-3 (operations officer) for the 23rd Infantry (Americal) Division in 1968–69.

42. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 28.

43. Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, Veterans and Agent Orange, 82; Burkett and Whitley, Stolen Valor, 47–48. Of the 101 eighteen-year-olds killed in Vietnam, 7 were African Americans.

44. Arnold Barnett, Timothy Stanley, and Michael Shore, “America’s Vietnam Casualties: Victims of a Class War?” Operations Research (September–October 1992), 856–66. Among Yale graduates who served off the Vietnam coast aboard the destroyer USS Fox was navy officer and future Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward.

45. Burkett and Whitley, Stolen Valor, 55–56; Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War, 18–23.

46. Burkett and Whitley, Stolen Valor, 454; Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, Veterans and Agent Orange, 83; Dougan and Lipsman, A Nation Divided, 78. Hispanic ethnic groups were not well tracked during the Vietnam era, and their numbers appear to be split between the white, black, and other categories. The usual number offered is that Hispanics totaled at least 5 percent of all casualties.

47. Tom Wolfe, “Art Disputes War: The Battle of the Vietnam Memorial,” Washington Post, October 13, 1982.

CHAPTER 3. WIDOWS VILLAGE

1. Ron Marks,… Of Bags, Counts, and Nightmares (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2013), 532. Marks served in Vietnam in both the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 1st Infantry Division.

2. Keith W. Nolan, The Battle for Saigon: Tet 1968 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1996), xii–xiii (map), 199–205. The late Keith Nolan wrote numerous superb tactical histories of key engagements in the Vietnam War. His work set the standard, interweaving personal accounts with relevant documents.

3. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 29.

4. John E. Gross, “One Rifle Company’s Wild Ride: The Battles of Bien Hoa and Long Binh,” Vietnam, February 2008, 50. John Gross commanded Company C, 2-47th Infantry during the Tet Offensive. He completed his military service as a lieutenant colonel. For a map of 2-47th Infantry’s movements on January 30–31, 1968, see Donn A. Starry, Vietnam Studies: Mounted Combat in Vietnam (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), 120–21. Starry served in J-3 Plans in MACV headquarters and then commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in 1969–70, to include service in the Cambodia operation. He retired in 1983 as a general (four stars).

5. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 396. Davidson, the MACV intelligence chief, noted that Giap strongly advised against launching the Tet Offensive in 1968. The North Vietnamese military leader did not think it would work; he considered the United States too strong, and recommended reversion to classic guerrilla tactics. For the number of targets attacked, see Clark Dougan and Stephen Weiss, Nineteen Sixty-Eight, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1983), 8.

6. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 396–99, 419–21, explains the North’s planning and preliminary operations for Tet. Giap’s quote, as well as an overall pre-Tet strategic assessment, can be found in Krepinevich, The Army in Vietnam, 238–39. For a graphic depiction of MACV and ARVN battalion-level positions on the eve of Tet, see Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 385.

7. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 425–26; Dougan and Weiss, Nineteen Sixty- Eight, 8–11, 184.

8. For General Erich Ludendorff’s quote, see Keith Neilson and Greg Kennedy, The British Way in Warfare: Power and the International System, 1856–1956 (London: Routledge, 2010), 139.

9. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983), 545. Lieutenant General Tran Do, a key VC commander during the war, died in 2002. He fell out of favor with the Hanoi party leaders in 1999.

10. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 392; Davidson, Vietnam at War, 426.

11. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Vantage, 1989), 707–9. For examples of later arguments that MACV anticipated the Tet Offensive, see Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 393, and Davidson, Vietnam at War, 430–31. Westmoreland claims “no surprise.” To his credit, Davidson admitted that while he and his intelligence staff discerned that the NVA would strike, “much more unexpected were the assaults on the many cities and towns.”

12. Gross, “One Rifle Company’s Wild Ride,” 50; Nolan, The Battle for Saigon, 200–1.

13. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 29–30. For a video summary of the introductory training at Camp Martin Cox (Bear Cat), see U.S. Department of the Army, Headquarters, 9th Infantry Division, Reliable Academy (Bear Cat, Republic of Vietnam: Headquarters, 9th Infantry Division, 1967) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90SmIUVepd0, accessed June 4, 2016.

14. Weigley, History of the United States Army, 436–38.

15. Ibid., 510.

16. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 358.

17. Krepinevich, The Army in Vietnam, 205–10.

18. Russell F. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany 1944–1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981), 13.

19. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

20. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 77.

21. John Sloan Brown, Kevlar Legions: The Transformation of the U.S. Army 1989–2005 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 2011), 253–57. A 1971 West Point graduate, Brown commanded a tank battalion in the 1990–91 Iraq War and completed his U.S. Army service as a brigadier general. His son served in Iraq in 2003–04.

22. John E. Gross, Our Time: Training, Deploying, and Combat with Company C, 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2013), 80–81.

23. Forrest Gump, directed by Robert Zemeckis, Paramount, 1994. Forrest Gump and Bubba Blue walk past a wooden sign with the words alpha company, 2nd/47th infantry, 9th infantry div. “old reliables.” The latter is the nickname of the 9th infantry Division.

24. Starry, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, 60, 106–7; Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.” For more on the M113, UH-1D, and numbers of maneuver battalions in MACV, see Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 260–61, 280, 282, 333.

25. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

26. Ibid.; Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 154. The AK-47, Avtomat Kalashnikova Model 1947, took its name from its inventor, Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov.

27. U.S. Department of the Army, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, Significant Activities for Calendar Year of 1968 (APO San Francisco, CA: Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, March 31, 1969), 1. The mortar might have been a Russian-made 82mm, but the VC used captured U.S. and ARVN 81mm mortars, too.

28. Starry, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, 120–21, 123–24; Gross, “One Rifle Company’s Wild Ride,” 50; Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.” For the contemporary record of orders and movements, see U.S. Department of the Army, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, DA Form 1594: Daily Staff Journal (Bien Hoa, Republic of Vietnam: Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized, 47th Infantry), 0001–2400, January 31, 1968, 1–2.

29. Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

30. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Nolan, The Battle for Saigon, 206; Starry, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, 124; Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, DA Form 1594: Daily Staff Journal, 2–3. For video of the ammunition supply point explosion, see U.S. Department of the Army, 221st Signal Company (Pictorial), Attack at Long Binh and Widow’s Village (Long Binh Post, Republic of Vietnam: 221st Signal Company (Pictorial), January 31, 1968) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZhPUVDCZH0, accessed June 4, 2016. Some sources refer to the town as Widow’s Village, but the official accounts clearly refer to Widows Village (plural, not possessive).

31. Nolan, The Battle for Saigon, 210; Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, DA Form 1594: Daily Staff Journal, 3.

32. Headquarters, 9th Infantry Division Public Affairs, “Widows Village: VC Graveyard Tet 1968,” Octofoil, April–May–June 1968, 1. The Octofoil was the division’s quarterly magazine. Some sources identify Robert Andrew Huie as a private or private first class, but the record of casualties lists him as a corporal, the most junior NCO rank. Given his role as a track commander, that was clearly his duty position on January 31, 1968.

33. Nolan, The Battle for Saigon, 210–11. For additional details by a soldier present at the firefight, see John Driessler, Widow’s Village—The True Story at http://www.angelfire.com/ny2/SGTFATS/WidowsVillageTruth.html, accessed June 3, 2016. Sergeant First Class William N. Butler earned the Silver Star at Widows Village. See Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, Significant Activities for Calendar Year of 1968, 2. The RPD, ruchnoy pulemyot Degtyaryova, the standard VC light machine gun, was designed by Vasiliy Alekseyevich Degtaryov.

34. Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, DA Form 1594: Daily Staff Journal, 3; Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.” See also 221st Signal Company (Pictorial), Attack at Long Binh and Widow’s Village.

35. 221st Signal Company (Pictorial), Attack at Long Binh and Widow’s Village. For additional video of the U.S. attack on Widows Village, see U.S. Department of the Army, Armed Forces Vietnam Network, Contact with Vietcong During Tet, 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division, 01/31/1968 (Saigon, Republic of Vietnam: Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, January 31, 1968) at https://archive.org/details/ContactWIthVietcongDuringTet, accessed June 4, 1968.

36. Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, DA Form 1594: Daily Staff Journal, 3–6; Nolan, The Battle for Saigon, 212–19. For 2-47th Infantry, two additional Americans (one scout and another from Company A) were killed in action, making a total of five dead for January 31, 1968. The battalion’s wounded totaled forty-five. For the day, the battalion reported 213 VC killed and 17 enemy prisoners. The number of prisoners was listed as 32 in the U.S. Army Valorous Unit Award earned for the actions on January 31, 1968.

37. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel. Captain Robert George Keats graduated from West Point in the Class of 1965. See Chris Carroll, “Hagel Pays Tribute to Fallen Commander,” Stars and Stripes, May 24, 2013. See also A Classmate (anonymous member of the U.S. Military Academy Class of 1965), “Robert George Keats” at http://www .west-point.org/users/usma1965/25736/, accessed June 29, 2016. Keats earned the Silver Star during the Tet Offensive. He was buried in the West Point cemetery.

38. Yuri Beckers, “The Octofoil Shoulder Patch,” at https://9thinfantrydivision .net/9th-infantry-division-history/the-octofoil-shoulder-patch/, accessed June 5, 2016.

39. Michael Casey, Clark Dougan, Denis Kennedy and Shelby Stanton, The Army at War, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1987), 145–46.

40. James Hinds, 3rd Squadron, 5th Cavalry, Third Squadron, 5th Cavalry in Vietnam: Part I (CONUS and III Corps) (Self-published, 1992), 72–79. CONUS refers to the continental United States. III Corps was the Vietnamese designation for headquarters assigned to the provinces around Saigon. In the month before Tet, the squadron lost seventeen killed, three missing, and sixty-three wounded. On December 31, 1967, on Route 2, Troop C, 3-5th Cavalry had been ambushed. The U.S. lost ten troopers killed, three missing in action, and twenty-nine wounded. Two tanks and six armored personnel carriers had been damaged too badly to move. No Viet Cong casualties were reported. A month later during Tet, Troop A fought in Bien Hoa, suffering six killed and twenty-four wounded. Troop B secured Route 2, but despite three straight nights of contact, sustained no casualties. Troop C fought in Xuan Loc and lost one killed and ten wounded.

41. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel. The letter is quoted in MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 10. Tom Hagel and Chuck Hagel correctly recalled that the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment was commanded by Colonel George S. Patton III, son of the famous World War II general, who took over on July 15, 1968. The younger Patton looked, talked, and fought like his illustrious father. As commander of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Patton earned two Distinguished Service Crosses, the Silver Star, and the Purple Heart, rare distinctions for a full colonel. Because 3-5th Cavalry went north in mid-February of 1968, it detached from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Tom Hagel never served under Patton’s command. For a summary of the younger Patton’s service in Vietnam, see Brian M. Sobel, The Fighting Pattons (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 137–59. The younger Patton completed his service in 1980 as a major general. Like his famous father, he commanded the 2nd Armored Division.

42. Hinds, 3rd Squadron, 5th Cavalry in Vietnam: Part I (CONUS and III Corps), 79; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

43. Westmoreland’s quotes come from Associated Press, “Recapture U.S. Embassy,” Chicago Tribune, January 31, 1968; Sorley, Westmoreland, 177–78.

44. Westmoreland’s quote comes from Associated Press, “Recapture U.S. Embassy.” For the situation in Saigon and across South Vietnam, see Lewis Sorley, Thunderbolt: From the Battle of the Bulge to Vietnam and Beyond: Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 211–18.

45. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 434. For the best examination of the role of the press in Tet, written by an experienced Saigon journalist who reported from Saigon during the war, see Peter Braestrup. Big Story, 2 vol. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977).

46. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 406; Davidson, Vietnam at War, 434.

47. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 404.

CHAPTER 4. THE BUTCHER OF THE DELTA

1. Alan Clark, The Donkeys (London: Hutchinson, 1961), 9. Clark served very briefly in the Household Cavalry and then as a long-time member of Parliament. He wrote several military history books. With regard to the quotation, General Erich Ludendorff and Major General Max Hoffman served in the Imperial German Army in World War I. After earlier duty on both the western and eastern fronts, by 1916 Ludendorff was the chief staff deputy in the German national high command. Hoffman spent the entire war in the east. In his bitter, controversial, influential, and eminently readable book The Donkeys, Clark attributed this exchange to the memoirs of General Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of the German general staff in 1914–16. No book written by Falkenhayn contained the quotation. It can be found, attributed to Ludendorff and an unnamed officer in the German general staff, in Evelyn, Princess Blucher (Evelyn Fuerstin Blucher von Wahlstatt), An English Wife in Berlin (London: Constable, 1921), 211. It’s unclear why Clark did not properly attribute the sentences, as they are central to his book’s strong argument. If nothing else, he offered an easy opening to his many critics. John Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire: Myths & Anti-Myths of War 1861–1945 (London: Leo Cooper, 1980), 170–71, offers one of many attempts to sort out the veracity of the quote. Terraine (1921–2003) was a well-known apologist for the British senior leaders in World War I with little time for Clark. British historians of the era split over the entire matter. The majority dismissed Clark’s sloppy research, although Great War veterans Basil Liddell Hart and Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery both praised the book. Given all of that, I think all we can do is credit Clark himself. Whatever the source of the quote, the sentiment rang only too true.

2. Ted Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell (Austin, TX: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, November 7, 1985), 41. This interview occurred in Ewell’s home in McLean, Virginia.

3. John Keegan, The Mask of Command (New York: Viking, 1987), 208–10, 214.

4. Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire, 43–47, 148–57. Terraine strongly supports Haig’s performance, but as a good historian, reflects contrary facts and opinions as well.

5. Josiah Bunting III, The Lionheads (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 15. Bunting served in Vietnam as an infantry officer in the 9th Infantry Division under Ewell’s command. A former enlisted marine and Rhodes Scholar, Bunting consciously made reference to British Great War literature, and his use of the term “Lions” in depicting American soldiers reflected that connection. The novel fictionalized the division as the 12th Infantry Division (“the “Lionheads” with a “Young Lion Academy” to train new arrivals and a “River Lion” riverine brigade). In Bunting’s narrative, “George Lemming” commanded. The outfit was clearly the 9th and the character was unmistakably Julian J. Ewell. Bunting, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, made Lemming a product of The Citadel, the military college in Charleston, South Carolina, and a friendly rival of Bunting’s alma mater. Westmoreland spent a year at The Citadel before going to West Point. Ewell was a West Point alumnus.

6. Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (New York: Vintage, 2013), 22–23.

7. For the Offutt family history, see http://offutt-history.tripod.com/id14.html, accessed June 9, 2016.

8. Patricia Gates Lynch Ewell and Ira A. Hunt Jr., “Julian J. Ewell 1939,” at http://apps.westpointaog.org/Memorials/Article/11388/, accessed June 9, 2016.

9. Clay Blair, Ridgway’s Paratroopers: The American Airborne in World War II (Garden City, NY: Dial Press, 1985), 30–38.

10. Ibid., 42.

11. Ibid., 413, 611.

12. Ibid., 491, note, 611. For the defense of Bastogne, see Major Gary F. Evans and Specialist 5 Michael R. Fischer, U.S. Army, The 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment at Bastogne, Belgium, December 1944 (Bozeman, MT: 50th Military History Detachment, June 22, 1972), 1–10.

13. Larrabee, Commander in Chief, 153. King sometimes denied the quote, but he certainly embraced its intent.

14. For the importance of Kien Hoa Province to the Viet Cong, see Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell and Major General Ira A. Hunt Jr., U.S. Army, Vietnam Studies: Sharpening the Combat Edge: The Use of Analysis to Reinforce Combat Judgments (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), 188. For pacification status of the Mekong Delta in 1968, see Ira A. Hunt Jr., The 9th Infantry Division: Unparalleled and Unequalled (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 141–42. Hunt served as both chief of staff and a brigade commander during Ewell’s tenure. He strongly supported Ewell’s approach. For a graphic depiction of the security situation in the ARVN IV Corps Tactical Zones, see Martin G. Clemis, “The Control War: Communist Revolutionary Warfare, Pacification, and the Struggle for South Vietnam, 1968–1973” (PhD dissertation, Temple University, May 2015), 475. In Vietnamese, the Mekong River is sometimes called the Nine Dragons River (Song Cuu Long), and thus the Delta is the Mouth of the Dragon.

15. Julius Caesar, The Gallic War, trans. H. J. Edwards (Cambridge, MA: Dover 2009), 1. The famous first line is Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. All Gaul is divided into three parts.

16. For province populations, see U.S. Agency for International Development, Economic and Engineering Study Grain Storage and Marketing System Vietnam (Toledo, OH: Wildman Agricultural Research, March 1970), 25. For unit locations, see Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 274, 371.

17. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 6, 77–78.

18. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 16; Casey, Dougan, Kennedy, and Stanton, The Army at War, 145, 155; Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 142, 153. In September 1968, as brokered by II Field Force, the 9th Infantry Division sent the mechanized 5-60th Infantry to the 1st Infantry Division and received back the 1-16th Infantry, a foot battalion. The units switched names, so the 1st Infantry Division ended up with the 1st Battalion (Mechanized), 16th Infantry and the 9th Infantry Division had a new leg 5-60th Infantry.

19. Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 11. Bunting’s novel The Lionheads turns on the known tactical shortcomings of the Mobile Riverine Force. During their counterinsurgency of 1945–54, the French employed similar dinassaut (Division Navale d’Assaut, Naval Assault Division) riverine units.

20. The 9th Infantry Division study is cited in Lieutenant General John J. Tolson, U.S. Army, Vietnam Studies: Airmobility 1961–1971 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 181.

21. Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 6, 11.

22. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 99–100, 184; Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 78.

23. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, 6. He quotes the idea as “it is better to send a bullet than a man.”

24. For the number of artillery shells to kill an enemy at Anzio, in Korea, and in Vietnam, see Edgar C. Doleman Jr., Tools of War, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1984), 48. For the 25th Infantry Division, see Eric M. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning: The World of a Combat Division in Vietnam (Boulder, CO; Westview Press, 1993), 77. In the first quarter of 1967, the 25th Infantry Division shot 207,000 artillery rounds and claimed 231 enemy killed by those fires.

25. Major Robert A. Doughty, U.S. Army, The Leavenworth Papers Number 1: The Evolution of U.S. Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946–76 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, August 1979), 38–39. Doughty served as an adviser in Vietnam, later headed the Department of History at West Point, and completed his service as a brigadier general.

26. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 73.

27. Patton was quoted in Doughty, The Leavenworth Papers Number 1: The Evolution of U.S. Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946–76, 36.

28. Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 22; Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 19–24.

29. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 40. Bergerud interviewed numerous 25th Infantry Division veterans. Lieutenant Richard Blanks described his schedule, which matched that found in the 9th Infantry Division before Ewell took command.

30. Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 24, 32.

31. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.” Chuck Hagel noted that his unit was understrength and usually short on NCOs as well as riflemen. He saw no real change from the Ewell policies.

32. Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 13 ; Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 83. The authors stated: “We then began to realize that the supermarket approach of large turnover with small unit profit paid off much more than the old neighborhood grocery approach of small turnover with a large markup.”

33. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 16, 38–39.

34. For helicopter combat contributions and increased aviation availability, see Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 44–46, 56–57.

35. For Ewell’s constant pressure quote, see Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 24.

36. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 38–39; Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 32–33; Agency for International Development, Economic and Engineering Study Grain Storage and Marketing System Vietnam, 25.

37. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 186; Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 26.

38. Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 15; Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 186.

39. Both of these quotes can be found in Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Picador, 2013), 206–7. Turse argues that the entire American way of war in Vietnam constituted a war crime. Leaving aside his extreme claims, he drew on excellent sources, including previously unreleased official investigations. The 9th Infantry Division under Major General Julian J. Ewell comes in for particular criticism. For the casualty totals, see Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 185. The 9th Infantry Division reported over three thousand enemy killed in February, March, and April of 1969, but never exceeded those numbers before or after that period. In April of 1969, the 9th alone, one of eight army divisions in country, accounted for one-third of all VC/NVA killed.

