In the ever-growing category of things I didn't know:

The first time British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain ever flew in an airplane was on 15 September 1938, to see Hitler at Berchtesgarden. Seeking to bolster his policy of appeasement, Chamberlain flew to Germany twice more that month, first to Bad Godesberg and then to Munich.

Also, Churchill, stunned and alone after the Munich agreement, retreated to his country house, where his first visitor was Guy Burgess, then a producer for the BBC, but of course also a Soviet spy. No indication that Churchill knew anything about that.

Both facts from Martin Gilbert's fine Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years.

I always read the Pentagon's flag officer announcements, mainly to see if someone I know has gotten an interesting job. (It is nice to see people I knew as majors are now making three and four stars. Unfortunately, it also reminds me that people who joined the military when I started covering the Pentagon are retiring.)

In this case, I don't know Rear Adm. Metts, but I sure found the move of this information warfare specialist interesting. Maybe the U.S. government is going to respond more actively to the stream of Chinese intrusions into American government and business computers:

Rear Adm. (lower half) Willie L. Metts will be assigned as director for intelligence, J2, U.S. Pacific Command, Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii.  Metts is currently serving as deputy chief, tailored access operations, S32, National Security Agency, Fort Mead, Md. 

And yes, that is the way the press release spelled Fort Meade.

Here are the results of our survey of good books of military history that aren't about the U.S. military.

There were so many British books mentioned that I moved them into a second category. The first part here is genuinely foreign books -- not necessarily written by foreigners (though most are) but about wars in which the British and Americans were not major players, or at least not written from the Anglo-American perspective.

Most of these mentions were in the comments, but about 10 percent came in by e-mail.

I offer them in no particular order. Not even cleaned up -- just pasted in. For details on the books, go back to the comments section -- lots of explanations there about why a particularly book was nominated.

David Glantz, When Titans Clashed

Rommel's Infantry Attacks (2 nominations)

Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War 1961-74

Zhuang-zhi

Epictetus

Martin Van Creveld, everything but especially Command in War

Michael Oren, Six Days of War (2 votes)

Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, 34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah, and the War in Lebanon

Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory

Noel Mostert's The Line Upon a Wind

Patrick Rambaud's The Battle

Roland Perry, Sir John Monash: The Outsider Who Won a War

Larteguy's The Centurions and The Praetorians (3 nominations)

Harold Parker's Three Napoleonic Battles (short treatments of Friedland, Aspern-Essling, and Waterloo, with observations uniting all three)

John Elting's Swords Around a Throne (the Billy Yank/Johnny Reb treatment of what it was like for soldiers, leaders, and specialists in Napoleon's Grande Armee)

David Galula's Pacification in Algeria

Legionnaire, by Simon Murray

B.H. Liddell Hart's Caesar: Man, Soldier, and Tyrant

Colonel Saburo Hayashi, Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War  

Hoito Edoin, The Night Tokyo Burned

No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, by Hiroo Onoda

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson

The Franco Regime, by Stanley G. Payn

Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, by Peter Godwin

Sean Maloney's three-volume history of the Canadian experience in Afghanistan (Enduring the Freedom, Confronting the Chaos, and Fighting for Afghanistan). He also did a narrative of the first eight or so years entitled War in Afghanistan: Eight Battles in the South.

Ivan's War, by Catherine Merridale (2 nominations)

The Reluctant Admiral, by Hiroyuki Agawa (Yamamto)

Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War

Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar, by his wife Dorothy with an introduction by David Halberstam

Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse Tung

Either The Code of the Samurai or The Hagakure or The 47 Ronin

Heart of Darkness for anyone about to do an AFRICOM rotation. (And one de-nomination.)

