The war had already lasted longer than any other in the nation’s history and had divided America more than any conflict since the Civil War.

He manifested the faith and the optimism of post-World War II America that any challenge could be overcome by will and by the disciplined application of intellect, technology, money, and, when necessary, armed force.

He was convinced that having gained the preeminence it had been destined to achieve, the United States would never relinquish the position.

He could not abide defeat, defeat for himself or for his vision of America.

Vann was sure that he would be able to see what motivated the Vietnamese officers with whom he would be working and persuade them to do what was in their best interest and in the interest of the United States. … History had not shown Americans to be fallible as other peoples were. Americans were different. History did not apply to them.

Cao knew that once the guerrillas were trapped, they might well attack straight into the reserve or turn and try to burst through whichever side of the box was nearest to them in their desperation to escape. … Cao would also take casualties. If he took casualties he would get into trouble with Diem.

Diem and his family believed that casualties suffered on offensive operations against the Viet Cong had been a major cause of the abortive coup d’état in November 1960. … They did not want another attempt at a coup, and therefore they did not want the army to suffer casualties on offensive operations.

They were willing to accept casualties in defensive actions because they saw these as unavoidable to maintain the outpost system that was the substance of their rule in the countryside. … The Ngo Dinhs were not troubled by the deaths of these peasants.

The relationship between the manipulated and the manipulator is a two-way exchange. … Vann had thought that he was manipulating Cao, but Cao had gotten his way.

The work of Lansdale during the pivotal years of 1954 and 1955 proved that one man and his vision can make a difference in history. Without him the American venture in Vietnam would have foundered at the outset. Diem might have been Washington’s choice in Saigon, but he could not have survived without Lansdale at his side.

Diem was not well known to ordinary Vietnamese then, and these peasants and provincial townsfolk could not have had the faintest idea who he was. They were bored, extremely bored, by all the years of isolation from the outside world.

Lansdale was a victim in Vietnam of his success in the Philippines. Men who succeed at an enterprise of great moment often tie a snare for themselves by assuming that they have discovered some universal truth.

Diem did not believe in representative government, although he had learned enough about Americans during two and a half years of exile in the United States to give Lansdale the impression that he did. He was also not interested in social justice. He did not want to alter the traditional Vietnamese social structure that the French had preserved in desiccated form.

America had first joined the wrong side by equipping and financing the French in their venture to reimpose colonial rule. America was now becoming the wrong side by moving directly into Vietnam to install Diem and his family as the representatives of its power.

The guerrilla battalion and company commanders had taken full advantage of the time to replace losses and to train their men in the new tactics and in the use of captured American arms.

They inflicted about 80 killed and well over 100 wounded on the Saigon forces and also killed three Americans, wounded another eight, and accounted for five helicopters.

They suffered eighteen killed and thirty-nine wounded, light casualties considering that the Americans and their Vietnamese protégés subjected them to thousands of rifle and machine-gun bullets, the blast and shrapnel of 600 artillery shells, and the napalm, bombs, and assorted other ordnance of thirteen warplanes and five Huey gunships.

By the second decade after World War II, the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the American armed forces had become professional arrogance, lack of imagination, and moral and intellectual insensitivity. … The elite of America had become stupefied by too much money, too many material resources, too much power, and too much success.

No such form existed among the tens of thousands printed by the U.S. armed forces. … The post-World War II American system was receptive only to the recording of sunny hours.

We are winning slowly on the present thrust, and … there is no compelling reason to change. … United States advice will be increasingly followed as Government of Vietnam confidence in themselves and their advisors continues to grow.

There was a duality in the man, a duality of personal compulsions and deceits that would not bear light and a professional honesty that was rigorous and incorruptible.

He had known that he could not hide the black spot from a board considering colonels for promotion to general officer. … He had tried and failed before going to Vietnam to steal those records and destroy them in order to remove the stain.

The social conditions in the mother country that influenced who would be forced to emigrate and the harshness of their introduction to the new world gave them certain qualities that set them apart. … They also had a kind of wildness. The Victorian era and industrialization tamed the masses of Britain. Nothing ever quite tamed these people whom Britain had discarded.

The most important thing he had learned was that he was a different person in this uniform. … The Army and the war had freed him in a way that Ferrum could not do from that trash-filled house in Norfolk, and he wasn’t ever going back into it again.

The John Vann of Vietnam could not have been the John Vann he wanted to be and not have led his Ranger company through a night of heroic resistance when the Chinese attacked in Korea. … He knew he would have behaved just as courageously as Puckett had, and so he wove the story into his legend.

Men like Hopkins are most attracted to the blond-slip-of-a-youth sort that Vann was at fourteen. … The relationship does seem to have aggravated the insecurity that Myrtle created, making Vann even more ferociously heterosexual.

Hopkins’s tragic flaw was pedophilia, a homosexual attraction to boys. … He would pick out a boy who had been frightened by his tales and crawl into the boy’s sleeping bag later that night saying that he wanted to comfort him.

The Saigonese form of corruption differed completely in magnitude and nature from the corruption most commonly found in state and local government in the United States. … Saigonese corruption was incapacitating, a malignancy that poisoned the entire system of government.

The Saigon regime had, in fact, evolved a system in which no one was permitted to keep his hands clean. … For all to be safe, all had to be implicated.

I am convinced that, even though the National Liberation Front is Communist-dominated, that the great majority of the people supporting it are doing so because it is their only hope to change and improve their living conditions and opportunities. … If I were a lad of eighteen faced with the same choice—whether to support the GVN or the NLF—and a member of a rural community, I would surely choose the NLF.

To make attrition work in his favor, a military leader must be able to force his enemy to fight, as Grant could force Lee to fight when he had Lee locked into a defense of the Confederate capital of Richmond in the last year of the Civil War and as the American and British armies could make Hitler’s Wehrmacht do after the landing at Normandy in 1944. … Thayer’s findings proved that Westmoreland was unable to force his enemy to fight, because the Vietnamese had an overwhelming grasp of the initiative.

What Calley and others who participated in the massacre did that was different was to kill hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese in two hamlets in a single morning and to kill point-blank with rifles, pistols, and machine guns. … The value of Vietnamese life was systematically cheapened in his mind.

His willingness to hew to this truth had been one of the qualities that had made him stand out morally and intellectually from the other major figures of the war.

Many of his listeners were swayed. Wilson was not.

The John Vann his old friends had known had disappeared into the war. … The war satisfied him so completely that he could no longer look at it as something separate from himself.