Such declarations could strain their bilateral relations.

An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

The plane to ’Nam set him down at Da Nang on April 19, 1970, with a year to serve if he were lucky enough to live through it. The first thing that struck him stepping off the plane was the heat; a country that had seemed so green and riotously alive from their incoming jetliner had air so close and hot it sucked his breath away. His second indelible impression was the look of the men waiting to leave on the plane that had borne him in. He could read his future in their past, in their missing limbs and their dull, haunted faces. The only thing that kept him from being scared was his countervailing sense that being scared was pointless. “I can’t say hey, I don’t want to go”, he thought; he felt like a man who had been sentenced to a year in prison, hearing the gates clank shut behind him.