survival. You take care of the men, they
take care of you.
"It wasn't necessarily just fighting the
Japanese. The idea that they come first
is essential to the overall success of
the platoon, of the company. And you
can transfer that into any organisation.
Because you can't ever do it all on your
own. Even if you are a surgeon, you need
somebody handing you the instruments.
You can stand alone, on purpose and
principle. But in achieving an objective,
you can't."
That, he felt, was the desperate thing
about Vietnam: the disintegration of mo-
rale, of the kind of comradeship that sus-
tained him and his men on Okinawa. As his
country entered that trauma, however,
Bassett found himself in another kind of
front line. In 1963 he was appointed
Director of the Kentucky State
Police, at a time when the so-
cial rupture that would be
widened by Vietnam was
already bloodily dividing
law enforcement and the
civil rights movement.
