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Acknowledgments This is a very personal book, though not in style, substance, or approach. It is personal in the sense that the subject is immediate for anyone who came of age in the United States during the turbulent 1960s. This book would probably not have been written, however, but for a fumbled toast in August 2006 in a poor Vietnamese village in Quang Ngai province. There, the “American Professor and his wife” were guests of honor at a party thrown by the parents of a young man we had befriended in the city of Hoi An. Our friend hosted the party to thank us for a longdelayed ride back to his home village and to introduce the village—once part of the strong Vietcong support base in the province—to actual “Westerners.” The party of forty people took place in a single room of a farmhouse. In an inner circle, over a dozen men, my wife Holly, and I sat on the floor around dishes of food; in an outer circle, women and children sat in chairs or stood to discuss our apparently amusing behavior. The mood turned somber when our host spoke of our trip earlier the same day to My Lai, where we talked to a woman cutting grass for her ox. She was working near the very same irrigation ditch in which she had lain wounded in 1968, one of the few survivors of the notorious massacre by US troops. Our host broke the awkward silence by raising a glass of rice whiskey to his guests, but the toast was halted when an older man interjected. “First,” he told the host, he wanted to know “what the American had to say to him knowing that he was Vietcong.” The question echoed defiantly when an older woman stood to offer an emphatic, “Me VC too.” I knew now that this was an important occasion, and I regretted that I was not better suited for such situations. I also wished, for the moment, that I could think in black-and-white terms—about valiant struggles, “good guys” and “bad guys,” and all the rest. The best I could do was pronounce, after a long pause, that the “war was over”—more silence—before discovering, to my relief, that a slight rephrasing would approximate a toast. “To the end of the war” did the trick—maybe because I conveyed that the war was not good for anyone but more likely because, when I downed my drink, it was clear that that was all I had. x Acknowledgments The unremarkable toast triggered a long series of jovial toasts. But, for me, the moment lingered. “What I should have said” prompted much thinking and reading and eventually this book on lessons from Vietnam and Iraq. As the reader is sure to agree, none of the book’s “lessons” work very well as a toast. If, however, these lessons contribute to our general understanding of the challenges of military operations, some of the credit belongs to a number of people who commented on portions or all of my book manuscript. For their useful remarks , I thank Deborah Avant, Nathan Brown, Joseph Clark, Eugene Gholz, Nathan Jones, Marc Lynch, Medlir Mema, Jonathan Monten, Patrick Morgan, Elizabeth Saunders, Holger Schmidt, and the various participants in panels at the annual meetings of the International Studies Association in San Francisco and New York (where I presented material from chapter 1 and an early version of chapter 4) and the RIGS Seminar, International Studies Program, at the University of California, Irvine (where I presented chapter 5). Shannon Powers deserves substantial recognition for her skilled—and, I might add, relentless—assistance in tracking down valuable research materials for this book. I also thank Henry Tom of the Johns Hopkins University Press for recognizing the potential contribution of the manuscript and pushing me, then, to complete and revise it on schedule, Martin Schneider for his meticulous copy editing, and the anonymous reviewer for the Press who provided valuable suggestions to improve the quality of the work. I owe special thanks to Elizabeth Saunders, the only other member of the Political Science Department’s “Vietnam-study group.” For what it’s worth, I benefited enormously from its meetings in the doorway of her office, late each Friday afternoon, when she probably wished she was working on her own manuscript rather than talking about mine. I must extend appreciation to Barry Steiner, my undergraduate mentor, for nurturing my early...

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