When I wrote this most Americans had neverheard of Vietnam, let alone of a village called Mai Lie (sic). We were blissfully unaware of the American corporate machinations which led to our CIA ousting of the democratically elected Iranian government whose only offense was to insist on raising the royalty on Iranian oil to more than fifty-five cents per 55 gallon barrel, i.e. from 1 penny per gallon to 2 pennies per gallon! When the oil barons flatly refused to accept the change our government hacks stepped in and organized a coup to depose the Iranian government and install a more obedient one. Most Americans had only vague ideas of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc. Despite the Evidence of World Wars I and II and Korea we had this quaint little idea that wars could be sanitized. With soldiers killing only soldiers. Our leaders had yet to dream up terms such as "disinformation" or "treat with extreme prejudice". How about "washboarding", or perhaps "enhanced interrogation techniques" and "collateral damage"? Predictably, events conspired to disillusion us and our government reverted to the tried and true doctrine of exercising maximum brutality in its behavior. "If they won't play nice we'll show them what ugly is!" Couple this with an arrogant bureaucracy and throw in incompetent leaders and the results are foreordained. My little tale has become altogether plausible. I debated even presenting it in among the corpus of my fiction but I felt the tale was interesting in its own right and fully six decades ahead of its time. The physics in the tale are quaint, but the psychologies of the principal actors are all too familiar. I hope you will like the novel even as you hate it. G.W.H.
