The cartoon uses baseball as a metaphor for war. The smaller a person is in baseball the smaller their strike zone is, because it is measured from the bottom of the knees to the midpoint between the top of their pants and the top of their shoulders, over the plate. The tiny Asian looking person wearing a sedge hat, representing Vietnamese guerilla warfare, is dwarfed by the enormous white guy representing the U.S. army. Even though he’s big and strong, the difficulty of actually scoring a strike on the little guy is still tiny. The caption “Reduced Strike Zone” sums this up admirably.
Vietnam, as it is today, has an area of about 330,000 square klicks, much of which is jungle; the average person has an area of about 0.00000011 square klicks, and about 1.1 million cumulative North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers died, so there had to have been more of them than that; the guerilla nature of their strategy made the group as a whole hard to count. In short, say we assume for the sake of running some numbers that 10% of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers died; 11 million times 1.1 *10^-7 is about 1.2 square klicks worth of people. Factoring in the fact that they were all spread out, that they were using Cambodia as a go around, and the likelihood that I am misestimating the number of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, it is amazing that any soldiers found any opposing forces at all. Not only were they looking for a needle in a football stadium, spacewise, but opposing forces looked just like regular civilians. Cumulatively the American forces were looking for specific needles that look like all the other needles spread around a football stadium in piles of varying sizes. Reduced strike zone indeed.
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