Hedrick Smith: Neil Sheehan forced an American reckoning
Reporter who died last week had a profound moral fervor about the people’s right to know the truth.
(Brendan Hoffman for the New York Times)
Author Neil Sheehan poses for a portrait in his home office on Thursday, September 10, 2009 in Washington, DC.
By Hedrick Smith | For The New York Times
| Jan. 12, 2021, 2:14 p.m.
Washington “It looks like a coup,” Neil Sheehan said. “I’ll call Mordecai. He’ll know whose tanks those are.”
It was Saigon, January 1964. I had just shared with Neil the news that I had seen tanks in the streets surrounding the home of Gen. Duong Van Minh, then the South Vietnamese leader. It was normal for tanks to be on guard to protect Big Minh, as he was known, but what caught my eye was that the tanks’ guns were pointed at the house, not away from it, menacing Minh instead of protecting him. It struck me that someone might be putting the commander in chief under house arrest.
How Vietnamese Commandos Captured a Secret U.S. Military Base
This base was one of many ‘Lima Sites’ in Laos intended to facilitate aerial supply of U.S.-allied forces.
Here s What You Need to Remember: Only thirty years later did the United States officially acknowledge the battle at the clandestine site. Etchberger would finally be awarded the Medal of Honor in a ceremony on September 1, 2010. Earlier in the 2000s, Vietnamese veterans of the battle helped U.S. military personnel locate the remains of airmen that had been cast over the side of the cliff, and later those of Major Barton as well.
Bookshop The sequel to Nguyenâs Pulitzer Prizeâwinning
The Sympathizer is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride filled with violence, hidden identity, and meditations on whether the colonized can ever be free. The fractured, guilt-ridden narrator, a veteran of the South Vietnamese Army, where he was a mole for the communists, goes by his assumed name Vo Danh, which means ânameless.â He has survived reeducation and a refugee camp and is now living in early 1980s Paris, along with his devoutly anti-communist âblood brother,â Bon, who doesnât know he was a double agent. Vo Danh starts selling hashish for a Viet-Chinese drug lord called the Boss, whom he and Bon met in their refugee camp. The gig has him more vexed about the crime of capitalism than that of drug dealing, and heâs not expecting a turf war. Indeed, heâs chagrined to discover his rivals, French Arabs who share with him a legacy of colonization, want him dead. Meanwhile, th
WARNING! IMMEDIATE THREAT! WMD FOUND THROUGHOUT THE USA!
WARNING! IMMEDIATE THREAT! WMD FOUND THROUGHOUT THE USA!
Don Bendell
WMD, Weapons of Mass Destruction, have been found throughout the United States of America, posing a clear and present danger to our national security here-at-home, and to the safety of the American fighting men and women in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other terrorism hot-spots abroad. Most of the weapons are concentrated in and near the cities of New York, Washington, and Boston, but many more are scattered throughout the entire United States and even around the world.
Most of these devices are set to attack our infrastructure slowly and methodically, and they are almost all referred to by acronyms. The most notable of these deadly weapons are called NBC, CBS, ABC, and DNC.
These mighty warships were thrice returned from retirement to serve on the front line.
Key point: The age of the battleship eventually drew to a close. However, it took much longer than is commonly realized and the Iowa-class served well in many conflicts.
The Second World War marked the end of the Age of Battleships. Aircraft carriers, with their flexible, long range striking power made battlewagons obsolete in a matter of months. American battleships, once expected to fight a decisive battle in the Pacific that would halt the Japanese Empire, were instead relegated to providing artillery support for island-hopping campaigns. Yet after the war America’s battleships would return, again and again, to do the one thing only battleships could do: bring the biggest guns around to bear on the enemy.