A Village, A Hill, Horror

David Zucchino | Philadelphia Inquirer | April 2000

Trung Luong was a remote hamlet folded into a fertile valley in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, not far from the South China Sea.

None of the young American soldiers who fought there, and died there, and left pieces of themselves there, had ever heard of Trung Luong until they approached the village on a brutally hot day in June 1966. Today, 25 years after the war ended and 34 years after an airborne battalion spent three unforgettable days in the hamlet, there are still very few Americans who have heard of Trung Luong.

By the time the Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 153,000 had been wounded. Thirty-one died at Trung Luong, many of them teenagers. In addition, 155 were wounded, some grievously.

For the men who survived the terror of that place, it is difficult to comprehend that the most searing events of their lives could pass with such little notice, then or now. You will not find Trung Luong ((pronounced trung long) in Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s official account, Report on the War in Vietnam, nor in Stanley Karnow’s seminal work, Vietnam: A History.

“This was a big, but not a huge, battle. It was a significant, but not an overwhelming, battle,” says John Carland, a military historian who is writing Stemming the Tide, about Vietnam battles in 1965 and 1966. “It was like so many, many battles of that war.”

Writer bio: David Zucchino won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989 for his series, “Being Black in South Africa”. Zucchino, who wrote for the Inquirer for 21 years, currently serves as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

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30 Yards and a Cloud of Dust

Seth Wickersham | ESPN The Magazine | August 2014

1. COACH IS A REAL SOCKS FIEND
LeSean McCoy is dressing for his first Chip Kelly practice. It’s a year ago May. Like all of the Eagles, he is unsure what to expect from his new coach. He knows that practice will be fast, because everything about Kelly is about speed — from how he talks, to how he hustles around the facility, to how, as the coach at the University of Oregon, he once chastised an assistant for exiting the freeway onto “inefficient” side streets. So it’s important for McCoy, who likes to be “the flyest guy on the team,” to be dressed and ready to roll: a white long-sleeve shirt, black shorts, a black headband and, finally, black socks.

Looking good. Feeling good. But then a team staffer says, “Uh, LeSean, I don’t want to burst your bubble. You look nice, but you got a dress code.”

It’s Chip Kelly’s dress code, and it mandates white socks. Kelly wants the Eagles to be uniform, like a team. No exceptions — not even for McCoy, a 2009 second-round pick out of the University of Pittsburgh who, with warp speed and quick feet, has become an NFL All-Pro. He’s desperate to join Adrian Peterson as their generation’s only Hall of Fame running backs. McCoy has a broad forehead and football-shaped eyes. He never stops moving and yet is late to everything. His mood is as shifty as his running style, which is why they call him Shady. And at this moment, he is, along with Michael Vick, the core of former coach Andy Reid’s decidedly NFL offense. Reid was fired and replaced by Kelly — a “college guy,” McCoy calls him.

The white socks feel like a gimmick.

So McCoy wears black socks to the first practice — and tapes them white.

Writer bio: From what we can tell, Seth Wickersham has never worked in Philadelphia, or frankly, for anyone except the World Wide Leader. What is blatantly obvious, though, is he is a damn fine writer. Here is the ESPN The Magazine’s superstar’s take on Chip Kelly, LeSean McCoy and our beloved Iggles.

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