A Terrible Beauty

Michael D. Miller graduated from West Point in 1964 and, as a captain in 1968, he led American soldiers in Vietnam. This is the story of their struggle to survive and prevail. Michael once said, "Vietnam was a mystical experience. What we experienced transcended the normal experience of life. My soldiers and I were forever transformed by what happened to us." By building schools for poor, rural Vietnamese villages, we showed the Vietnamese that we were there to help them. This had a dramatic effect on the local people. Had our program been more widely implemented, we feel that we could have won the war. This lesson should not be forgotten, especially as we now struggle to fight wars in other third-world countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.