Virtually no senior commanders spend time with the grunts to learn the true nature of the war. Most of us are isolated from the fighting men—not unlike the French, British and German senior brass of World War I. Similarly, we live in royal comfort, complete with white-coated servants and sparkling China-set tables, safely away from the killing fields. When a battle does rage, we whirl above it in helicopters making decisions that may have worked in another war, but often don't make sense to the men on the ground. (These sky-borne leaders became bitterly known to the men who did the dying as The Great Squad Leaders in the Sky.)

Native to the villages of the south, the NLF guerrillas, lightly armed and thoroughly familiar with the territory, proved to be a formidable adversary. Because these troops were often difficult to distinguishfrom the population itself, we, the US military commanders, have resorted to such pacification tactics as free fire zones and search and destroy missions.

Free fire zones are areas in which anything that moves is assumed to be an enemy and is then attacked; search and destroy missions are responses to a single sniper attack from a village whereby the entire village is destroyed and the surviving population is relocated. In this way, every Vietnamese, of whatever political affiliation, has become a potential enemy to American soldiers.