40. Bunting, The Lionheads, 17.

41. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, 240–41; Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 431–32.

42. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, 240–41; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 793, 798; Davidson, Vietnam at War, 452; Sorley, Westmoreland, 191.

43. Sorley, Westmoreland, 194.

44. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, 240.

45. Halberstam The Best and the Brightest, 794–95.

46. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 11; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

47. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; U.S., Fleet Marine Force Pacific, WestPac SitRep #1066 through #1071 (Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii: Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, February 27 through March 3, 1968), 3–9. See also Jack Shulimson; Lieutenant Colonel Leonard A. Blasiol, USMC; Charles R. Smith; Captain David A. Dawson, USMC, U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Defining Year, 1968 (Washington, DC: Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, History and Museums Division, 1997), 248. The marines later assessed a total of thirty-five enemy dead, although that exceeds the counts reflected in the contemporary records.

48. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

49. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 33.

50. Richard B. Frank, Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle (New York: Penguin, 1990), 457–59, 489–90. The 1944 movie was The Fighting Sullivans. The destroyer USS The Sullivans (DD-537) served in both World War II and Korea. A new guided missile destroyer, USS The Sullivans (DDG-68), served in the global war on terrorism. The Sullivans were not the only family so affected. Another famous case involved Fritz, Bob, Preston, and Edward Niland of Tonawanda, New York. Wartime reporting convinced the authorities in Washington that all but Fritz had been killed in action, with both Bob and Preston killed in the 1944 Normandy invasion and Edward dead in Burma. Fritz was evacuated to the United States as the sole survivor. After the war, Edward emerged alive from a Japanese prison camp. The Niland family’s story became the basis for the 1998 movie Saving Private Ryan.

51. U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Defense Instruction Number 1315.15: Special Separation Policies for Survivorship (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, with Change 1 of June 1, 2012), 1–4.

52. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

53. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 11; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 33.

54. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel. See also MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 11.

55. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 11. For Chuck Hagel’s quote, see Patricia Sullivan, “A Vietnam War That Never Ends,” Washington Post, Post Mortem blog (August 5, 2009) at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postmortem/2009/08/vietnam_still_resonates_in_the.html, accessed June 11, 2016.

56. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

57. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 34, 36. For Betty Hagel’s quotes, see MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 419.

CHAPTER 5. BLAST

1. James Jones, WWII (New York: Ballantine, 1975), 86. Author of the novels From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, James Jones served as a rifleman in the 25th Infantry Division in World War II. He earned the Purple Heart when wounded during combat on Guadalcanal in January of 1943.

2. U.S. Department of the Army, FM 7-15: Rifle Platoon and Squads, Infantry, Airborne, and Mechanized (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, April 1965), 4–6, 192–95. Although the U.S. Army in World War II used yards to mark distances, by Vietnam, most measurements were metric. Altitudes and elevations continued to be counted in feet. For consistency and reader understanding, measurements have been converted to standard units, with the exception of weapons (5.56mm, for example).

3. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, 188.

4. Eric Brandner, “Just as in Vietnam, Hagel Still Navigates the Road Less Traveled, On Patrol: The Magazine of the USO, Summer 2014, 30. For an example of a three-man point element, see Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 108.

5. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

6. Department of the Army, FM 7-15: Rifle Platoon and Squads, Infantry, Airborne, and Mechanized, 207; Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 108.

7. Department of the Army, FM 7-15: Rifle Platoon and Squads, Infantry, Airborne, and Mechanized, 254–55.

8. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

9. U.S., Headquarters, 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968 (Camp Martin Cox, Republic of Vietnam: Headquarters, 9th Infantry Division, May 12, 1968), 7. For casualties on February 28, 1968, see David L. Argabright, ed., 9th Infantry Division “The Old Reliables” Those who Gave Their Lives in Southeast Asia 1966–1970 (St. Charles, IL: 2nd Battalion, 60th Infantry Southeast Asia Vietnam Association, September 18, 2000), 6, 7, 9, 23, 36, 38, 43, 46. In addition to those killed in the rocket attack, two others were killed in action elsewhere on February 28, 1968.

10. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 29–30; Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

11. Casey, Dougan, Kennedy, and Stanton, The Army at War, 153, 155. For more on this event, see Ray Funderburk, “Mekong: Memoirs of Ray Funderburk, PIO [public information officer], 9th Infantry Division, 1967–68,” at www.mrfa.org/pdf/Funderburk.Memoirs.pdf, accessed June 14, 2016. The Hagel brothers recalled the incident in Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 14 of 21,” Nebraska Educational Television, August 15, 1999. Penner created a half-hour documentary from his many hours of file footage. Most of the interviews occurred on site in Vietnam as the brothers visited the locations of their key 1968 experiences. The raw video can be reviewed at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.88134/, accessed June 26, 2016. For the 25th Infantry Division’s base camp and the Cu Chi tunnels, see Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 29–33.

12. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

13. Rudyard Kipling, “Gunga Din,” in M. M. Kaye, ed., Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Verse (London: Kyle Cathie, 1990), 323.

14. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 24, 114.

15. Department of the Army, FM 7-15: Rifle Platoon and Squads, Infantry, Airborne, and Mechanized, 207.

16. Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 154–55.

17. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel. Specialist 5 Phillip Rogers held a rank no longer used in the contemporary U.S. Army. For those with responsibilities but not leadership authority, the army designated specialist ranks 4 through 7, and briefly even an 8 and 9 level. In World War II, these were known as technical ranks and marked by a “T” inside the soldier’s chevrons. Except for Specialist 4, all these designations were eliminated by 1985. Despite common usage, to include some official documents, the ranks were never formally titled as specialist fourth class, fifth class, and so on.

18. Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 8–9.

19. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 200.

20. Ronald J. Glasser, 365 Days (New York: Bantam, 1971), 4–6. During the Vietnam War, Dr. Ronald Glasser served as a U.S. Army major at Camp Zama, Japan. In addition to his own experiences, Glasser collected accounts of those in country. See also Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 200–5; Doleman, Tools of War, 68, 70–71. For triage, see Peter Dorland and James Nanney, Dust Off: Army Aeromedical Evacuation in Vietnam (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2008), 5.

21. Sam McGowan, “Herculean Ordnance,” Air Force, March 2016, 58–62. The M121 went into service in the spring of 1969. A year later, the 15,000-pound BLU-82 became available. It remained in use through the 2001 Afghanistan campaign. Since then, the BLU-82 has been replaced by the GPS-guided 21,600-pound GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, “mother of all bombs”).

22. Dorland and Nanney, Dust Off, 71–72; Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 155.

23. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 8; Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 14 of 21.”

24. Dorland and Nanney, Dust Off, 68–69.

25. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 212, 214, 215, 217. Bear Cat did not have a full-fledged hospital, only a clearing (emergency treatment and stabilization) facility run by the 50th Medical Company and the 9th Medical Battalion. The 3rd Surgical Hospital was in Dong Tam in May of 1967, and would eventually support the bulk of the 9th Infantry Division by the second half of 1968.

26. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 9.

27. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

28. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 53.

29. Weigley, History of the United States Army, 533–35.

30. Sorley, Thunderbolt, 184.

31. Weigley, History of the United States Army, 533–35. See also Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (Orlando, FL: Harvest Books, 1999), 288.

32. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

33. Sorley, A Better War, 288. In an extreme case, General Creighton Abrams found a rifle company in which only the captain, one platoon sergeant, and one squad leader had more than two years in the army.

34. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 11; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

35. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 32. For more on both brothers in Vietnam, see Charles P. Pierce, “‘Before This Is Over, You Might See Calls for His Impeachment,” Esquire, April 2007, 143.

36. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

37. Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 15 of 21” (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska Educational Television, August 15, 1999) at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib .afc2001001.88134/, accessed June 26, 2016.

38. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 9.

39. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 65–66.

40. Paddy Griffith, Forward into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to Vietnam (Strettington, UK: Antony Bird Publications, 1981), 124–25.

41. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 10, 38, 110.

42. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 19.

43. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

44. Ibid.

45. Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 18.

46. Ibid, 19.

47. Ibid, 19.

48. Ibid., 9; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 35; Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

49. Jones, WWII, 88.

50. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.” For the Stars and Stripes, see http://www.stripes.com/customer-service/about-us/about-stars-and-stripes -1.101084, accessed June 17, 2016.

51. Associated Press, “Youth Slain as Wallace Visit Ignites Violence in Omaha,” Stars and Stripes, Pacific edition, March 7, 1968.

CHAPTER 6. KILLSHOTS

1. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “A Time to Break the Silence,” delivered at Riverside Church in Manhattan, New York, April 4, 1967, at http://www.ameican rhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm, accessed June 17, 2016. The original speech included this ellipsis. After the pause, King went on to say “… and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing ‘clergy and laymen concerned’ committees for the next generation.” King was assassinated exactly one year later in Memphis, Tennessee.

2. George Wallace’s crew flew to Tinian aboard a new B-29 they named Sentimental Journey, after the hit tune by Les Brown and his Band of Renown. When the crew arrived, the 794th Bombardment Squadron took the new aircraft and reassigned the men to the older Li’l Yutz. See Robert W. Bushouse, “Ray Crew,” in B-29 Crews, 794th–795th Bombardment Squadrons, 468th Bombardment Group (Windsor Locks, CT: New England Air Museum, 2010), 1–2. Captain Jack Ray headed the eleven-man crew that included Wallace. Sergeant Robert Bushouse was the senior fire control NCO (the B-29’s chief gunner).

3. Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2000), 109, 137. See also Stephen Lesher, George Wallace, American Populist (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1995), 56–57.

4. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 223–24.

5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census, Volume I: Characteristics of the Population, Part 29: Nebraska (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 1973), 29–6, 29–13, 29–33, 29–40. For African American population numbers, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of Population, Supplementary Reports, PC (S1), Negro and Total Population of the United States: 1970 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1971), Table 1.

6. Adam Fletcher Sasse, “A History of the North Omaha Riots,” North Omaha History blog at http://northomaha.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-north-omaha-riots .html, accessed June 22, 2016.

7. “Mob in Omaha Lynches Negro; Attempts to Hang Mayor Smith,” Omaha Morning World-Herald, September 29, 1919. Nebraska State Historical Society, We the People: The 1919 Riot at http://nebraskahistory.org/exhibits/we_the_ people/1919_riot.htm, accessed June 22, 2016.

8. Gitlin, The Sixties, 146. Malcolm X (né Little) only lived very briefly in Omaha after his 1925 birth. The post-1919 situation wasn’t good for African Americans in the city. The Littles moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then Lansing, Michigan.

9. Jessica Fargen, “King’s Legacy Continues in Lincolnites’ Lives,” Daily Nebraskan, January 14, 1999, 1. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta and earned his doctorate at Boston University.

10. Paul J. Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Civil Disorders 1945–1992 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005), 169. The 1965 Watts riot saw thirty-four killed and about a thousand injured, as well as 950 buildings looted and 200 burned or otherwise damaged.

11. Perlstein, Nixonland, 103–4.

12. Sasse, “A History of the North Omaha Riots.”

13. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York; Basic Books, 1999), 290. Mitrokhin defected from Russia in 1992, after the collapse of the USSR. For the KGB role with the Black Panthers, see Yuri V. Andropov, “#1128A, Committee for State Security to Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 28 April 1970” in Vladimir Bukovsky, Soviet Archives Collected by Vladimir Bukovsky, at https://matiane.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/soviet -archives-collected-by-vladimir-bukovsky/, accessed June 22, 2016. Andropov headed the KGB from 1967 until 1982. Bukovsky, a prominent Soviet dissident, was forcibly deported in 1976. He smuggled out a large number of government documents. For Soviet intelligence collection versus the Strategic Air Command, see Loch K. Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence: Understanding the Hidden Side of Government (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 37. For the GRU role, see Viktor Suvorov, Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), 158–59. Suvorov is a pseudonym for Vladimir B. Rezun, a former GRU officer who defected in 1978.

14. Walter C. Jersey, director, A Time for Burning (San Francisco: Quest Productions, 1967).

15. Michael Richardson, “George Wallace Rally in Omaha Triggered Riot After Demonstrators Were Beaten,” Examiner.com, March 12, 2011, at http://www .examiner.com/article/george-wallace-rally-omaha-triggered-riot-after-dem onstrators-were-beaten, accessed June 22, 2016.

16. Ibid. David Rice later took the name Mondo we Langa.

17. Associated Press, “Negro Youth Shot in Omaha Looting,” La Crosse Tribune, March 5, 1968. Some sources give Stevenson’s age as twenty-three. The FBI Omaha Field Office account listed him as sixteen years old. Officer Abbott was not charged.

18. Erin Duffy, “1968 Visit by George Wallace, Riots, State Tourney Loss Left Lasting Marks on Central High,” Omaha.com, March 21, 2014, at http://www .omaha.com/news/visit-by-george-wallace-riots-state-tourney-loss-left-lasting/article_fbdf0f1f-f7a7-5b2e-bac1-7f7492bb3117.html, accessed June 22, 2016. Omaha Central High School lost to Lincoln Northeast High School 54–50.

19. Associated Press, “Youth Slain as Wallace Visit Ignites Violence in Omaha.”

20. The FBI memorandum is quoted in Richardson, “George Wallace Rally in Omaha Triggered Riot After Demonstrators Were Beaten.”

21. Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971), 533.

22. The Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam, 1968), 1. The members were I. W. Abel of the United Steelworkers of America, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, Representative James Corman of California, Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, Atlanta police chief Herbert Turner Jenkins, Mayor John Lindsay of New York, Representative William McCullough of Ohio, Commerce Commissioner Katherine Graham Peden of Kentucky, Charles Thornton of Litton Industries, and Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

23. King, “A Time to Break the Silence.”

24. Tom Buckley, “Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men, Stirring Debate in Administration,” New York Times, March 10, 1968.

25. Perlstein, Nixonland, 228–32.

26. Ibid., 241.

27. Dougan and Weiss, Nineteen Sixty-Eight, 69.

28. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 439.

29. Sorley, Thunderbolt, 224–27.

30. U.S., Office of the President, “President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Address to the Nation Announcing Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam and Reporting His Decision Not to Seek Reelection,” March 31, 1968, at http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu /johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/680331.asp, accessed June 22,2016.

31. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, 291.

32. Gerald Posner, Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Mariner Books, 1999), 39–41, 93–95, 200. Ray served in the U.S. Army as part of the occupation forces in Germany from 1946 to 1948. A poor soldier, he committed minor offenses and received a general discharge. The U.S. Marine Corps often says once a marine, always a marine. Older veterans may merit the title former marines. There is but one ex-marine: Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. James Earl Ray was an ex-soldier.

33. Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Civil Disorders 1945–1992, 271. James Earl Ray confessed, then recanted. In later life, he spun imaginative tales of who really killed King. Although rumors continue, the weight of evidence has long implicated Ray.

34. Ibid., 272, 287, 288–89, 308, 325, 329. The U.S. Army sent the 1st Armored Division and a brigade of the 5th Infantry Division into Chicago. The 82nd Airborne Division sent a brigade to Baltimore and another brigade to Washington, joining local marine and army ceremonial troops committed for security. When the 82nd needed another brigade in the District of Columbia, it came from the 5th Infantry Division. The 82nd’s third brigade had already left for Vietnam, one of the post-Tet reinforcements.

35. Nebraska State Historical Society, We the People: Separate but Not Equal, at http://nebraskahistory.org/exhibits/we_the_people/separate_not_equal.htm, accessed June 23, 2016.

36. Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Civil Disorders 1945–1992, 337, 440–41. Aside from the North Omaha riot of 1969, the only significant urban unrest over the next few decades occurred in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, Florida, (1980) and the disturbances in Los Angeles, California, (1992) in the wake of not-guilty verdicts for police officers accused of beating African American Rodney King. The 2014 racial confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri, also came after the death of an African American youth shot by a white police officer. This episode catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement to highlight similar allegations across the country.

37. Perlstein, Nixonland, 267.

38. Dougan and Lipsman, A Nation Divided, 78, 80; Burkett and Whitley, Stolen Valor, 54–55.

39. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

40. Richard Sisk, “Hagel Remembers Martin Luther King,” DoD Buzz, January 20, 2014, at http://www.dodbuzz.com/2014/01/20/defense-secretary-hagel -remembers-martin-luther-king/, accessed June 23, 2016. See also Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

41. Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War, 154. Ron Milam served as a junior officer in Vietnam. He quoted one African American soldier stating: “Black soldiers should not have to serve under the Confederate flag or with it. We are serving under the American flag and the American flag only.” For another example of the routine display of the Confederate flag, see Bunting, The Lionheads, 113. Bunting referred to the flag’s use on air-cushioned vehicles in the Mekong Delta. For racist epithets in Vietnam, see James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), 217–18. Gibson’s book has a strong polemic slant, but his citations and cited evidence speak for themselves.

42. For a typical example of the reliance on photographs of white soldiers in one of the army’s most widely distributed field manuals, see U.S. Department of the Army, FM 22-5 Drill and Ceremonies (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, August 1968). See also Samuel Lipsman and Edward Doyle, Fighting for Time, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1983), 101–102. James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix served in the 101st Airborne Division before the Vietnam War.

43. Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War, 27–28.

44. Ibid., 28. In the U.S. Armed Forces as a whole in the Vietnam era, African American officers totaled 2 percent.

45. Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Civil Disorders 1945–1992, 332.

46. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

47. David Martin, “Defense Secretary Hagel Finds Long-Lost ‘Brother.’” CBS News, February 17, 2014, at http://www.cbsnews.com/news/defense-secretary-hagel-finds-long-lost-brother/, accessed June 23, 2016; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel. Tom Hagel noted that Johnson was serving outside his assigned armor branch but did just fine.

48. Claudette Roulo, “Hagel ‘Quintessentially American’ Obama says at Farewell Tribute,” DoD News, Defense Media Activity, January 28, 2015. President Barack H. Obama met both Jerome Johnson and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in the Oval Office in 2014. In his farewell to Hagel, Obama quoted Johnson. Johnson’s comment about his personal order comes from Martin, “Defense Secretary Hagel Finds Long-Lost ‘Brother.’”

49. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 486–87.

50. With regard to the shortcomings of MACV’s body counting formula for victory, in Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 794, the author included a devastating exchange that occurred during the deliberation of LBJ’s wise men. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg asked the military briefer the hostile strength as of February 1, 1968. The answer came back: 160,000 to 175,000. How many did we kill? Forty-five thousand. And for every NVA/VC death, how many were wounded? Three. At that, Goldberg did the mental arithmetic. He remarked that using MACV math, there were no enemy left in the field.

51. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 12.

CHAPTER 7. HEAT

1. John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980) 130. Private Stephen Bagnall served as an infantryman in the British army with Company C, 5th East Lancashire Regiment during the extended battle at Caen in Normandy in the summer of 1944. His 1947 novel, The Attack, drew from his experiences.

2. Starry, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, 9–10. The northern part of South Vietnam experiences opposite seasons. So it was wet, foggy, and muddy up north near Khe Sanh and Hue during Tet and the following weeks, with consequent degradation of U.S. and ARVN operations.

3. James A. Warren, Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 157. For the relationship between the one-slow, four-quick tactics and the Mao Zedong approach to guerrilla warfare, see Starry, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, 14.

4. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 15–16.

5. U.S. Department of the Army, Headquarters, 9th Infantry Division, Ground Force Commander’s Situation Report 22001H to 222400H April (Camp Martin Cox, Bearcat, Republic of Vietnam: Headquarters, 9th Infantry Division), April 23, 1968, 1.

6. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

7. For Tom Hagel’s description, see Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 14 of 21.” For details of the chemical defoliation program, see Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, Veterans and Agent Orange, 89–90. The three principal defoliants were Agent Orange (dichlorophenoxyacetic and trichlorophenoxyacetic acid, 11,261,429 gallons), White (picloram, 5,246,502 gallons), and Blue (cacodylic acid, an arsenic derivative, 1,124,307 gallons). Orange wiped out broad-leaf forests. White lasted longest and proved useful around base camps, including Bear Cat. Blue worked well on rice crops. Prior to 1964, compounds known as Purple, Pink, and Green were also used, but the total amounted to less than a quarter million gallons. When Chuck Hagel served as an official with the Veterans Administration in 1981–82, he tabbed brother Tom to assist in the study of the long-term effects of Agent Orange on those who served in Vietnam.

8. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 14 of 21.”

9. For an example of a cordon and search using mechanized infantry, see Starry, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, 103–6.

10. Although often done in Vietnam, carrying exposed linked machine gun ammunition “bandit style” can be a problem. If the gunner goes prone, dirt usually encrusts the ammunition, leading directly to stoppages. Experienced soldiers prefer to carry the ammunition coiled in a slung pouch. A gas mask carrier (minus the mask) works well. By the time of the Afghanistan (2001–14) and Iraq (2003–11) campaigns, the military issued pouches to carry belts of linked machine gun rounds.

11. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 14 of 21.”

12. Ibid.

13. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 188–93.

14. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 14 of 21.”

15. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 13, 43.

16. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

17. U.S. Department of the Army, Technical Manual 9-2350-261-10 Operator’s Manual for Carrier, Full-Tracked, Armored M-113A2 (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, August 2005), section 028.00. Although the manual is new, the basic driving method for an M113 has not changed.

18. Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 2 of 21,” Nebraska Educational Television, August 14, 1999 at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001 001.88134/, accessed June 29, 2016.

19. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

20. Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21,” Nebraska Educational Television, August 14, 1999, at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001 001.88134/, accessed June 29, 2016.

21. Ibid.; Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 155–56; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 42; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

22. U.S. Department of Defense, Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, “TBI & the Military” (Washington, DC: Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, 2016) at http://dvbic.dcoe.mil/about/tbi-military, accessed June 29, 2016.

23. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 2 of 21.”

24. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 34; Keith W. Nolan, House to House: Playing the Enemy’s Game in Saigon, May 1968 (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2006), 216.

25. Nolan, House to House, 210.

26. For participating enemy units, see 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 7–11. Sorley, Thunderbolt, 230, summarized Mini-Tet’s bombardment, including 450 attacks by 122mm and 107mm rockets and various mortars directed at targets across Saigon’s eight districts.

27. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 487, claimed MACV intelligence derived “almost complete knowledge of the details of the enemy’s plans” for the May 1968 Mini-Tet offensive. For the name of the offensive, see Starry, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, 129.

28. John A. Cash, “Gunship Mission” in John A. Cash, John Albright, and Allan W. Sandstrum, Seven Firefights in Vietnam (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), 139–52. During a major engagement near the Phu Tho Racetrack, the 120th Aviation Company flew attack missions on May 5, 1968, in support of the 30th Ranger Battalion.

29. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 19–21.

30. Ibid., 20; Nolan, House to House, 215–16; Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 6 of 21,” Nebraska Educational Television, August 14, 1999, at http://memory.loc .gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.88134/, accessed June 29, 2016.

31. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

32. 31st Infantry Association, “Chapter 18: 6th Battalion, Fort Lewis and Vietnam, 1967–1970” in America’s Foreign Legion, 11–12 at http://www.31stinfantry .org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Chapter-18.pdf, accessed July 1, 2016. The 6-31st Infantry history provides an excellent overview of the entire engagements at Xom Ong Doi and Xom Cau Mat. See also Nolan, House to House, 216–17.

33. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 6 of 21”; Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

34. Nolan, House to House, 216–17.

35. Argabright, The 9th Infantry Division “The Old Reliables” Those Who Gave Their Lives in Southeast Asia 1966–1970, 17, 21.

36. Ibid.

37. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 6 of 21.”

38. Nolan, House to House, 218–19.

39. Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

40. 31st Infantry Association, “Chapter 18: 6th Battalion, Fort Lewis and Vietnam, 1967–1970,” 11–13.

41. Nolan, House to House, 221.

42. 31st Infantry Association, “Chapter 18: 6th Battalion, Fort Lewis and Vietnam, 1967–1970,” 15; Nolan, House to House, 225.

43. Sorley, A Better War, 27–28. Both Hagels were aware of these restrictions and commented on their effects on the ground. See Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 6 of 21.”

44. 31st Infantry Association, “Chapter 18: 6th Battalion, Fort Lewis and Vietnam, 1967–1970,” 11–13.

45. Nolan, House to House, 225–29.

46. 31st Infantry Association, “Chapter 18: 6th Battalion, Fort Lewis and Vietnam, 1967–1970,” 11, 13–14; Nolan, House to House, 238–39.

47. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; “Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 6 of 21.” For the tendency to call all hostile marksmen snipers, see Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 252–58.

48. John Morocco, Thunder from Above, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1984), 46–47, 66, 79. The Mark 81 250-pound Snakeye had a set of big tail brakes that slowed its descent and allowed for on-target drops near troops. The Mark 47 500-pound napalm canister mixed gelling aluminum salts and petroleum. It exploded in a nasty fireball and stuck to people and things. The F-4D Phantoms carried their 20mm rotary cannon in an attached gun pod.

49. Nolan, House to House, 230–31; Argabright, 9th Infantry Division “The Old Reliables” Those Who Gave Their Lives in Southeast Asia 1966–1970, 49.

50. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 19–22; 31st Infantry Association, “Chapter 18: 6th Battalion, Fort Lewis and Vietnam, 1967–1970,” 14; Nolan, House to House, 242–43. Of note, the single VC prisoner stated that his female unit commander took his weapon for her own use.

51. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 21.

52. Stephen E. Atkins, Writing the War: My Ten Months in the Jungles, Streets and Paddies of Vietnam, 1968 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 163–64. Atkins served with Company C, 6-31st Infantry; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

53. Nolan, House to House, 301.

54. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

55. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 6 of 21.” In this segment, both Chuck and Tom Hagel actually walked the Route 320 areas of the May 9 and May 11, 1968, firefights.

56. Nolan, House to House, 304–5.

57. Ibid., 316–19.

58. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 6 of 21.”

59. 31st Infantry Association, “Chapter 18: 6th Battalion, Fort Lewis and Vietnam, 1967–1970,” 28–32. See also Nolan, House to House, 320–21.

60. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 18–22; Nolan, House to House, 339; Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 13.

61. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 439. For MACV’s claim of 40,000 enemy dead, see Sorley, A Better War, 97.

62. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 422–24, 437. For the 101st Airborne Division’s operations in the A Shau Valley, see Tolson, Airmobility, 182–92. The A Shau Valley operation recorded 869 NVA dead for the cost of 142 Americans killed.

63. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 10–11, 22. In assessing the enemy losses, the 9th Infantry Division’s intelligence section judged the Phu Loi II Battalion (strength 300) as “combat effective,” 5th Nha Be Battalion (strength 60) as “not combat effective,” and 506th Battalion (strength 270) as “marginally combat effective.” All three battalions escaped from the south Saigon neighborhoods.

64. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, Inclosure 6 “Summary of Rounds Fired.”

65. Ibid., 31; Nolan, House to House, 312–14, describes U.S. embassy efforts to estimate civilian casualties in Saigon during Mini-Tet. See also Sorley, A Better War, 77.

66. Nolan, House to House, 349–51, lists the six journalists killed. See also Herr, Dispatches, 231.

67. Sorley, A Better War, 29. Sorley transcribed the quote from a 1968 tape recording. He added the italics to depict words emphasized by General Abrams in his comments. The first two defenses Abrams mentioned were Tet (January–February) and Mini-Tet (May).

68. The United States lost 616 troops in the week of May 5 through 11, 1968. This is noted in Herr, Dispatches, 230, and explained in Ronald Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year of the Vietnam War (New York: Vintage, 1993), 319.

CHAPTER 8. THE RIVER BLINDNESS

1. Herr, Dispatches, 13. Among his many other accomplishments. Michael Herr wrote much of the narration for the 1979 film Apocalypse Now.

2. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 36. Senator Robert F. Kennedy won the California presidential primary just before his assassination by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian from Jordan. Sirhan was not a U.S. citizen and said he shot Kennedy due to the senator’s support of Israel.

3. Starry, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, 11–13.

4. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 8, 11.

5. Argabright, 9th Infantry Division “The Old Reliables” Those Who Gave Their Lives in Southeast Asia 1966–1970, 51, 53.

6. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

7. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 22. The words “infantry” and “infant” share a common root. In addition, the U.S. Army infantry’s branch color is baby blue, the traditional color associated with male children. That’s an interesting but apparently unintentional coincidence. The U.S. Army’s choice of blue probably had more to do with finding a contrast between the Continental Army’s uniforms and the red coats of British infantry regiments during the Revolutionary War (1775–83).

8. Sullivan, “A Vietnam War That Never Ends,” 1.

9. Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 7 of 21,” Nebraska Educational Television, August 14, 1999, at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001 .88134/, accessed July 4, 2016.

10. Ibid.

11. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 19.

12. Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 156; Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 2 of 21”; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 35.

13. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 19. Emphasis in original.

14. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 35–36. The Military Auxiliary Radio System allowed civilian ham radio volunteers to assist the U.S Armed Forces in tying field radio traffic into commercial phone lines. The radio-wire interface allowed soldiers in Vietnam to “phone home,” although connections could be spotty and both sides had to use radio procedures, such as “over” to end a sentence and “out” to end the transmission.

15. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 21.

16. Argabright, 9th Infantry Division “The Old Reliables” Those Who Gave Their Lives in Southeast Asia 1966–1970, 49, 57.

17. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, Inclosure 8, “Division Operations Data.” During the reporting period, the 2-47th Infantry lost thirty-one killed (plus two attached aviation soldiers) and claimed thirty-one VC killed and two prisoners taken.

18. Carolyn S. Van Deusen, “Frederick F. Van Deusen, Class of 1953” at http://apps.westpointaog.org/Memorials/Article/19460/, accessed July 4, 2016.

