A few of my classmates became counterinsurgency cultists, immersing themselves in almost all of the literature published on the subject. They made a curious sight, those crew-cut, American-looking officers studying the gospels of Mao Tse-tung as devoutly as the Chairman’s disciples in Peking and Hanoi. They were obeying the old injunction “Know your enemy.” Most of those studious officers were regulars with career ambitions, and they boned up on that exotic strategy for the same reason medical students read articles on the latest trends in surgery: they thought it would make them better at
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