A grim-faced U.S. Army major led a group of armed men away from a tropical village he decided not to attack. Wearing jungle boots and olive-drab battle dress, Edwin Brooks grasped a lightweight, reliable, .30-caliber weapon in his right hand as he walked.
It was an M-1 carbine.
The scene could have been anywhere in the South Pacific during World War II or somewhere near the Pusan Perimeter during the Korean War. But Brooks also wore a green beret with a Special Forces flash and he was leaving the then-South Vietnamese village of Ban Me Thuot in 1964, leading the indigenous forces he commanded back to base in an effort to defuse a rebellion.
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