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soldiers in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. An irreverent, carefree inmate, Hilts is known as the “Cooler King” because he spends his time either trying to escape or being punished for it in the cooler, solitary confinement, where he plans the next attempt. The comparison was a good-natured honor. Sort of.
    My fourth and final slug solidified this reputation. After dinner one evening near the end of our yearling year, I joined Kenny Liepold, Rick Bifulco, Rick Bowman, and a few others in barracks horseplay with unloaded vintage weapons from West Point’s museum. Being yearlings with more energy than sense, we were soon chasing one another down the hallway, clicking the triggers and yelling “bang,” taking cover behind corners, and feigning being hit by rolled-up-sock “grenades.” It was literally sophomoric.
    We soon spilled out the back door and ran to the entrance of Grant Hall, a few yards behind our barracks. At the time, Grant Hall served as a place where upperclassmen were allowed to congregate and meet dates. Inside is a long, very West Point–like lounge: dimly lit and filled with overstuffed leather furniture. We achieved complete surprise, running through the door, mimicking the
rat-a-tat
of guns, tossing socks at perturbed upperclassmen and their dates, doing combat rolls at their feet, laughing wildly. Then we withdrew to our barracks rooms.
    As we caught our breath, flashing lights lit up the walls and ceiling of our room from the street below. We looked out the window to see a military police car. Suddenly our door opened and a tactical officer entered, the hallway behind him full of faces trying to catch a glimpse of the fugitives. “Was it you?” he asked. “Yes, sir,” we responded. “You got the weapons?” We handed them over. Disappointed, the crowd in the hallway dispersed. He closed the door behind him and turned to us, only barely concealing his amusement. “What were you knuckleheads
thinking
?”
    In the end, he wrote up the event conservatively and we received a light punishment. But I finished the year having walked 127 hours on the Area.
    *   *   *
    W hen I entered West Point, some Americans still believed the Vietnam War might end honorably. By the time I graduated, South Vietnam did not exist. As cadets, we watched the war teeter and implode, and the historical sweep was not lost on us.
    My interest in Indochina began when my father first deployed to Vietnam in 1965, as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war that summer. Then a lieutenant colonel, my father commanded the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment, part of General William DePuy’s 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. Their battalion ran search-and-destroy missions in the Bien Hoa area in South Vietnam,near the Cambodian border. Curious about where my dad was going, I read
The Two Viet-Nams
by Bernard Fall, the war correspondent and historian who chronicled the French and later American experiences in Indochina. Only eleven at the time, I struggled through parts of it, but from then on I was captivated by Indochina, and I eventually read all of Fall’s books.
    The focus of my senior year in high school was a research project on Indochina. Ho Chi Minh, General Giap, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, Bruno Bigeard, and the other players in the conflict fascinated me. Their outsized personalities and human flaws all converged in the military and political fights of the First Indochina War. The essay ended up well over a hundred pages long. It was not groundbreaking, but I had pursued the topic with an intense curiosity about how the French had failed so spectacularly in their efforts to maintain their colonies and why the Americans and the British had decided against overt intervention in those early years.
    While I studied the French war, support for the American one evaporated. Growing up near