Until 1954 the strategically important Central Highlands were primarily inhabited by some twenty indigenous ethnic groups that the French and Americans collectively referred to as Montagnards or Highlanders. From 1960 the communist National Liberation Front sought to recruit Highlanders, leading to a rapid deterioration of the security situation in the Central Highlands, which in 1961 provoked the deployment of US Special Forces to lead Highlander militias. In combination with discriminatory policies of successive South Vietnamese governments, the militarization of the Highlands spurred the emergence in 1964 of a Highlands autonomy movement known as FULRO. As the Central Highlands became one of the main theaters of war, an attack by communist forces on an American airstrip close to Pleiku in the Central Highlands prompted the bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder and the landing of US combat troops near Da Nang in 1965. After a decade of forced resettlement and displacement of Highlanders, it was the silent complicity of FULRO militia and indigenous populations around the Highlands city of Ban Me Thuot that ensured the element of surprise in the attack by regular North Vietnamese cavalry in March 1975, triggering the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam one month later.

The Epilogue examines how trends from the 1990s continued to develop in the following decade. These included the growing civil–military gap, even as the American public lauded the troops as heroes; tensions between notions of the soldier as a male warrior and more inclusive visions of soldiers might be; and the question of what roles soldiers might be asked to take on. First, it explores how soldiers began to talk about themselves as ‘Spartans’, referencing their separate status as a warrior caste. It also examines how popular culture and the military itself began to increasingly venerate Special Forces ‘operators’, using these images to sell products as diverse as video games, fitness regimes and coffee blends, but also to reinforce notions of American soldiers as quasi-supermen, capable of incredible feats. Finally, it examines a cultural phenomenon that cut against the grain of ‘Spartan’ and ‘operator’ images: the ‘Fobbit’ – a term that refers to the personnel deployed to Forward Operating Bases but who avoided combat by remaining at the base, a description that then broadened to describe all sorts of personnel who deployed overseas but didn’t face the prospect of combat.

President John F. Kennedy was elected on a program of change. Despite his electoral rhetoric, in office, he was cautious and fiscally conservative. He felt especially vulnerable on economic issues with a nagging balance of payments deficit that threatened the role of the dollar in the international monetary system. He chose Republicans for the two agencies that had the greatest bearing on the balance of payments: C. Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury and McNamara as Secretary of Defense. At the same time, Kennedy’s interest in the developing world was different from his predecessors’ and led him to experiment with new ways of projecting US power internationally, including through building up local capabilities to fight “wars of national liberation.” His national security bureaucracy changed accordingly with the creation of a Special Group on Counterinsurgency, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Peace Corps and with a renewed focus on the US Army’s Special Forces.