History is like a nagging friend, a back-seat driver or a Monday morning quarterback always ready to tap you on the shoulder with an often annoying reminder of the obvious, of something startling that’s been forgotten in the dust of time passed. And fifty years isn’t exactly in yesterday’s rear view mirror.

I found myself thinking about something the other day that took place exactly 50 years ago. The ghost of that long gone time jumped off the page of the newspaper as I read about the Obama administration’s decision to announce publicly for the first time that a small unit, less than 50, of Special Operations troops would soon be on the ground inside Syria. They will be advising, working and fighting alongside one element or another of rebels combating both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad, the killer who leads what’s left of his broken state.

Fifty Novembers ago, the war in Vietnam totally changed in a place called the Ia Drang Valley. There, for the first time, the United States Army used tactics that brilliant minds like Robert McNamara felt would result in victory over the North Vietnamese.

We would use a combination of air power, fire power, air mobility and increasing numbers of American soldiers and Marines to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate an end to war. Our combat superiority would result in so many enemy casualties that they would sue for peace rather than suffer such massive losses.

So in the second week of November 1965 elements of the First Air Cavalry Division boarded helicopters and flew into the Ia Drang Valley to take on about 2,000 NVA soldiers. It was the first and perhaps only classic set-piece battle of our years in Vietnam: two tough, battle hardened armies going against each other on a single field of fire.

In December 1964, there were 23,000 Americans fighting in Vietnam. By December 1965 the number had jumped to 185,000. At the end of 1964, the war had claimed the lives of 216 Americans. One year later the casualty count was 1,928 Americans killed.

War and the cost of fighting one is and always has been a growth industry. Fifty years ago the appetite of politicians and the Pentagon was fed largely by the draft. Today less than one percent of our population puts their lives on the line, puts their families fate at risk, for the rest of us here at home....