This was the best article I read all summer. A good friend of mine did 2 tours in Vietnam as a SEAL, but it's too hard for him talk about it. This article helps me to get a little sense of the frustrated warrior in him, without his having to go back to a place he'd prefer not to return, even in his mind.

Yes, excellent reading all around there.

I also recommend picking up old Soldier of Fortune magazines when you have the chance. And I’m not kidding!

Anything from say 1975-1985 as a start. I just picked up a stack of about 60 of them for $80 (with shipping) on eBay. Excellent reading, and a bargain too, IMO.

I’m about 10 magazines into the stack. Lots of “I was there” stories from ‘Nam and Rhodesia and Central America. And it was all about counter insurgency and fighting terrorists even back then.

The “breaking news” coming out of Afghanistan at the time was intriguing, and right on the money. Oh, and just this morning, I finished a 7 page story on the coming threat to the US of illegal immigrants. Written in 1980. Pretty scary.

Yes, some of it is over the top, and a bit off the mark. But surprisingly, maybe only 10% or so. It was the leading journal of the day for the “real fighters”, after all.

Go to eBay now (or wherever) and buy a few copies. You won’t regret it.

We have had great heroes, no doubt of that. But true to form, Kaplan thinks always in terms of brute force. In fact, Viet Nam was one war and what America is confronting in Iraq is different. In Iraq, there are the Sunnis and the shia and Al Qadea dn the Kurds...and, worse, within some of these faions, sub groups fighting each other! Now in Nam, we confronted
a totally different enemy. Incidentally, I am working with a post-Nam hero to push his book, a book it took ten years to write because of trauma. If you want more on that book drop me a note.

Nice article.

A few years ago I read everything I could get my hands on about LRRPs, SOG, Seals, Air Cav, and other very successful groups and operations in Vietnam.

Like Kaplan says, there was the regular army and then there was the effective military units that were really, really out there. The big problem even for those guys was that all of their ops were telegraphed to the enemy by spies within the ARVN and South Vietnamese government--who had to be notified in advance.

If the regular military had stayed home and just the special ops guys, LRRPs, gung ho helicopter pilots etc. and air/naval support had gone to Vietnam and kept a low public profile, the counter-insurgency lessons could have been learnt and applied efficaciously.