Where were the smiles, the flowers? We'd expected, in a modest way, to be greeted as liberators.
This was many years ago, Chu Lai, South Vietnam, 1966, in one of the early disasters of the United States' post-World War II attempts to fight wars for virtue. People in the villages refused to meet our eyes, and they only smiled if they were selling us something.
How disappointing. The war was young then, and so were we, but not so young that we hadn't seen newsreel footage of the cheers from the giddy urchins of Naples, the French doing their tiptoe waves.