I can’t say what Vietnam was really like because it was different for all of us who were there at different times and places, in different roles and for different reasons. But from those varied perspectives, some valid conclusions can be drawn about the collective American experience called "Vietnam." Much of what was germane, enduring and instructive to the monarchs of the what’s-happening-now media has proven in advancing frames of "now" to have been ephemeral, irrelevant or wrong. From Cronkite’s assessment of the `68 Tet offensive to Time’s "crucial question" in the Cambodian aid debate, the judgment of pros wearing the blinders of conviction were never worth a damn outside of that field of vision. Yet, thanks to our media, those are the visions most people still see as Vietnam.

My brother came home from there three years before I shipped over, with spellbinding black and white photographs of the natives who became his friends. I was floored by the superb quality of his work, having had no idea that he was that good a photographer, as good as any Time/Life professional who had ever impressed me. Had I not seen his photos, I could never have seen dignity in the bearing of a twelve-year-old boy standing around doing nothing. Nor could I have imagined that a smiling, shriveled up old lady with blackened front teeth could be beautiful. I saw in those pictures what I never saw on TV or in any of the leading newspapers or magazines. I saw what Sergeant George Ernest Garrison saw in his relationships with ordinary Vietnamese people who were no fans of the Viet Cong, and I never forgot.

For a while, though, it seemed that he did.

The first time I needed someone to talk to about the war, he sided with the media and dismissed everything I said before I got it out of my mouth. So did my best friend and half of the veterans I tried to talk to at work, regardless of how well we knew each other. I was even at odds with myself, unable to enjoy a normal social life without exchanging an occasional peace sign or criticizing the critics of Jane Fonda, which was essential for liberal blacks who didn’t want to be labeled "oreos." But that was before the boat people stories of `78 and the smashing success of "Coming Home."

In the mid `80s, I asked George why he wasn’t bothered by the likely fate of the people in his photographs. "It does bother me," he said, "but there’s nothing I can do." The last time I tried to talk to him about Vietnam late in that decade, he listened but he didn’t say much. I couldn’t be sure if he was just giving me his shoulder to cry on or trying to put together what I said without all of the pieces he needed to do it.

My brother would have been the first to admit that his serious interest in Vietnam started when he got his draft notice. What he learned about the war over and above the widespread corruption he saw while he was there came from our media—from the people who told us and showed us over and over that we couldn’t win and didn’t deserve to. It was only through the pages of The Invisible Warrior that I was able to draw together enough of my observations on the war and the peace to give veterans like him a rational alternative view. It made sense to him and to more of the other people who read it than I thought it would.

My first attempt at writing a book began after a year of work on my position paper. It ended two years later with a 50-page outline, an impressive bibliography and reams of footnotes in search of an appropriate text. The task was complicated by the first PBS airing of "Vietnam: A Television History," which, like Stanley Karnow, got enough big things right to make the little things it got wrong seem petty. My book was about the number of "little things" askew in every prize-winning account of Vietnam to date. The challenge was to show how intelligent people could line up all of that information end to end for years without ever noticing that each tiny bend in the facts was curving in one direction—and missing the truth by a mile.

Take most people’s pre-Ollie North/Iran-Contra ignorance of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, for instance. Add to that base everything they learned through the media about body counts and civilians. The UCMJ prohibits the deliberate killing of non-combatants. All American servicemen learned in Basic Training that they were individually responsible for such acts because the law also required them to disobey any unlawful order. Without a firm grip on that fact, which highly publicized veterans and law-makers in the peace movement chose to ignore, it was easy to view American fighting men, in general, as wanton slayers of Vietnamese peasants. The exceptions were opinion leaders and lawmakers like Ron Kovec and Bob Kerry, who never said anything about Hanoi over the airwaves that might be painful to their friend and ally, Hanoi Jane. The rest of us were, at best, suspect.

The media’s treatment of the UCMJ was another tiny bend in the facts, perpetuated by their selection of spokesmen, text, context and pictures, like the ones involving bombing targets in "The 10,000 Day War."

In "A Television History," first aired on PBS in `82, a vet trying to counter the image of American soldiers as indiscriminate killers of Vietnamese people said, "Half of my squad never killed no innocent civilians." When I heard that, I could almost hear my antiwar friends saying to themselves, "What about the other half?" I could imagine students who were watching that program for the college credits it offered or who were just old enough to start thinking about the war on an adult level saying the same thing.

