Monthly Archives: March 2013

Members of 3/3 escort a visiting dignitary through Nawa, Afghanistan in October 2010.

John Paul Vann, the U.S. adviser in Vietnam whose story was told in the book A Bright Shining Lie, once complained, “We don’t have twelve years experience in Vietnam. We have one year’s experience twelve times over.”

The Global War on Terror’s six-to-twelve month rotation policy created many similar problems.  One in particular is that its histories tend to work in those increments. Many of the memoirs out there are written from a first-person or a unit perspective, and there’s usually a noticeable lack of information or interest about what happened before or after the person or unit was there. Read more »