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A Few Words Concerning the Text We have done a very modest amount of editorial work to make the text easier to read by avoiding the constant use of [sic], brackets, and ellipses. For example , we corrected most misspelled words and grammatical errors, except in what Joe Hooper wrote, where we left the original intact, correcting only his most egregious errors with bracketed material. As an example of the types of changes we made, Cleo Hogan wrote, “I could not even phantom what a dsc or Medal of Honor would be like to receive or recommend.” Since he obviously meant “fathom” rather than “phantom,” we made the change. Or Dale Urban said, “I never seen Joe again until after we got done,” which we modified to “I never saw Joe again until after we got done.” As a final example , Noah Rockel was no scholar but he got his point across when he wrote about “the most proudest fighting unit the U.S. has, the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles there the most proudest paratroopers there are. And we were asked to do a job here. So were doing it.” Without losing the flavor of what he said, we changed the first “there” to “they’re” and the second “were” to “we’re.” Interviewees sometimes made points in an awkward or “wordy” manner , so we occasionally modified quotes to make them read more smoothly. For instance, Ava James said, “And we were the only two guys that I saw up there. I didn’t see anybody else. There was nobody else up there at all.” Leaving out the middle sentence, which was redundant, we rendered this as “And we were the only two guys that I saw up there. There was nobody else up there at all.” Or Chris Luther said, “I just felt comfortable knowing this guy, yeah, he had fear like everybody else but he knew how to control it.” In the text this appears as “I just felt comfortable knowing this guy had fear like everybody else but knew how to control it.” That is, we omitted three unnecessary words: “yeah,” “he,” and “he.” In a few cases when interviewees told us what Joe said, we put those words in quotation marks as if he actually spoke them. These quotes should not be taken literally but as an approximation of what Joe said. To limit the number of acronyms, we often wrote out those that appeared infrequently. For example, General Westmoreland wrote that Tet “has dealt the gvn a severe blow,” which we changed to “has dealt the Government of Vietnam a severe blow,” and General Abrams wrote that he hoped to “ensure a free rvn,” which we changed to “ensure a free Republic of Vietnam.” In July 1970, the United States changed the four Corps Tactical Zones to Military Regions, but we used Corps for the entire war. Thus, in the text it remained “I Corps,” never Military Region I (or the acronym, mri). Also, fire bases and fire support bases were technically different, but soldiers often used “fire base” for either a fire base or a fire support base, and so have we. 506 A FEW WORDS CONCERNING THE TEXT ...

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