That sort of response to that sort of information is automatic for most brighter-than-average people. For those who didn’t want to miss what was coming next, it’s unlikely that they would have stopped to ponder why they were given that spokesman’s words to chew on and the gruesome pictures to digest them with. And who would want to miss any part of a program hailed in advance by NPR as "accurate, balanced and complete"? That is a definition of journalistic perfection. You can’t argue with perfection, at least I couldn’t with PBS or NPR.

I used to sponsor PBS as well as NPR with the few dollars I could afford on the salary of a bottom rung clay modeler. I was a news junky and it provided in-depth news and information I couldn’t get on commercial TV. When Karnow’s "Television History" was aired for a local pledge drive, I called in with my pledge and my comment on its deficiencies. The station manager hosting the drive acknowledged my comment on the air and dismissed it with derision. Though my complaint to NPR about its endorsement of the program was ignored, I did hear enough on the radio to know how it was received. Bill Busenberg, in particular, made it clear that no disparaging review of Stanley Karnow’s "History" by any nameless, faceless, nickel-and-dime NPR sponsor would be given a penny’s worth of attention by NPR.

Could the sponsorship of public television and radio by Jane Fonda, one of the wealthiest, best connected and most admired women in America, have had something to do with it? Let’s get real. How could it not have? Criticizing Stanley Karnow’s version of the Vietnam War was as fatal to further communication on the subject with public television and radio as criticizing Hanoi Jane’s. It was the same message sponsored by the same people during the same war.

I gave my all to attacking the credibility of that message with the fast and dirty letter to ATC’s Ted Clark that ended the last chapter. I wrote it in one sitting between New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day 1986. I knew that it would be a decisive year in the war, which could end in only one way unless it began on a new tack.

When I reached the point in The Invisible Warrior where I needed to put that letter in temporal perspective, the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan was the closest thing going to "another Vietnam." I didn’t see it that way, but the fact that NPR, and therefore a big chunk of its listeners, did, made it a perception of reality to be reckoned with-a conventional wisdom filter through which all commentary on the subject had to pass. The imminent breakup of the Soviet Union wasn’t contemplated by anyone I knew, and even if I had predicted it, I would have lost credibility points by doing so if the book had been published after the fact. The crucial question would have been missed and defining the crucial question was the crucial question.

I had a similar timing problem with my position paper, with a line from The Authorities, and with my kill zone vision of a dummy and a dove.

Item: Ronald Reagan said something in a speech at the Republican National Convention in Detroit about Hanoi winning with propaganda what it could not win on the battlefield. That racist flim-flam man, soon to become president of the United States, was stating a fact that no one before him had mentioned in the media. Who would have believed that an honest black man from Detroit, with no link to the Republican party, wrote it in an unfinished position paper before he said it? So much for the main theme of my paper.

Item: In every version of The Authorities, beginning in 1979, I wrote, "Being invisible isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be." When a TV announcer said that in a `93 promo for Chevy Chase’s "Memoirs Of An Invisible Man," the line became his in the minds of everyone who heard him say it first. I changed mine to avoid the possibility that it would be mistaken for his.

Item: If you saw "Killer Klowns From Outer Space," I won’t have to tell you what it has to do with "The Dummy and The Dove" or why I can’t rewrite that chapter because of it. If you didn’t see "Killer Klowns," all I can say is, the truth can’t be altered like a coincidental turn of phrase to allay a question of authorship or to disassociate it from a scene in a low budget comedy-horror flick. What happened to me in 1971 happened to me whether or not it happened to a uniformed character in a funny movie 15 or 16 years later

Beginning in a couple of paragraphs and ending with the final chapter, you’re going to read much of what was in the manuscript I sent to Alex Chadwick at the start of the Gulf War. Since I began this book in a different place than that one and added some pertinent "current events," I’ve had to make some editing adjustments for the sake of clarity and continuity. Other than that, you have read and you will read most of what the NPR news staff had the opportunity to read in 1990, including the introduction to Time Travel, which was then chapter one.

Since the Gulf War, I’ve heard more of the kinds of questions I raised in that manuscript, from more NPR correspondents, than I ever thought I’d hear—notably from Ann Garrels, Jacki Lyden, Deborah Amos and Martha Radditz. Ted Clark did a piece on Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge which gave me hope that he might have read it, though I can’t say that he did. None of those people have written to me so I don’t know how they came to see the relevance of the same things I did, and I don’t want to take credit for the work they did in uncovering the truth. The only author of the truth is God.

