I remember the exact moment when I knew we would lose the war. I was in an infantry platoon conducting night ambushes to keep the enemy far enough away from Danang so they couldn’t fire rockets into the city. I had only been in country for a few weeks and was just getting into the rhythm of operations. As we prepared to move out at dark suddenly all kinds of fireworks filled the sky, apparently coming from an ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) base near us. I thought those poor souls must be getting hit hard, then fireworks started coming from other ARVN bases all around us. For a second I envisioned Tet II, but slowly realized that it wasn’t combat, but a celebration. Someone told me it was Ho Chi Minh’s birthday that they were celebrating. The fact that young men, no matter what county, would celebrate with the best fireworks that money can buy was not a surprise (you should have seen the sky on the Fourth of July); what surprised me was they were celebrating the birthday of the leader of the enemy, even though he’d died about a year before. I thought then that the South Vietnamese didn’t have their hearts in this fight.