Lester Grau, The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan

Alistair Horne's Savage War of Peace

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom

Avigdor Kahalani, Heights of Courage

Rabinovich's Yom Kippur War

On the Banks of the Suez: An Israeli General's Personal Account of the Yom Kippur War, by Avraham Adan

Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer (2 nominations)

All Quiet on the Western Front, and the lesser known but just as powerful sequel to the book, The Road Back, both by Erich Maria Remarque

Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel

Coalitions, Politicians and Generals -- Some Aspects of Command in Two World Wars, by Dominick Graham and Shelford Bidwell

Strange Victory, by Ernest May

Julian Jackson's The Fall of France

Witness to Surrender, by Brig. Siddiq Salik

The Way It Was, by Brig. Z.A. Khan

In the Line of Duty, by Lt. Gen. Harbaksh Singh

Guerrilla Warfare, by Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Afgantsy, by Rodric Braithwaite

The Jungle is Neutral, by F.Spencer Chapman

The War in Paraguay: With a Historical Sketch of the Country and Its People and Notes Upon the Military Engineering of the War, by George Thompson

On British military -- listed separately because more familiar

Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem

George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here (3 nominations)

John Masters, first two volumes of his memoirs

Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up

Keegan's Face of Battle

The Dambusters

William Slim, Defeat into Victory (4 nominations)

The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command, by Andrew Gordon (4 nominations)

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of The Great War, by Robert K. Massie (4 nominations)

The Last European War: September 1939-December 1941, by John Lukacs

How the War Was Won: Factors that Led to Victory in World War One and The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front & the Emergence of Modern War 1900-1918, two volumes by Tim Travers

Churchill's Generals

The Story of the Malakand Field Force, by Winston Churchill

Churchill and Seapower, by Christopher Bell 

J.F.C. Fuller's Strategy

Donald Morris, The Washing of the Spears (Zulu Wars)

Gordon Corrigan's Mud, Blood, and Poppycock (attempts to bust many of the popular myths about WWI on the Western Front)

Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (doorstopper-sized analysis of WWI)

Andrew Roberts' Masters and Commanders

The Tizard Mission: The Top-Secret Operation That Changed the Course of WWII, by Stephen Phelps

Not Mentioned in Dispatches

18 Platoon, by Sidney Jary

The Defence of Duffer's Drift, by Maj. Gen. Ernest Dunlop Swinton.

Brazen Chariots, by Robert Crisp

My War Gone By, I Miss It So, Anthony Loyd, ex-British soldier in Bosnia.

The Swordbearers

Forgotten Armies: Britain's Asian Empire and the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper

The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War, by H. P. Willmott

Battle for the Falklands, by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins

Poetry

Sassoon's The War Poems

The Dark Hills, by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Bingen on the Rhine, by Caroline E. Norton

I was surprised to see that Izzat al-Douri, a top Baathist leader, is being hunted around Tikrit. He was supposed to have fled to Syria long ago.

If so, what does that mean about the war in Syria? It seems to me to be an encouraging sign.

By Richard Coffman

Best Defense bureau of Vietnamese War affairs

Hanoi's War is an important book drawing on secret Vietnamese Communist Party and government archives and chronicling how Hanoi planned and waged war in Vietnam following the defeat of the French in 1954.

More than that, the book surfaces serious dissension at the highest levels in Hanoi over priorities, strategies, and resources undermining, among other things, preparation for the Tet Offensive of 1968 and leading to arrests and purges. Had Washington and Saigon had a clearer picture of this, the war certainly would have been fought differently, and the outcome might well have been more favorable. It's probably fair to say that we knew as much about Hanoi's leadership then as we do the North Korean leadership today.

As it was, this book describes how badly U.S. bombing in the North and significant ground incursions into communist base areas in Cambodia and Lao hurt Hanoi's war effort. It further shows the utter failure and enormous cost of Hanoi's major offensives in 1968, 1969, and 1972, which forced the North into greater dependence on the Soviets and Chinese and ultimately to engage in negotiations to force U.S. withdrawal.

The author, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, a native-born Vietnamese, naturalized U.S. citizen, and professor at the University of Kentucky, had access to a wealth of official Vietnamese language archives, personalities, and unpublished manuscripts. Among others, she interviewed Hoag Minh Chinh, once North Vietnam's leading communist theoretician and a purged dissident. She had access to the unpublished memoirs of the first of communist party First Secretary Le Duan's wives, who served in the Mekong Delta for years

Lieng-Hang not only plows much new ground, but does so in a well-organized, lucidly argued, and well-written chronological treatment of the Vietnam War and Hanoi's direction of it. Readers will be grateful for her facility in writing and organizing this substantively dense material, and that she makes clear that the archives she reviewed were sanitized and by no means complete.