Except for one correspondent who was immensely encouraging in her remarks, the NPR news staffers I did hear from expressed a polite interest in addressing my legitimate concerns, then said they didn’t think I had any. They dismissed or ignored all of my key issues, taking pains to explain the practical limitations of the press which a nine-year-old might need to have explained to him—a dumb nine-year-old oreo with delusions of sanity.

I had the identical experience with senior editors of the Detroit Free Press so I knew how they pictured me. I wondered why they took the time and trouble they obviously did to write if they thought I was a jackass, which they obviously did. I still haven’t figured that one out.

My next reference to a letter will be the `86 Clark letter, the writing, the reading and the disposition of which, like the Dixie letter of `85, was as much a part of fighting the war as the shooting, the dying and the planting of flags. You’ll be reading from a perspective in time that precedes Desert Storm, the breakup of the USSR and the end of communism in Europe. None of those momentous events was set in stone until a lot of other things happened to shape them. I can’t know everything going on in the world today that will change it tomorrow. What I do know and what I hope you’ll see are some principles of perception-driven efficacy that always apply. From the perspectives of then and now, I hope you will see the ones that have.

Fall, 1988:

...When that letter was written, few Americans believed that the Russians would ever withdraw their troops from Afghanistan. When the Russians first committed them to battle, most Americans believed that they would inevitably be forced to. Between then and now, much has changed. Between then and the fall of Kabul or the disintegration of the rebels, much will change again according to the interests and capabilities of the parties involved. For all we know today, the Soviets will leave Afghanistan only to return with sudden, overwhelming force at a later date. For all we know today it might be in the best interest of the United States to give them a hand.

The point is, Afghanistan was not, is not and will not be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, any more than Cambodia was, is or will be Vietnam’s Vietnam.

The Vietnam War was sponsored by the Russians and the Chinese, initially as partners in a common global cause and then as rivals for influence. It was fought by non-communist South Vietnam for freedom from the communist North. It was fought by the North to unify Vietnam under a communist dictatorship for Vietnamese domination of Laos and Cambodia. It was fought by the United States and its allies for the principle of freedom from totalitarian aggression everywhere. It was the subject of public debate only in the West, where American public opinion played a decisive role in how it evolved.

But there was more to Vietnam than that. There was the cadre of media personalities on both sides of the Pacific who looked good on television, gave great interviews and defined the issues for America to debate. North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh was one of those personalities. Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk was another.

Before he was ousted from power by Lon Nol in 1970, Sihanouk could have made an issue of Nixon’s "secret" bombing, often cited as the opening chapter in Pol Pot’s reign of terror. He chose not to for one good reason: It would have also made an issue of North Vietnam’s "secret" invasion. Once you make an issue of something, you have already begun to do something about it. In Sihanouk’s case, it would have put enough international pressure on Hanoi to force a drastic change in its behavior. Unfortunately for the prince, that could have meant an all-out war with the North Vietnamese, which his small, ill-equipped and undertrained army could not have survived. But since Hanoi was as dependent on its good-guy standing in the peace movement as it was on its base camps and supply routs in Cambodia, another kind of war was more likely, a "popular" uprising.

Little would have stood in the way of Hanoi’s replacement of Sihanouk with home-grown communist Khieu Samphan (Pol Pot’s boss), a madman he had once condemned to death. Remember that name, Khieu Samphan; you will be seeing it again.

With Hanoi setting up base camps and transporting men and arms through the country at will, Cambodia was hardly a neutral party to the fighting across the border. Indeed, the NVA’s free run of Cambodian territory was vital to its continuation of the war, and the army that couldn’t continue was the army that couldn’t win. That’s why Sihanouk, whose anti-American rhetoric seemed to condone the North Vietnamese invasion even as he claimed neutrality, would have had to go if he suddenly reversed himself. In any event, a public condemnation of Hanoi’s expansion of the war into Cambodia would have meant an end to the pretense of Cambodian neutrality and that pretense was Sihanouk’s only real protection from the Khmer Rouge.

It was no protection at all from the forces within his government who could endure no more of his subservience to the North Vietnamese. These were the men who deposed him to fight the communist invaders, only to end up fighting their own communists, strengthened increasingly by North Vietnam, China, the peace movement, the international press and the Congress of the United States.

