Godel brought some of the more benign counterinsurgency gadgets home for a commonsense evaluation. One time, for example, Larry Savadkin, a navy officer assigned to work with Godel, bought sporting pontoons, essentially water shoes, from Abercrombie & Fitch, hoping they might be useful in Vietnam, and Godel let his daughters try them out on the lake. The pontoons would in theory allow a soldier to glide down Vietnam’s water canals. Godel’s daughters called them “walking on water shoes” or “Jesus shoes.” But even in Lake Barcroft, thousands of miles away from Vietnam, it was easy to see they
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