To students of communist ideology and tactics, Hanoi's War neatly describes the rise to the pinnacle of power of communist party leader Le Duan and his close associate Le Duc Tho, and the marginalization of Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap. Indeed, these latter two internationally acclaimed heroes of the Vietnamese communist revolution, widely thought to wield unchecked power in Hanoi, sat out the Tet Offensive, Giap pouting in Hungary and Ho taking the waters in Beijing.

We further learn that despite Le Duan's repeated failures of strategies and tactics in the war in the South and immense personnel losses and the virtual destruction of the northern economy, he held on to power by virtue of brutal and non-stop repression. Even before the infamous Hanoi Hilton imprisoned U.S. airmen, it held scores of Le Duan's political opponents and dissidents, both real and imagined. His purges even claimed senior military officers close to Giap and some who helped plan the Tet Offensive.

In these and scores of less consequential matters, this book should humble Western intelligence and diplomatic observers, journalists, historians, academics, and the international left who got so much of North Vietnam wrong then and whose mistaken interpretations and judgments persist to this day.

Make no mistake, this is not revisionist history. The book's subtitle gives us a clue to her leanings: "An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam."

The author persists in describing the Vietnam War as "unwinnable" for the United States, which certainly must come as news to such eminent contemporary historians as Lewis Sorley and Mark Moyar, whose recent works, even without primary sources on Hanoi's troubles, make clear that the outcome in Vietnam was far from inevitable. Moreover, she has a palpable antipathy for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger even while brilliantly and in great detail describing how they simultaneously leveraged both Moscow and Beijing to squeeze Hanoi -- and against his deep instincts, Le Duan -- to get the best possible negotiated deal extricating the United States from Vietnam.

Indeed, Le Duan so preferred massive offensives designed to trigger popular uprisings in the South that he sent his right-hand man, Le Duc Tho, to Paris to keep the lid on the negotiations. This follows Le Duan's pattern in dispatching trusted generals to command the headstrong southern communists who believed their revolution was betrayed by the 1954 Geneva Accords. How ironic -- or perverse -- that Le Duc Tho won a Nobel Peace Prize for his service in Paris.

Finally, she attributes Hanoi's victory not to its persistence and tenacity, not to winning hearts and minds in the South, not to the enormous sacrifices of North Vietnam's armies and people, nor to U.S. politics which hamstrung and undermined the U.S. effort, particularly under Richard Nixon, but to the unwavering and irresistible pressure of post-colonial, third-world, anti-war nations fed by Hanoi's clever propaganda and diplomacy and eager to teach the United States a lesson. This, she avers, is perhaps the greatest legacy of Hanoi's war and serves as a model to those planning future revolutionary campaigns against Western powers.

This flight of fancy only slightly detracts from what is otherwise a major and unique contribution to our understanding of what we faced in Vietnam. Students of military history, the Vietnam War, and revolutionary communism have much to look forward to as these archives are more fully mined in the years ahead.

Richard Coffman served as a Marine Corps officer in Chu Lai and Danang, RVN in 1965-1966. He then served in the CIA for 31 years, analyzing the North Vietnamese leadership there from 1967 through 1972.

Gen. George C. Marshall was usually very close-mouthed about the tensions he felt with our British allies during World War II. But in a 1947 letter to McGeorge Bundy, who was helping write the memoirs of former Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Marshall was pretty candid:

... there was quite evident to me the feeling that of the British leaders that our ground army was not going to be effective, at least in time to play a decisive part in the fighting. As you know, Mr. Churchill had grave doubts about the comparative fighting ability of the American divisions as compared to the German divisions, though we should never say this publicly.... There was also the feeling that we would have no commanders comparable to the British Field Marshal..."

