Word: stabbed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ARMY AND VIET NAM: THE STAB-IN-THE-BACK COMPLEX...
WHENEVER a war ends in defeat or a dubious stalemate, the unsuccessful military leaders are apt to grope for some kind of stab-in-the-back explanation. The U.S. is certainly not headed in Viet Nam for any defeat remotely akin to Germany's humiliation in World War I, which the German generals blamed on treacherous politicians and civilian softness. Nor is Viet Nam likely to prove quite as bitter a military experience as the French abandonment of the Algerian war, in which some French officers even threatened to attack Paris in their rage against De Gaulle...
...defensive, and they raised an issue that has long stirred controversy in the U.S.: civilian limitations on the use of military power. Most top military officers refrain from public alibis, criticism and rebukes. But many privately agree with Westmoreland's complaint, and there are signs that a stab-in-the-back, or Versailles, complex is developing. Some officers contend that they were not permitted to move quickly, massively and without restrictions-either on bombing targets or in hitting enemy sanctuaries along Viet Nam's borders-once the decision was made in 1965 to commit U.S. combat troops. This...
...even more basic argument against any stab-in-the-back theory is that the military only belatedly made the case for an all-out effort. Especially in the conflict's early years, the professionals of war were thinking in the old way of victory on the battlefield, and troops conventionally trained by the U.S. were a little like the British redcoats fighting in lines as they engaged in forest skirmishes against the American colonists and their Indian allies. Clumsy U.S. battalions in the mid-1960s were out of place in the jungles, swamps and highlands of South Viet...
...SITTING ROOM. This is Director Richard Lester's second surrealistic attack on the homicidal excesses of war; it makes his first aggressive stab against the military (How I Won the War) look like a warm-up exercise...