ARMED FORCES: Nation-Mending at Home

Like the disciplined, daredevil corps of '60s prose and ballad, the Special Forces, or Green Beret, teams slipped quietly into the countryside miles from their base. Soon the Berets, many of them veterans of countless similar operations in Montagnard villages in the mountains of South Viet Nam, were moving among the natives, ministering to the sick, refurbishing schools, teaching preventive hygiene and first aid. In many ways it was a textbook exercise, except that the locale was not Viet Nam but two poverty-stricken counties in rural North Carolina.

This kind of civic action at home has not been an Army practice...

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