(P. 236, The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, Vol. 6: ‘The Whole World Hangs in the Balance.' Edited by Larry Bland, Mark Stoler, Sharon Stevens and Daniel Holt. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Buy it now! )

Remember my ruminating a couple of weeks ago about whether our strategic culture was shaped in part by the Old Testament?

Turns out someone who actually knows what he is talking about when he discusses the Bible is thinking about the strategic implications of the situation of Israel described in that book. In the new issue of The American Interest, former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim finds parallels between Israel's current strategic situation and that described in the Bible. He predicts that:

"Israel could indeed find itself in a general situation paralleling that of its Biblical predecessors: without a geographically remote ally, and in a region no longer tightly tethered to and constrained by an extrinsic great power rivalry. Like its Biblical predecessors, Israel may be forced to confront its place in shifting local power balances among states that might be at times friendly and at other times hostile. It may also have to weigh alliances with and against powers more geographically proximate: Turkey, Iran, India, perhaps Pakistan (if it survives as a state) and even China."

Zakheim also is interesting in his discussion of the politics of the prophets: "The Prophets were consummate realists: Isaiah preached independent neutrality when it was appropriate; Jeremiah preached submission to the superpower when the external ‘correlation of forces' had changed."

The lesson for Israel he finds in the words of the prophets is this: "Realism in foreign policy, moderation in religious policy, openness in economic policy and equality in social policy may be the best path for the Jewish state as it confronts its uncertain future."

David Rothkopf on the American search for enemies abroad: "The United States is a bit like a 375-pound, middle-aged man with a heart condition walking down a city street at night eating a Big Mac. He's sweating profusely because he's afraid he might get mugged. But the thing that's going to kill him is the burger."

CNAS, the little think tank where I hang my hat, picked a new president yesterday: Richard Fontaine. He is a smart, even-keeled guy who used to be the foreign policy advisor to Sen. John McCain.

But I don't think picking Fontaine is a make-nice-with-Republicans move. Rather, I think that Fontaine is a young, energetic guy who cares about national security, understands the unusual culture of CNAS, and would make a good president of the place. He is also a great listener, an unusual quality in Washington.  

As a bonus, the selection of Fontaine will flummox those who contend that CNAS is a stalking horse for Obama administration policies. Plus, I continue my streak of reporting to someone about half my age, which is fun.

The dispute was over tiny and barren Hans Island, which lies between Greenland and some equally boring Canadian wasteland.

War is never desirable, but I confess to wondering: Exactly how would the two countries confront each other as they escalated? Boycott each other's films? Neil Young banned from performing in Copenhagen?

By "Jeff"

Best Defense guest historian

I fully appreciate the dialogue between the Athenian elite and the Melian elite. I am sure that among the Melians there must have been contention as to what choice to make. In 400 BC, as in our time, an elite in the name of the people always makes such decisions for better or worse.

A modern parallel existed in May of 1940 in Great Britain. With her armies being shattered on the continent and her key ally in the final stages of her death throes, Britain faced a choice very much like that of Melos.

The choice was no less stark than that faced by Melos. The enemy was a great power, with the momentum of victory behind it. It was utterly ruthless. Britain could have cut a deal with the looming threat -- a deal eagerly sought by Hitler -- and opted out of harm's way with little loss but of reputation and humiliation.

Many of the British elite who were led by Halifax and the Foreign Office were looking for such a peace treaty but Winston Churchill, understanding the nature of his foe, outmaneuvered the Halifax faction and accepted the challenge from Hitler come what may. This choice amounted to the key strategic decision of the 20^th century. Churchill's leadership resulted in a decision that showed a willingness to risk all to preserve western civilization from Nazi barbarism.

This choice in my view was anchored in realism. Churchill and his Parliamentary allies possessed a hardboiled realism that fully appreciated the consequences of defeat but also the possibilities (as remote as they seemed at the time) of victory in the end.

Halifax's approach, in contrast, was seemingly realistic on the surface but in fact was not, because it failed to appreciate the nature of the opponent. Any deal arranged with the Nazis could only be temporary, because of the innate predatory nature of the Nazi regime and its cold-blooded ideology. Churchill, a historian, intuitively understood this important fact.

