Cub Driver wrote in message . ..
I do hate to break this to you but that is a book about airplanes,

I know it's a book about a fighter-bomber pilot, with a great deal in
it about the extreme restrictions he had to follow. Very far from the
unrestricted use of power you speak of.

Almost every day of the time I spent in Vietnam was in the field,
because it spared me the cost of hotels, laundry (we didn't wash), and
food (someone was always willing to replenish my C-rations).

I never witnessed an atrocity, either by the Americans or by the ARVN.
(Or indeed by the Viet Cong.) It was as clean and as genteel as ever a
war could have been.

So I know something about the life of a footsoldier in Vietnam, and
not from books.



It is easy to take a single viewpoint and extrapolate to a general
situation. My experience, although second hand, was 25th Infantry
artillery people marveling at the ability to shoot at live targets in
the early 60s, aviators extolling the virtues of knowing what you
dropped wouldn't earn points but actually take someone's life, people
sent to seemingly peaceful parts of the Delta and being unable to get
ashore without supporting fire, collecting museum pieces of 240mm
rockets with the warhead removed and every kind of explosive device
available packed into 55-gal drums as a substitute and fired into Tan
Son Nut.

I have seen something in the paper today that the wise ones are
starting to believe there is a 'bomb school' that teaches terrorists
how to make these IEDs. Well that started in Vietnam and those things
don't have 'friendly-enemy' sensors on them.

Many came back with the concept of the Yalie who is quoted in a study
on Yale and the Vietnam War: One student expelled for a prank became
an infantry officer, participated in ferocious combat in 1967-68, and
then was readmitted to Yale where in 1970 he took the author's course
on the history of American foreign relations In 1970. Invited to speak
to the whole class about the war, he said his combat experience could
be summarized In three principles. "If it runs, It is VC [Vietcong-the
Communist enemy], waste it. If It hides, it is VC. Waste it. If It is
dead, it is VC. Count it and wait for your promotion."33
http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/cuhistory/yale.htm

You can deny your involvement in what we would call atrocities 30
years later but at the time and for many areas in Vietnam the enemy
was not obvious.