“…the name Vietnam…arrived…as a summary and combination of everything one had ever learned…about the horrors of war.  There was something profoundly, horribly shocking in the odds and the proportions of the thing.  To all appearances, it seemed as if a military-industrial superpower was employing a terrifying aerial bombardment of steel and explosives and chemicals to subdue a defiant agrarian society.  I had expected the newly-elected Labour government to withhold British…