I find this parallel with the experience of the Melians very compelling. Had the Melians had a great power ally (Sparta), perhaps their choice may have become heroically successful rather than heroically doomed. As it was there was no deliverer off in the distance whose interests were served by a living Melos.

"Jeff" is an amateur military historian and financial executive retired after thirty years with Merrill Lynch.

By Peter Mattis

Best Defense guest respondent

Colonel Gregory Daddis' argument is that strategy is overrated: "Talented American generals can develop and implement a comprehensive political-military strategy and still lose a war." As sympathetic as watching a poorly executed strategy fail is likely to make someone to this argument, the argument itself rests on fallacious assumption. In the United States, a general cannot develop and implement a comprehensive political-military strategy. That's what civilian control of the military means. We are not the Prussians under Frederick the Great or the French under Napoleon, where civilian and military command was unified. A talented American general only may advise on creating such a strategy, because he/she -- like almost everyone else in the room -- lacks the standing and the comprehensive professional competence to establish the political ends. Something civilian commentators should remember when the national introspection and reflection begin, hopefully with more honesty.

Does a good strategy guarantee success? No. A good political-military strategy however does mean that individual operational and tactical successes (or failures) are far less important. 

The Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 provides a useful antidote to the focus on operational successes at the expense of thoughtful strategic planning. The Chinese suffered enormous losses for the number of troops engaged. Apart from the crossing the border with some level of operational surprise, it is hard identify what the People's Liberation Army (PLA) did right. Beijing did however achieve its political objectives. As Vietnamese documents later showed, Hanoi learned that Moscow could not be depended upon to protect Vietnam from China. Vietnam's potential expansion was stifled, because it had to maintain more forces closer to the northern border. Beijing earned the gratitude of Bangkok and Washington, while getting Moscow to back off in Asia. If there is a Chinese way of war, then focus on political outcomes of campaigns is a key element to how the use of force is measured. 

General Ulysses S. Grant's peninsula campaign in 1864 also shows the value of operations within a sound strategic framework.  From the Wilderness to Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor and the failed amphibious move on Petersburg, Grant continued to have opportunities -- irrespective of stalemate or defeat on the battlefield -- to hurt Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and separate it from the Confederate political leadership. Because Grant understood this, he did not react the same way to defeat as the previous commanders of the Army of the Potomac. Lee may have been able to parry Grant's individual and successive thrusts; however, he could not force Grant out. 

Although Andrew Bacevich's charge that the U.S. military has failed in almost every conflict since becoming an all-volunteer force may be hyperbole, there is enough truth to warrant some critical introspection. The lack of a draft meant a U.S. administration did not have to think as critically about power, passion, and politics -- even if the draft was not always a sufficient guard against supercilious "strategizing." Similarly, we should compare the record of the PLA's operational competence against the record of it accomplishing Beijing's objectives. That the former was poor while the latter superb should raise important questions for would-be U.S. strategists to consider about why and how to employ the U.S. military. 

On one score at least Clausewitz was unequivocal: "War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means." Although the military's professional prerogative and special competence, victory on the battlefield and operational competence are only relevant if they advance political objectives. The focus on the war-fighting excellence of the U.S. military seems to distract those in the civilian world from understanding that that excellence means little without walking through the political steps of strategy long before the military becomes involved. 

Clausewitz was clear about war being simple, but he decried devotion to any simplistic notion of how to design and execute strategy. One of the analogies used was a comparison to chopping down trees with an axe. At first glance, the object is simple. Chop the tree down. However, it rapidly gets more complicated. Which direction does it need to fall? What about the knots in the trunk? Is it a hard- or soft-wood tree? Where to start making the cuts and at what height? Each tree grows in a different context -- even if in the same forest -- with different features. Thus, what is simple in concept rapidly becomes more difficult in execution. 

