Carter Rudel

“I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“בעבודה זו, כמו בכל הפעולות שעליהן ציווה מאו, היינו חייבים להפגין להט...
עמיתי הסטודנטים היו ללא ספק נלהבים יותר משהיו מקצוענים. מקלות חומר הנפץ שנתחבו בקרקע לא נדלקו בדרך-כלל, ומוטב כך, מפני שלא ננקטו שום אמצעי זהירות. קירות האבן שבנינו כדי לתמוך את שולי הטרסות קרסו במהרה, וכאשר עזבנו את המקום אחרי שבועיים, היתה צלע ההר שוממה וחרבה, ערבוביה של חורי פיצוץ, בטון שהתקשה לגושים חסרי צורה וערימות אבנים. רק מעטים מאיתנו נראו מודאגים בשל כך. האירוע כולו לא היה אלא הצגה, מחזה תאטרון - אמצעי חסר מובן להשגת מטרה חסרת משמעות.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans

“As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas.
This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training.
So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems.
The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam.
Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists.
The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done.
The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s.
On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“What does regression do? It finds a prediction based on the average of what has occurred in the past. For instance, if all you have to go on to determine whether it is going to rain tomorrow is what happened each day last week, your best guess might be an average. If it rained on two of the last seven days, you might predict that the probability of rain tomorrow is around two in seven, or 29 percent. Much of what we know about prediction has been making our calculations of the average better by building models that can take in more data about the context.”
― Ajay Agrawal, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence