Sarah Paine

And I'm starting to lose it.

And you've got to...

You gotta put everything in the context of each other, losses, replacements, fighting, resting, concentration and dispersion.

And I'm thinking, I don't get this, Mao's bipolar disorder.

So I went to this gentleman, Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith.

He is the only translator into English of Sun Tzu, who has a distinguished military career.

And also he went on to get a DPhil, that's like a PhD, from Oxford in military history.

And if you look at his career, he's in China during the Japanese escalation of the Sino-Japanese War.

He's back in China, does another tour at the end of the Chinese Civil War.

He gets top marks in the military's Chinese language exam.

And oh, look at these details.

Navy Cross, Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross.

He's a distinguished man.

And for retirement, he decides he's going to go get the Oxford degree.

And he writes the translation of Sun Tzu.

He is the only translator of Sun Tzu who translates Zi Di as death ground.

Other people, it's like, oh, I don't know.

I can't remember the words, like...

I don't know, contested ground, something else.

But I'm guessing that when he chose those words, death ground, it's because when he was thinking about it, it might well have conjured up his memories of what exactly it was like to be on Guadalcanal or New Georgia.