Front Toward Enemy

Three years after the collapse of South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland announced that “militarily we were successful . . . we didn’t lose a single battle above company level.” It was in these intense company- and platoon-level firefights, which characterized most combat in the Vietnam War, that military engagements could be won and lost. At close quarters in the jungle, at night, and in hamlets surrounded by rice paddies, American soldiers faced their North Vietnamese and Vietcong enemies