19. Tolson, Airmobility, 14.

20. Ibid., 264–65, 269, 272–74; Dorland and Nanney, Dust Off, 66, 69; Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 46, 116. The OH-23 Raven was an exception to the usual use of Indian names for U.S. Army aircraft. The model was a variant of the UH-12, already named by the U.S. Navy.

21. Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (New York: Viking Penguin, 1983), 97, 209. As a warrant officer, Mason flew Hueys in Vietnam in 1965–66, to include duty with the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). He flew during the vicious combat in the Ia Drang Valley in November of 1965.

22. U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Comptroller, Air War in Indochina (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1972), 267–72, 283. For current U.S. Army numbers, see U.S. Congressional Budget Office Modernizing the Army’s Rotary-Wing Aviation Fleet (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, November 2007), ix, 24.

23. For overall accident rates of the Vietnam era, see U.S. Department of the Army, U.S. Army Board for Aviation Accident Research, Rotary Wing Sortie Study by Phase of Operation for FY 69 (Fort Rucker, AL: U.S. Army Board for Aviation Accident Research, 1970), 6, 8. Helicopter-related casualties are summarized in Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 346. Two-thirds of those killed in helicopter operations were aviators, the soldiers flying the aircraft.

24. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 49, 69.

25. Emphasis in original. Winston Groom, Better Times Than These (New York: Berkley Books, 1978), 68. Groom, also the author of the novel Forrest Gump that became the basis for the movie, served in Vietnam with the 4th Infantry Division. Groom’s earlier novel Better Times Than These is a fictionalized version of the experiences of the 1st Cavalry Division in the Central Highlands in 1966–67. The sentences quoted are from a character speaking of his experiences as a helicopter aviator in the Ia Drang Valley, scene of fierce fighting in November of 1965.

26. Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan R. Jackson, U.S. Army, interviewer, and Colonel John R. Dabrowski, U.S. Army, ed., An Oral History of Lieutenant General Henry E, Emerson (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army Military History Institute, 2004), 27. Emerson developed the jitterbug tactic during his time as the commander of the 2nd Battalion (Airborne) 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division in the Central Highlands in 1965–66. Ewell referred to Emerson as “a genuine genius” [emphasis in original] in Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 35. A graduate of West Point (Class of 1947), Emerson completed his thirty years of service as a lieutenant general in command of XVIII Airborne Corps. As commander of the 2nd Infantry Division in the Republic of Korea in 1973–75, he had a strong positive influence on then-Lieutenant Colonel Colin Powell, who commanded the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry during that time.

27. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 41. The XM-2 was also called an E63 man-pack personnel detector. It was supposed to be employed by a soldier on foot, but the 9th Aviation Battalion figured out how to emplace it on a UH-1 helicopter. The XM-3 device, introduced later, was specifically designed for use aboard a rotary wing aircraft.

28. Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 58–61.

29. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 107–10.

30. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

31. Tribune Wire Services, “Van Deusen, Westmoreland’s Brother-in-Law, Dies in Viet,” Chicago Tribune, July 6, 2016; U.S. Department of the Army, Headquarters, U.S. Army Vietnam, General Orders No. 3240: Citation for the Distinguished Service Cross: Lieutenant Colonel Frederick French Van Deusen (Long Binh Post, Republic of Vietnam: Headquarters, U.S. Army, Vietnam, July 9, 1968).

32. Tolson, Airmobility, 35–36, 272.

33. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

34. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; see also Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21,” Nebraska Educational Television, August 14, 1999, at http://memory .loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.88134/, accessed July 7, 2016.

35. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 16.

36. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

37. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21.”

38. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

39. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 16.

40. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21.”

41. Ibid.

42. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 16.

43. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21.” The Vam Co River has two branches: Dong (east) and Tay (west).

44. Ibid.; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

45. Headquarters, U.S. Army Vietnam, General Orders No. 3240: Citation for the Distinguished Service Cross: Lieutenant Colonel Frederick French Van Deusen.

46. Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 46–48.

47. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

48. For the details of the shoot-down, to include a modern perspective of the terrain, see Army Air Crews, UH-1 Crews: UH-1 Vietnam Losses 1968 at http://www.armyaircrews.com/huey_nam_68.html, accessed July 7, 1968. For Tom Hagel’s recollections, see Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21.”

49. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21.”

50. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; see also MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 16–17.

51. Tribune Wire Services, “Van Deusen, Westmoreland’s Brother-in-Law, Dies in Viet”; Headquarters, U.S. Army Vietnam, General Orders No. 3240: Citation for the Distinguished Service Cross: Lieutenant Colonel Frederick French Van Deusen.

52. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 17; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

53. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 8, 11; U.S. Army Vietnam, General Orders No. 3240: Citation for the Distinguished Service Cross: Lieutenant Colonel Frederick French Van Deusen. Van Deusen’s award citation noted the search for an enemy battalion command post.

54. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 17.

55. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21.”

56. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 321.

57. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 2, 22, Inclosure 8 “Division Operations Data”; Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 101–2. Lieutenant Colonel William Edward Berzinec of 4-39th Infantry was killed in action by an enemy land mine on July 30, 1968.

58. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 21, Inclosure 8 “Division Operations Data”; U.S. Army Vietnam, General Orders No. 3240: Citation for the Distinguished Service Cross: Lieutenant Colonel Frederick French Van Deusen.

59. Starry, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, 235. Lieutenant Colonel William Bernard Cronin was killed in action on April 27, 1967.

60. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 20; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel. Tom Hagel received the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star with “V” (valor device), and the Army Commendation Medal with “V” for his various actions on July 3, 1968. Years later, when his brother was a senator, a review of Tom’s records caused some officious bureaucrat to rescind the Bronze Star under the theory that only one award could be given for each engagement, as if heroism can be quantified. Tom Hagel kept another Bronze Star and another Army Commendation Medal with “V” given for other actions.

61. Nolan, House to House, 277. The speaker was First Lieutenant Ronald P. Garver, who served during Mini-Tet with Company C, 5-60th Infantry. See also 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 30 April 1968, 82. From May 1 to July 31, 1968, 2-47th Infantry soldiers earned eighty-six Purple Hearts, to include thirty-one men killed in action. Soldiers received eighty-one valor awards (one Distinguished Service Cross, thirteen Silvers Stars, forty Bronze Stars with “V,” and twenty-seven Army Commendation Medals with “V”). Compared to other 9th Infantry Division battalions, 2-47th Infantry processed fewer awards.

62. Grossman, On Killing, 97–119.

63. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

64. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21.”

65. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 37.

66. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 17–18. Emphasis in original.

CHAPTER 9. CONSTANT PRESSURE

1. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, 1979), 91–92. An acclaimed writer, O’Brien wrote this book about his year (1969–70) in Vietnam. The short book originally came out in 1973. The title comes from a cadence call used in basic training. The epigraph about Charlie Cong was also a cadence call and another drill sergeant favorite. The first part was sometimes rendered “Late at night when you’re sleepin’.” In addition to the nonfiction account If I Die in a Combat Zone, O’Brien also wrote the novel Going After Cacciato (1978) and a short story collection, The Things They Carried (1990). Both of these well-regarded books offer more of O’Brien’s views on the Vietnam War. He served in Company A, 5th Battalion 46th Infantry in the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal) in northern South Vietnam during 1969. Like the Hagel brothers, draftee O’Brien advanced to sergeant in country. He earned one Purple Heart.

2. Gitlin, The Sixties, 331. Todd Gitlin was in Chicago as a participant in the unrest.

3. For crowd estimates, see Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Civil Disorders 1945–1992, 358; and Dougan and Weiss, Nineteen Sixty-Eight, 164. For Lyndon Johnson’s, crude remark, see Perlstein, Nixonland, 267. For the nomination of Humphrey as street clashes escalated, see Tom Wicker, “Humphrey Nominated on the First Ballot After His Plank on Vietnam Is Approved; Police Battle Protestors in Streets,” New York Times, August 29, 1968, 1. Humphrey chose as his running mate the colorless Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. He delivered his state’s four electoral votes and not much else.

4. Dougan and Weiss, Nineteen Sixty-Eight, 168.

5. Gitlin, The Sixties, 331–34. Gitlin was there.

6. Carl D. Rostow and Robert D. Davis, A Handbook for Psychological Fitness-for-Duty Evaluations in Law Enforcement (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2004), 18.

7. Richard M. Nixon, “What Has Happened to America?” Reader’s Digest, October 1967, 49–54. Conservative writer Patrick Buchanan assisted Nixon in drafting this article.

8. Ibid., 302–4; Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Civil Disorders 1945–1992, 320–22.

9. Dougan and Weiss, Nineteen Sixty-Eight, 176.

10. Lessing, The Politics of Rage, 343, 364; Lesher, George Wallace, 399, 416. For “work” and “soap,” see Marianne Worthington, “The Campaign Rhetoric of George Wallace in the 1968 Presidential Election” at http://www.ucumberlands .edu/downloads/academics/history/vol4/MarianneWorthington92.html, accessed July 12, 2016. For the meanness quotation, see Perlstein, Nixonland, 340.

11. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 36–37.

12. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

13. Ibid.

14. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 419. Emphasis in original.

15. U.S., Headquarters, 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 October 1968 (Dong Tam, Republic of Vietnam: Headquarters, 9th Infantry Division, November 15, 1968), 24.

16. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 7 of 21.”

17. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 7 of 21.”

18. Sobel, The Fighting Pattons, 39; Sorley, Thunderbolt, 57. Abrams, like Westmoreland, hailed from the West Point Class of 1936.

19. Sorley, A Better War, 17–30.

20. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 512–13. Davidson’s intelligence analysts recognized that the NVA and VC shifted to guerrilla activities by mid-1968.

21. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 118–20, 129–30; Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 22–23, 25, 32.

22. Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 23–25.

23. Headquarters, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry, Significant Activities for Calendar Year of 1968, 4. Binh Phuoc is in Long An province.

24. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 October 1968, 21. A small segment of Route 25 near Dong Tam also had to be secured.

25. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 150–53; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

26. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

27. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 109. For a detailed examination, see Jean L. Dyer, Kimberli Gaillard, Nancy R. McClure, and Suzanne M. Osborne, Evaluation of an Unaided Night Vision Instructional Program for Ground Forces (Alexandria, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute, October 1995), 2–4, B-1, B-2.

28. Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 64–77; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel. Hagel said he led “a lot of ambush patrols.”

29. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

30. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 7 of 21.”

31. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 277.

32. Doleman, Tools of War, 40–41.

33. Ibid., 305.

34. Bunting, The Lionheads, 47, 54–58. Bunting’s novel reflects many of the attitudes he witnessed during his time serving under Major General Ewell’s command with the 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam.

35. For a good description of setting up a Claymore mine in a night ambush, see O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, 93–94.

36. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

37. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 31.

38. David C. Isby, Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army (London: Jane’s Publishing, 1988), 251–52, 284–85, 331–33, 419–21. The Soviets and Chinese shipped towed mortars, towed rocket launchers, and towed heavy machine guns to the North Vietnamese. All of these came mounted on rubber tires, to be pulled by trucks. In Vietnam, the VC and NVA often dragged these weapons by hand.

39. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 31.

40. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

41. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 32.

42. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

43. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 October 1968, 6–8, 21.

44. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 109–10.

45. Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 34.

46. John “Fats” Spizzirri, “One Day in Nam (For Chuck),” at http://www.angel fire.com/ny2/SGTFATS/page10A.html, accessed July 13, 2016. John Spizzirri served in 2nd Platoon, Company B, 2-47th Infantry in 1968–69. Like Chuck and Tom Hagel, he advanced to sergeant and spent most of his time as an acting NCO. He knew the men on the patrol of October 3–4, 1968, and participated in the morning reaction force mission.

47. Ibid.; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel. Tom Hagel was part of the reaction force. For his additional recollections, see Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 9 of 21,” Nebraska Educational Television, August 14, 1999, at http://memory .loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.88134/, accessed July 14, 2016.

48. Argabright, The 9th Infantry Division “The Old Reliables” Those Who Gave Their Lives in Southeast Asia 1966–1970, 3, 9, 11, 17, 26, 41, 44, 50; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

49. The words of a Vietnam-era military death notification message are noted in Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once… And Young: Ia Drang—The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam (New York: Presidio Press, 1992), 345.

50. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 October 1968, 16, 21.

51. Carroll, House of War, 320; Carter, The Politics of Rage, 359–61; Lessing, George Wallace, 425–26.

52. Perlstein, Nixonland, 354. Wallace won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. He was the last third-party candidate to earn an electoral vote in a U.S. presidential election.

53. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”; Berens, Chuck Hagel, 37; Roger L. Vance, “Chuck Hagel Nomination: An Interview with Senator Hagel on His Vietnam War Experience and Vision for the War’s Commemoration,” Vietnam, December 2012, 30.

54. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel”, Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

55. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

CHAPTER 10. CHILDREN OF NYX

1. Hesiod, Theogony, Stanley Lombardo, trans. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Classics, 1993), 67. A Greek contemporary of Homer, Hesiod wrote his Theogony, the genealogy of the gods, sometime between 750 and 650 B.C. Among her many progeny, the primordial goddess Night (Nyx) gave birth to Doom (Moros), Fate (Ker), Death (Thanatos), Sleep (Hypnos), and Dreams (Oneiroi).

2. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; see also Vance, “Chuck Hagel Nomination,” 31.

3. For the phases of breakdown, see Roy L. Swank and Walter E. Marchand, “Combat Neuroses: Development of Combat Exhaustion,” American Medical Association: Archives of Neurology and Psychology, March, 1946, 236–43. For the official military findings, see Robert R. Palmer, Bell I. Wiley, and William R. Keast, U.S. Army in World War II: The Army Ground Forces, Vol. 2: The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), 228.

4. Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 5–6.

5. Ewell and Hunt, Sharpening the Combat Edge, 102, 127.

6. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

7. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 181.

8. Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, 719. Reporter Peter Arnett, a longtime Vietnam hand, secured this evocative quote for a story published on February 8, 1968. Like the “lions led by donkeys” line in World War I, it has been much disputed. Colleagues Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam, two award-winning journalists and historians of the Vietnam War, supported the integrity of Arnett’s reporting. Both Major Phil Cannella, U.S. Army, and Major Chester L. Brown, U.S. Air Force, have been named as the sources. Arnett interviewed four officers that day in Ben Tre and could not recall who said it.

9. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 369–70. While there are many dictionaries of Vietnam War slang, the thoughts of the longtime MACV commander are rather interesting. He certainly heard the words and knew their definitions. Whether he understood what it all really meant is another matter.

10. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel,” offers thoughts on the battalion and brigade commanders, including Emerson. For Chuck Hagel’s positive view of Ewell’s field leadership, see Sullivan, “A Vietnam War That Never Ends.”

11. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 112.

12. Philip Caputo, Indian Country (New York: Vintage, 1987), vi. Caputo served in Vietnam as a U.S. marine lieutenant in 1965–66, to include service as a rifle platoon commander. This novel is one of several books he wrote based on his experiences in combat and subsequent role as a journalist.

13. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 5 of 21.”

14. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 9 of 21.” For “Charlie worship,” see Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 255.

15. Herr, Dispatches, 178, recounts a colonel calmly discussing the etymology of “dinks.”

16. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 369–70. With regard to “gook,” the Korean language makes broad use of the word. Koreans are Hanguk. Americans are Miguk, literally “the beautiful people.” The Chinese are Chunguk. English are Anguk.

17. Get Smart, CBS Studios, 1965–70. This comic look at spies and espionage followed the adventures of Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, and his female partner, known only as Agent 99. World War II veteran and noted comedian Mel Brooks joined with Buck Henry to develop the show.

18. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 9 of 21.”

19. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 390; Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 2–3, 32.

20. Bunting, The Lionheads, 67.

21. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 July 1968, 81–82, 84.

22. The no alcohol rule, known as General Order Number One, originated in the 1990–91 war with Iraq. Vietnam veteran General H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. banned beer and hard liquor in deference to the customs of Saudi Arabia, the country where American troops staged. Whatever the Saudis made of it—and despite their ostensible religious views, most Saudis liked a drink as much as anyone—the lack of alcohol greatly reduced disciplinary problems. Every subsequent U.S. overseas operation has followed that example. See H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. and Peter Petre, It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (New York: Bantam, 1992), 360, 384.

23. Nolan, House to House, 59. Lieutenant Colonel Eric F. Antila of 5-60th Infantry offered that statement. For Ewell drinking beer with 2-47th Infantry troops, see Chuck Hagel’s comments in Sullivan, “A Vietnam War That Never Ends.”

24. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 8 of 21”; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

25. Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), i, 330–31.

26. Lieutenant General Carroll H. Dunn, U.S. Army, Vietnam Studies: Base Development 1965–1970 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), 135; Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 77–78.

27. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 8 of 21.”

28. Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 72–78.

29. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 July 1968, 21.

30. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 8 of 21”; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

31. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

32. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 8 of 21.”

33. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 9 of 21.” For artillery round counts, see 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 October 1968, 22. About 70 percent of all artillery fired went toward these harassment and interdiction missions, all based on intelligence reports and aerial spottings of varying reliability. See Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, 201.

34. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 276.

35. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 9 of 21.”

36. For an excellent overhead view of Bien Phuoc, see Bob Pries, Welcome to Binh Phouc! at http://www.angelfire.com/ny/binhphouc/, accessed July 15, 2016.

37. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 9 of 21”; 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 October 1968, 5, 16.

38. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

39. Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 10 of 21,” Nebraska Educational Television, August 14, 1999, at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001 001.88134/, accessed July 15, 2016.

40. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 9 of 21”; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

41. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.” Chuck Hagel described a similar enemy attack from his time in country.

42. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 159, describes this method of artillery direct fire.

43. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 9 of 21.”

44. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 177; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

45. 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 July 1968, 12; 9th Infantry Division, Operational Report of 9th Infantry Division for Period Ending 31 October 1968, 11; Hunt, The 9th Infantry Division, 109–10; Clemis, “The Control War,” 475–77. See also Race, War Comes to Long An, 417, 419. In that province, enemy force strength increased from 2,180 to 3,100 and 79.7 percent of villages remained outside of Saigon’s authority.

46. In a later operation named Speedy Express (December 1, 1968 to June 1, 1969), the 9th Infantry Division reported 10,899 enemy killed and 748 weapons taken. See U.S. Headquarters Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Review of Ground Operations (Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Republic of Vietnam: Headquarters, MACV, June 1969), 94.

47. Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, 217. Turse quotes from “A Concerned Sergeant” letter sent to the secretary of the army and subject to an extensive investigation. Turse had access to the investigation documents.

48. Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 33–36, 39–40.

49. Doleman, Tools of War, 164–76.

50. Ibid., 27–28.

51. Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, 211–12. Major Bill Taylor reported these rationalizations after he witnessed a UH-1 Huey door gunner engage Vietnamese in race paddies.

52. Gittinger, Interview with Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, 11, 38.

53. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 10 of 21.” At My Lai, Quang Ngai Province, on March 16, 1968, U.S. soldiers of Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers in an unprovoked atrocity. See Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 456–62.

54. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

55. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 22.

56. Toby Harnden, “Chuck Hagel, Obama’s Pick for Pentagon, Was ‘Very, Very Good at Killing’ in Vietnam,” Sunday Times (UK), January 27, 2013.

57. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 10 of 21.”

58. Ibid.; MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 21.

59. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

60. Argabright, The 9th Infantry Division “The Old Reliables” Those Who Gave Their Lives in Southeast Asia 1966–1970, 1–52. During the time the Hagel brothers served in 2-47th Infantry (December 4, 1967 until January 31, 1968), the battalion lost eighty-two soldiers killed in action.

61. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

62. Ibid.

63. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 7 of 21.”

64. Perry, “Interview with Senator Charles Hagel.”

CHAPTER 11. ASHES

1. Sorley, Westmoreland, 258.

2. Adam Fletcher Sasse, “A History of North Omaha’s June 1969 Riot,” North Omaha History blog, August 21, 2015, at http://northomaha.blogspot.com/2015/08/remembering-vivian-strong.html, accessed July 18, 2016.

