A Personal Disappointment
One of the bigger
disappointments I had over Crickets on a Steel Tiger being mired down
in classification issues after I’d had it fully cleared at one time was that
I didn’t get to close out the book with this picture and this quotation. Somewhere in my research, I came across this quote, so I
found a picture that I thought matched it very well.
So if you’d read Crickets on a Steel Tiger, after covering about 300
pages with the actions of Cricket FACs intermingled with the story of Air
Interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, 1966-1968, you would have ended up with
this picture and this closing.
“On each side of the road there were heaps of
scrap metal, pieces of aircraft, the containers of antipersonnel bombs, empty
munitions casings, 37-mm cannon shells, detonated antipersonnel mines. . .. At
certain points, it is impossible to walk on the sides of the roads.
You sink up to your knees in an impalpable dust, the earth having
become dust under the impact of the bombs and incendiary weapons. . ..
When the monsoon comes, that dust turns to mud and slides onto the
road. . .. Nothing lives in this dust, not even crickets.”
(Observations of a French news
correspondent made during the height of the battle for control of the Ho Chi
Minh Trail.)
I believe the reference for the quote was The Electronic Battlefield,
pp. 90-91.
