I'm John Batchel with Jeff Warro.

The book is The Vietnam War, a military history.

1966 and 1967, more troops coming in all the time.

A man named Westmoreland is in charge of the MAC fee.

He's supported by his president and the national Security Advisor and the chief of staff of the Army, the Joint Chiefs, more and more troops, army troops, marine troops, and a new kind of war, a helicopter war.

The fleets off the coast of Vietnam launching airstrikes all the time,

rolling thunder. The operations have romantic names such as Paul Revere 1, 2, 3, 4, Hawthorne.

The operations resemble what we've just seen in the Edring Valley. So what are the phases

that Westmoreland plans to show to his politicians how he's

going to win the war? Phase one we've seen. It's the buildup. What is phase two, Jeff?

Well, as you say, phase one is the buildup. And the buildup is not to be sneezed at because

it requires like building dozens of air bases around Vietnam, container

ports, base camps, you know, petroleum and ammunition storage depots all over the country.

So the country, South Vietnam, the country about the size of Montana is carved into this,

you know, they build something like 8,000 firebases in the course of the war.

And you still see these all over the country when you drive around southern Vietnam today.

You'll see on every hilltop there's the remains of an asphalt helipad and the perimeter fence

where they would have these networks of artillery.

So wherever you launch an operation in any part of

South Vietnam, you were within range, 15 miles, basically, of one of these fire bases. And then you have

to have, you have to have air strips for fixed-wing aircraft. And then you need container ports,

so you don't just bring your supplies over the beach, but you can have warehouses and you have the, so that's like phase one in addition to these early, you know, uses of the air mobile concept in battles like Eadrang.

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