Word: ho
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Real Pros. Almost invariably, the morale of activated reservists and Guardsmen depends on whether they believe their duty really helps national security. Already, 3,375 have been sent overseas; it would be hard to find more gung-ho outfits anywhere than four Air Guard squadrons mobilized straight into combat in Viet Nam. "Nobody's got a bitch about being here," claims Captain Thomas Risan, an airline pilot now bombing and strafing Viet Cong fortifications with the 120th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Phan Rang. Calling themselves the "Raggedy-Ass Militia of Happy Valley," the 25 pilots and 350 maintenance crewmen...
...from their chemistry textbooks how to mix and use explosives, and in physics they are taught how to build a bunker so as to make it safe against various kinds of allied shelling and bombing. If they do well at these lessons, they are rewarded by being declared "Uncle Ho's good nephew (or niece)." The following first-and second-grade arithmetic problems, taken from a textbook published by Hanoi's Liberation Publishing House and widely used in V.C. country, illustrate the approach...
...well, the sudden joy of discovering that he's got 27% fewer cavities has apparently unhinged him. Now he stands in front of the mirror all day and counts his pimples. And after dinner, the whole family gathers at the hearthside, unwraps their Wrigley's and, with a hi ho and a hey hey, chews their little troubles away...
...distinctly anti-American and anti-Thieu overtones. "If the Americans want to withdraw, they can go ahead," he told Vietnamese soldiers in Saigon. "We only want people who want to stay." On another occasion he asked his audience: "Why has South Viet Nam not been able to produce a Ho Chi Minh or Vo Nguyen Giap whom the world admires and respects? Why have we been unable to produce such people? Isn't it because our leaders are merely a bunch of servile and corrupt officials...
Heavy-handed amateur ironies prevail. A Polaroid commercial is doctored to show a still of a dead soldier; a Band-Aid commercial is spliced into combat scenes. Only bits and pieces of conversation with Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro give anything like a sense of ideological actuality. The rest has the secondhand look of a film that has been petulantly edited, as the title implies, far from Viet...