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While it has been almost fifty years since the United States became involved in Vietnam, and almost twenty years since the Fall of Saigon, it is those first major engagements that took place over forty years ago that provide the most portraits of what American soldiers would endure during their tours in Vietnam. Master military theorist Karl Von Clausewitz in the 1830s could have been talking about Vietnam when he discussed the nature and conduct of war by saying, "the confused and confusing welter of ideas that one so often hears and reads on the subject of the conduct of war. These have no fixed point of view as they lead to no satisfactory conclusion: they appear sometimes banal, sometimes absurd, sometimes simply adrift in a sea of vague generalization." Clausewitz's "vague generalization" on the "fog of war" is a problem as it fails to provide specifics, however if specifics help provide answers, a good answer would be the first major engagement of the U.S. Army in Vietnam,......

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