In his book The Logic of Failure, psychological researcher Dietrich Dorner highlighted how complex problems needed variable levels of planning for good strategic decision-making to occur. Many individuals had a marked tendency to plan too much or too little, based on how insecure they were facing uncertainty. Dorner's experiments were not simplistic "games" of strategic choice, but rather continuing tests of people to manage the complex relationships -- such as the interrelationships between healthcare, population, food supply, and more -- over time where they had near dictatorial powers. Even people should know better by dint of training and experience still fail to set clear objectives, to treat strategies like testable propositions, and gather information related to the first two. Instead, most "muddle through" and a repair approach, which, although often better than nothing, is the result of a lack of clear objectives. In the face of such uncertainty, humans fall back on what they know and can deal with -- no matter how trivial -- to preserve their sense of competence.

Read on

C'mon, you know who you are. The National Archives has just the session for you, on Tuesday April 10:

The Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense and the National Archives invite you to a panel program discussing Robert S. McNamara's most controversial years as Secretary of Defense (1965-68), and Clark Clifford's brief but significant successor tour as Secretary (1968-69). The event will take place at noon on 10 April 2012 at the McGowan Theater, National Archives, located at 7th and Constitution, NW, Washington, DC. 

Discussion will be based on the Historical Office's recent publication, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 1965-1969, by Edward J. Drea. Panel speakers will focus on the work of Secretaries of Defense McNamara and Clifford and the Vietnam War, but they will also address the impact of Vietnam on American defense interests in other parts of the world.

David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, will convene the panel and introduce Dr. Erin Mahan, Chief Historian, Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Mahan will introduce the panelists and lead the panel. Harold Brown, Air Force Secretary under McNamara and later Secretary of Defense under President James E. Carter, will talk about working with McNamara. Professor Emeritus George C. Herring of the University of Kentucky, one of the nation's foremost experts on the history of the Vietnam War, will review the book. The author, Dr. Edward J. Drea, currently a contract historian in the Office of Joint History, Joint Chiefs of Staff, will respond to Secretary Brown's and Professor Herring's comments. The speakers' presentations will be followed by a question and answer session and then a reception.

The event is free; reservations are not required. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. For this McGowan Theater event, doors to the building will open 30 minutes prior to the start of the program. Use the Special Events entrance on Constitution Avenue.

By Ron Rogers

Best Defense department of odd war stories

I forgot to mention a unique story about an experience enjoyed by no other soldier in Republic of Vietnam (RVN). There came a day when I gave a nice Viet Cong (VC) platoon a ride down the canal separating RVN from Cambodia and they asked to be dropped off on the VC side and disappeared into the high grass as they walked to their R&R leave, 1 kilometer away in Cambodia. They were so grateful for the ride that they didn't shoot me! 

When the platoon leader waved me down, I thought that I was giving a Popular Force platoon a ride. As I continued down the canal to my temporary duty at A-424, it dawned on me that they had gotten off on the wrong side! I pushed the throttle as far as it would go and raced along close to the bank so the VC would have a harder time tracking me with a weapon. Their nice platoon leader wore an NVA pith helmet without the star and he spoke French with me. I think they would have ridden further, but their crisp khaki uniforms were getting wet and the men got upset. Their leader wore shorts and high socks and didn't care, but he didn't want their uniforms messed-up or their AKs (very few of the South Vietnamese Popular Force had that weapon!) to get rusty. They didn't try to take the 2 M1s lying in the bottom of the boat. They belonged to the two VN SF assholes who ignored my orders to get underway and went to eat and take Pak. The chain didn't know what to say to me and I told them I didn't appreciate being fucked with. We had a schedule and they were violating it. Boy, were they pissed when they were handed back their rusted rifles.

We radioed around when my commander thought it was weird to find a wandering PF unit wanting to cross the canal. Well, there were no PF in that sector that day -- just me and a VC platoon. I held that throttle so hard that the web of my thumb was bleeding badly. So I stopped at a fort and a Vietnamese medic bandaged it and spoke French with me. (Can you get a Purple Heart for a self-inflicted wound?) They thought that I was French! In 1965, a decent number of rural folks thought that we beret wearers were French. I guess they hadn't read the papers nor watched TV. 

Sometimes you can get scared without being shot at. Of course, that platoon commander was awfully nice.

Ron Rogers was a Special Forces soldier once, and young.