BEYOND WITCHES AND DRAGONS: THE KINDOM OF VIETNAM

I don’t get it. The stories of witches, dragons, sorcerers, and mythical kingdoms don’t speak to me. Tales of magical characters possessing extraordinary powers, never grow old, and escape death at every turn. Still, everything ends with a drink, a smile, and a laugh. But the Kingdom of Vietnam offered no such picture.

Like the dragon’s breath of Napalm, there’s no magic there. The flames were long and wide. They didn’t stop. They burned everything to cinders. Then, there were the bites from a fifty-caliber machine gun — a copper shell with a lead center at two-thousand rounds per minute, a small hole in you, and then a fist that punched through.

And the bombs. Thousands of pounds dropped from B-52s in a single run: one bomb, one crater, a small lake where once was earth. But the four-hundred-pounders, they made something else.

Then, Agent Orange. It didn’t care. It killed the trees, the grass, the men, the women. It contaminated the water and earth for years to come and wiped everything out. And those exposed to the poison would eventually carry a cancer diagnosis.

The Vietnam War wasn’t a myth. It was real. And the heroes did not escape death and return for sequels, not in any way that counted. But those who fought and gave it their all were braver than any knight who lived in a…