3. Amy Helene Forss, Black Print with a White Carnation: Mildred Brown and the Omaha Star Newspaper, 1938–1989 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 143–44.

4. For the role of helicopters in riot control, see Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Civil Disorders 1945–1992, 76, 321, 347, 389.

5. Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (New York: Penguin, 1998), 211, 226. The second American to walk on the moon, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr., U.S. Air Force, spoke the words “magnificent desolation” as he stepped off the lander.

6. Vance, “Chuck Hagel Nomination,” 32.

7. Adam Fletcher Sasse, “A History of the Logan Fontenelle Housing Projects,” North Omaha History blog, August 20, 2015, at http://northomaha.blogspot .com/2015/08/a-history-of-logan-fontenelle-housing.html, accessed July 18, 2016. Hall of Fame St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson grew up in this housing area. The project was named for Logan Fontenelle (1825–1855), an Omaha Indian with a French father. Fontenelle acted as an interpreter in early negotiations between the Omaha and arriving settlers.

8. Forss, Black Print with a White Carnation, 143.

9. Frederick C. Luebke, Nebraska: An Illustrated History (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2005), 336–37.

10. Sasse, “A History of North Omaha’s June 1969 Riot”; Forss, Black Print with a White Carnation, 144.

11. Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Civil Disorders 1945–1992, 335.

12. United Press International, “Omaha Negroes Urged to End Disorder,” Arizona Republic, June 27, 1969, 36.

13. For FBI interest in Omaha, Nebraska, see U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Special Agent in Charge, Omaha, Memorandum for Director, Subject: Counterintelligence Program, Racial Intelligence, Black Nationalist-Hate Groups, Racial Intelligence, Black Panther Party (BPP) (Omaha, NE: FBI Special Agent in Charge, July 14, 1969), 1. For reference to photographs of Black Panthers guarding a location in North Omaha, see Leo Adam Biga, “A Brief History of Omaha’s Civil Rights Struggle Distilled in Back and White by Photographer Rudy Smith,” Leo Adam Biga’s My Inside Stories, May 2, 2012, at https://leo adambiga.com/2012/05/02/a-brief-history-of-omahas-civil-rights-struggle -distilled-in-black-and-white-by-photographer-rudy-smith/, accessed July 18, 2016. Photojournalist Rudy Smith captured key images of the 1969 Omaha riot.

14. Tom Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2013), 195–96, 270, 279, 283, 347.

15. For anti-government groups targeted by the FBI Counterintelligence Program, see U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “COINTELPRO,” FBI Records: The Vault at https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro, accessed July 19, 2016.

16. Perlstein, Nixonland, 331, 363.

17. Biga, “A Brief History of Omaha’s Civil Rights Struggle Distilled in Back and White by Photographer Rudy Smith.”

18. Sasse, “A History of North Omaha’s June 1969 Riot.”

19. Paul Hammel, “David Rice, Long Known as Mondo we Langa, Maintained His Innocence in 1970 Slaying Until the End,” Omaha World-Herald, March 16, 2016, at http://www.omaha.com/news/nebraska/david-rice-long-known-as -mondo-we-langa-maintained-his/article_44514dcc-2778-5593-a7ff-23f5dcbad22c .html, accessed July 19, 2016.

20. Elena Carter, “The Forgotten Panthers,” Buzzfeed, February 11, 2016, at https://www.buzzfeed.com/e6carter/the-omaha-two?utm_term=.wv1El3bY7# .urzqeLv8A, accessed July 19, 2016. Carter’s father, Earl Sandy Carter, worked in North Omaha in the early 1970s as a Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA) anti-poverty worker.

21. Michael Richardson, “Omaha FBI Office Sets Up COINTELPRO Unit and J. Edgar Hoover targets Black Panthers,” San Francisco Bay View, June 25, 2011, at http://sfbayview.com/2011/06/the-story-of-the-omaha-two-2/, accessed July 19, 2016.

22. Vance, “Chuck Hagel Nomination,” 32; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

23. Robert Nelson, “War and Peace,” Omaha Magazine, July 10, 2014, 60–61.

24. Ibid.

25. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 37–38, 46.

26. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 22–23.

27. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 455–56.

28. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, 274, 334. The ARVN 7th Infantry Division and 9th Infantry Division assumed responsibility for the former U.S. 9th Infantry Division area of operations.

29. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 542–47.

30. U.S. Selective Service System, “Induction Statistics” at https://www.sss .gov/About/History-And-Records/Induction-Statistics, accessed July 19, 2016. See also U.S. Selective Service System, “The Vietnam Lotteries,” at https://www.sss .gov/About/History-And-Records/lotter1, accessed May 27, 2016.

31. Sorley, Thunderbolt, 291, 313–14, 317–18; Davidson, Vietnam at War, 653–54.

32. Thomas J. Knock, The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 429. McGovern earned the Distinguished Flying Cross during a 1944 bombing mission over German-held Czechoslovakia.

33. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 45–46; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

34. Unattributed, “Hastings Youth, 16, Is Victim,” Lincoln Evening Journal, November 17, 1969.

35. Betty Breeding was quoted in MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 420. For Chuck Hagel’s quotation, see Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 279. He offered similar thoughts in the Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

36. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 18–19.

37. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 180.

38. Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), 213–20.

39. Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

40. Grossman, On Killing, 287–89.

41. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 180. Emphasis in original.

42. Ibid., 180; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel; University of Dayton, “School of Law: Thomas Hagel” at https://www.udayton.edu/directory/law/hagel _thomas.php, accessed July 19, 2016.

43. Berens, Chuck Hagel, 47.

44. U.S. Senate, Senator Charles T. Hagel, “Governor Frank B. Morrison,” 108th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record (April 22, 2004), S4288; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

45. Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

46. Carter, “The Forgotten Panthers.”

47. James Moore, Very Special Agents: The Inside Story of America’s Most Controversial Law Enforcement Agency—The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 103–4.

48. The FBI special agent is quoted in ibid., 104 below. For the Des Moines, Iowa, attack, see United Press International, “Des Moines Building Ripped by Explosion,” Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1970.

49. Ibid., 104.

50. In Operation Pandora, on July 25, 1971, the KGB directed emplacement of bombs “in the Negro section of New York,” preferably at a black-majority college. See Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive, 238.

51. Unattributed, “Students, Police to Be Topics of UFAF Confab,” Omaha Sun, January 1, 1970. This source refers to the United Front Against Fascism, an alternative name for the National Committee to Combat Fascism. That latter name was on the sign in front of David Rice’s house.

52. Carter, “The Forgotten Panthers.”

53. Ibid.; Moore, Very Special Agents, 104.

54. Carter, “The Forgotten Panthers.”

55. Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

56. Hammel, “David Rice, Long Known as Mondo we Langa, Maintained His Innocence in 1970 Slaying Until the End.”

57. Carter, “The Forgotten Panthers”; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

58. Jennifer Mascia, “People Were So Stunned That a 12-Year-Old Could Be Holding a Gun,” Trace, July 30, 2015, at https://www.thetrace.org/2015/07/omaha -nebraska-urban-gun-violence-city-limits/, accessed July 20, 2016.

59. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 420; Bolger interview with Thomas L. Hagel.

60. Todd Cooper, “After 35 years, Witness Still Says He Was 911 Caller. Duane Peak Holds Firm on the Recording That Led to the Death of an Omaha Officer and the Convictions of Two Men in the 1970s,” Omaha World-Herald, May 14, 2006. For Chuck Hagel’s thoughts on due process, even when it is very unpopular, see Hagel, America: Our Next Chapter, 101.

61. Penner, “Interview with Charles Timothy Hagel and Thomas Leo Hagel, Part 10 of 21”; Bolger interview with Charles T. Hagel.

62. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 706–10.

63. Edward Doyle and Terrence Maitland, The Aftermath, 1975–1985, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing), 102. For Chuck Hagel’s thoughts on the differences between Saigon of 1968 and 1999, see Hagel, America: Moving Forward, 8–9. Following his stint as a public defender, Professor Tom Hagel served on the law faculty of Temple University and then the University of Dayton. He also filled in as an acting municipal judge in Dayton, Ohio.

64. Brad Penner, producer, writer, reporter, Echoes of War, Nebraska Educational Television, 1999, at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc 2001001.88134/, accessed July 21, 2016.

65. The complete set of available raw video footage and sound can be found at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.88134/, accessed July 20, 2016.

EPILOGUE. THE OLD SERGEANT

1. George Santayana, “Tipperary,” Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (London: Constable, 1922), 102. Santayana wrote these lines following the armistice of November 11, 1918. The quotation is often attributed to Plato, most notably on the wall of the British Imperial War Museum in London. It was also linked to Plato by General of the Army Douglas A. MacArthur in his famous “Duty, Honor, Country” speech to West Point cadets on 1962. The words appear again as Plato’s aphorism at the beginning of the 2001 film Black Hawk Down. No extant work of Plato includes this quotation.

2. Karen Parrish, “Hagel Visits Afghanistan to Assess Operations,” American Forces Press Service, March 8, 2013, http://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle .aspx?id=119473, accessed August 2, 2016.

3. Mirwais Harooni and Phil Stewart, “Suicide Bomber Kills Nine Afghans in Kabul During Hagel Visit,” Reuters, March 9, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-blast-idUSBRE92804220130309, accessed August 1, 2016.

4. Karen Parrish, “Hagel Offers Observations After Meeting with Karzai,” American Forces Press Service, March 10, 2013, at http://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=119483, accessed August 1, 2016.

5. Karen Parrish, “Suicide Bomber Attacks Nearby During Hagel ISAF Meeting,” American Forces Press Service, March 9, 2013, at http://archive.defense .gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=119480, accessed August 1, 2016.

6. Chris Carroll, “On Hagel’s First Afghan Visit, Karzai Alleges US, Taliban Are Colluding,” Stars and Stripes, March 11, 2013.

7. Daniel P. Bolger, “Notes on Events of March 10, 2013,” NATO Training Mission—Afghanistan commander’s journal.