The book outline that my letter to Ted Clark was based on contained material in the chapter on Cambodia that didn’t appear in the much quoted Sideshow by William Shawcross. I was careful to draw my information only from sources like Time, Newsweek, and tape-recorded broadcasts of "All Things Considered." I wanted to show the best quality of information the public had to draw on in its pre-Sideshow perception of the Khmer Rouge. I also wanted to refresh some memories about Sihanouk’s identification as "the popular leader" of the resistance to Lon Nol’s "weak, unpopular regime."

That identification is important because it made all claims of communist subversion and communist aggression in Cambodia seem ridiculous; that helped our Congress to act in good conscience to assure a rebel victory with a cutoff in military aid to their opponents—our allies—during their final offensive. To many guilt-ridden Americans, Sihanouk was Cambodia; his voice was the voice of the Cambodian people.

In a May 10, 1973 edition of the Detroit Free Press, Keys Beech (Chicago Daily News Service, reporting from Peking) captured the spirit of the man and his message with these words:

"...’The Americans are a great people and I like them,’ he said. "But unfortunately you don’t mind bombing yellow people.

`I understand your own revolution and your democratic traditions,’ he continued. `But the Cambodians know you for your B52, your F111 and your helicopter gunships."

The headline on that story was, "Sihanouk Rebuffs U.S. Bid for Amity." Here’s where the headline comes from:

"If the U.S. wants to negotiate his return, Sihanouk said, it can deal with his deputy prime minister, Khieu Samphan, a 43-year-old French-educated economist who commands Sihanouk’s insurgents in Cambodia.

"The energetic prince, who recently completed a month’s tour of `liberated’ areas of Cambodia, claimed the support of all anti-government forces in Cambodia, including the Khmer Rouge (Cambodian Communists), his former enemies

`The Khmer Rouge are the masters of Cambodia,’ he declared, adding that the insurgents now control 90 percent of the country.

"Asked if that meant a communist government would emerge in Cambodia, Sihanouk said: `Not exactly. It is difficult to explain in a few words, but it would be a combination of communism, Buddhism and nationalism."

Sound’s idiotic, doesn’t it? The dots just don’t connect. But that has nothing to do with the picture of peace that millions of Americans saw in "combinations" like that if the United States just bowed out. Ergo, Time magazine’s "most crucial question about the Cambodian situation: To whom will the Phnom Penh regime fall? The answer: To other Cambodians."

In those days, before Sideshow and "The Killing Fields" made international heroes out of William Shawcross and Sydney Shamberg, that’s how all well-informed people were expected to see things. No fooling.

Of the one in five Americans who never came to see things that way, ABC’s Howard K. Smith was the only one working as a mainstream media journalist. His former co-anchor, Harry Reasoner, did a special report on the subject when he returned to CBS. It featured two countries where the kind of power-sharing envisioned by Sihanouk worked out splendidly. Whenever you got hit with those shining examples of why we shouldn’t keep our bombs and bullets going to our allies in Saigon and Phnom Penh, there was no hitting back. Thanks to television, everybody with an open mind could see for themselves that the peace movement was right. And they didn’t even have to look at the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia to do it; they had only to look at the peace in Lebanon and Laos.

I don’t know what difference it would have made to the public if my first book had been finished, but the accident that prevented it made a hell of a difference to me.

Knowing that my status as a Vietnam veteran is more important to most people than the intrinsic merit of my arguments has been a constant source of frustration. It eliminates any question of whether I can empathize with the common soldier’s travails, but, all too often, it imposes a requirement to say no more, to speak of the war only from a "Coming Home" point of view. Over the past fifteen or twenty years, many of my brothers in uniform have been seen in that role while others just vanished. I was one of the others.

I wanted bright, caring people who were looking back in time at Vietnam and still asking "Why?" to look at Indochina "now" and to know. But to do that I had to be seen in uniform, putting my life where my mouth was, and I couldn’t pull it off. Before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in the fourth quarter of `82, wearing the uniform, either literally or figuratively, was a great way to get attention if you invited people to spit on it. Otherwise it was hard for most people to look at without feeling uncomfortable. What could they say? How could they know what to say? Before I went to Vietnam, I didn’t know. When I got back, I still didn’t know. I couldn’t even talk to my own brother.

