Two Quick Things

[David Gordon]

Team G2,

We look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning.  In the meantime, we wanted to flag two things that came up during an informal meeting we had with Corey earlier today.

1.  Dates.  It is important that each character be given a date.  For some, this date should be very specific.  For others, a rough time should be sufficient.  This is vital for two reasons.  First, one point of a staff ride is to understand decision-making by examining the information an individual had available at a given time.  This is difficult to do if the is not given.  Second, providing participants specific dates for their presentations will help us keep things along a rough chronology.  We don't need you to finalize dates by tomorrow's meeting.

2.  Proposed Day 4 schedule adjustment.  After speaking with Corey, we thought it made sense to begin Day 4 with the Wise Men discussion at the US Embassy followed by the Lao Dong/NLF presentations at the Military History Museum.  The reason for this shift has to do with chronology.  The fallout from Tet crystalized in Washington before it did in Hanoi.  In fact, senior North Vietnamese leaders leveraged internal political developments in the US to spin Tet as a success.  If we leave the order as is, the Tang and Giap presentations may address Johnson bowing out before the Wise Men presentation.  This would be bad.  We can discuss tomorrow.

Finally, I wanted to attach last year's final character list, in case it is helpful to you.

-Dave and Kelly

[Louis Lauter]

Makes sense to me.

On Feb 4, 2013, at 2:37 PM, David Gordon wrote:

<Character List.xls>