You are 19 years old, hanging out the open side of a helicopter a thousand feet above the jungle, a hundred mile an hour wind in your face, two thousand rounds of ammunition between your boots, and the only thing keeping you from falling to your d.e.a.t.h is a single strap of nylon clipped to…
for some the queen-mother is an enduring symbol of regal grace and feminine charm others like Princess Diana detected a more forceful character I think Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother is the original English Steel Magnolias perhaps I could translate it out of southern states American she’s an English Rose inside a steel spectacle case…
One company. 294 Korean Marines. Three NVA battalions, roughly 2,000 soldiers, in the middle of the night. No reinforcements coming before dawn. The North Vietnamese commanders had done the math. They were right about the numbers. They were catastrophically wrong about the men. By early 1967, something had changed in Quang Ngai province that had…
You are a North Vietnamese soldier, and your commander has just shown you the target. It is a circle on a map, a raw red circle, cleared earth on a jungle hilltop, a few hundred men behind a fence of wire, completely surrounded, fed entirely by helicopter because there is no road, no way in,…
The gold envelopes arrived on a Tuesday. Each one was delivered by hand by a man named Gerald, who had worked as Eleanor Whitmore’s personal courier for 22 years, and who drove a dark sedan with exceptional care, and appeared at front doors with the quiet authority of someone who understood that…
A mine goes off under the helicopter. The blast comes through the floor. Aluminum splits. Shrapnel sprays upward through the cabin and into Daniel Schidler’s legs. The medic and crew chief are thrown into the air. The instrument panel lights up red. The Huey lurches sideways and the turbine screams in a pitch that means…
The deal closed at 7:43 in the evening. William Carter knew the exact time because he had been watching the clock on the conference room wall with the peripheral attention he gave to all things that were not the negotiation itself, tracking the movement of the minute hand the way a pilot…
Five men are lying in the mud 3 ft from a North Vietnamese trail. It is after midnight. They have been motionless for 6 hours. Through the dark, they can hear boots, dozens of them, passing close enough that the lead NVA sold.i.er’s sandal brushes the toe of the point man’s jungle boot. Nobody breathes….
1941, Horse Guards Parade, London. Winston Churchill stands reviewing a procession of British armored vehicles, tanks, half-tracks, armored cars, each one tested, approved, and ordered by the War Office. But one vehicle in the column does not belong. It is enormous, taller than anything around it, painted in bright factory colors rather than military camouflage….
On a Mekong Delta canal in 1968, a six-man SEAL squad holds position in the mangrove roots on the west bank and waits for a sampan to drift into the kill zone. The point man is carrying something that looks nothing like the standard M79 grenade launcher his army counterpart would have, a pump-action 40-mm…
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