“The war is not only not going well,” Clyde Petit wrote Lee Williams from Bangkok in January 1966; “the situation is worse than is reported in the press and worse, I believe, than is indicated in intelligence reports.” Petit, a lawyer-turned-journalist who had just finished interviewing some two hundred military personnel for the Arkansas radio network, instructed his friend to show the letter to Fulbright but otherwise to keep it confidential. That communication, a devastating account of the political and military situation in Southeast Asia, would become the existential basis for Fulbright, Marcy, and Williams’ already deeply rooted philosophical and historical dissent from the war.

For the most part, the American military buildup was having little effect on the war because most troops “are literally confined in closely-guarded compounds, protected by moat-like defenses of concertina-wire and incessant barrages of U.S. artillery,” Petit wrote. Among American enlisted personnel and lower- and middle-ranking officers, particularly in combat areas, morale was unbelievably high. This gung-ho attitude made U.S. soldiers vigorous and effective fighters but, ironically, rendered them useless in the battle for the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese. Their “messianic attitude of anger” made pacification most difficult. One erudite officer had told him, “If there is a God, and he is very kind to us, and given a million men and five years and a miracle in making the South Vietnamese people like us, we stand an outside chance of a stalemate.”