… Not long after the end of the Vietnam War [1975], Army Col. Harry Summers, who’d won Bronze and Silver stars in that war as an operations officer, flew to Hanoi as chief of the U.S. delegation to resolve the status of missing American soldiers. In between sessions, he struck up a conversation with his counterpart, Col. Nguyen Don Tu, who’d fought in the North Vietnamese army. “You know,” Summers remarked, “you never beat us on the battlefield.” Col. Tu replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

(Fred Kaplan in Slate, 4-13-26)

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