In my first attempt at writing a book about Vietnam, I took the "God’s-eye" approach of Halberstam, Fitzgerald and Shawcross to make my case with scholarly "detachment." In retrospect, I can see that it was foolish to expect anything I said as a mere student of the war to carry any weight. My name was not a household word. I was unheard of in scholarly circles. I didn’t even finish my first year of college. I didn’t work for any of the wire services, newspapers, magazines or television networks. I didn’t write about the fall of Phnom Penh as it happened, where it happened or spend fifteen years in Vietnam hobnobbing with the movers and shakers of the time. I was never in the running for a Pulitzer Prize, and Ho Chi Minh never gave me any wise, prophetic messages to pass on to the American people.

In short, my efforts were doomed from the start. All things considered, I should have known. Maybe it was for the best that I didn’t....

On June 1, 1984, my sons were spending the weekend with their mother so I had plenty of time to myself to work without interruption. But I needed something to write with. Having searched the living room, the dining room and the kitchen without success, I took on the awesome challenge of pursuing my quest in my small, overcrowded bedroom.

A few neat stacks and many broken down piles of books and magazines were scattered here and there—on top of the dresser, the portable cardboard closet and all over the floor. Mixed in with that reference material in no special order were newspaper clippings and reprints from various publications going back to 1953, all of which had to do with Vietnam. There were also scores of notebooks I’d filled over the years with stories, essays, game scenarios and theories on everything in the world I thought was important. My outline was one of them.

On and under these implements of intellectual cultivation were some junk books, junk mail and a smattering of dirty clothes which hadn’t found their way to my half-empty laundry bag. Standing upright near the head of my bed was a recently removed cowboy boot. On its side at the foot of the bed was the other one. Sprinkled liberally about were loose, hand-written drafts from many long-lost letters to the media. In one special corner were some letters from a long-lost love.

There are those who would say that the room was a mess.

So, there I was on the floor of my walled-in monument to chaos at 10 o’clock at night looking under my bed for a pencil. What I needed was a flashlight. I hadn’t been able to find one. What I found was an empty Bic lighter which I had recently found in the parking lot of a shopping mall but hadn’t seen in days. I had given up cigarettes a year before but picked up the Bic as a torch lighter for some work I was doing on a tabletop golf game.

The only thing necessary to ignite a propane torch is a good spark. Good sparks throw off a surprising amount of light, and light was what I needed to see what was under the bed. What a wonderful coincidence, I thought as I picked up the Bic, wondering vaguely how it got there. Finally, I thought, recounting a year where everything that could go wrong did—finally I got lucky. Then, as I always did on such serendipitous occasions, I softly uttered the words, "Thank you God," and proceeded with the business at hand.

Holding the lighter close to the wooden floor, I thumbed the wheel. In one brilliant flash I saw one lost sock, a big formless mass that may have been a T-shirt, two small lumps that may have been anything and more dust than I had ever imagined. I was appalled. So, this is why my mother made me dust under the bed when I was a kid. And all these years I’d thought she was being a fanatic about the thing. I made a mental note to clean the place up-tomorrow-or the next day.

I struck the flint again. Once more the dusty space between the netting under the mattress board and the floor was bathed in a flash of light. This time, though, there was a faint afterglow, almost too faint to notice. But I did notice. It was coming from a thin ring of burning mesh which I slapped at quickly with my hand. I looked long and hard for any trace of a lingering glow and pulled away, satisfied that there was none.

Enough of that, I decided, seeing how one wild spark had nearly destroyed my mattress. Or was I overreacting? Possibly... No, probably. I plopped my butt on the bed, chiding myself for imagining the little incident to be so much bigger than it had been. Odds were, I could use up the flints in a hundred Bics before—What the hell?

My sage speculation was rudely put in its place by flames galloping up the side of the bed between my legs. Even before I could seriously entertain the idea that my mattress was really on fire, I was on my feet and moving to put it out. Flinging the mattress up on end so I could get at it, I was struck by the speed with which it was streaking from one spot on the dusty mesh to another, devouring it like wisps of cotton candy on huge ghostly tongues.

I grabbed my laundry bag by the neck and threw the body of it against a wide arc of fire. But as soon as I did that, another strip of mesh burned itself loose and suddenly the upper third of the mattress literally burst into flames. Thick black smoke poured out like an angry black waterfall running uphill and out over the ceiling. It was as though my "torch lighter" had indeed ignited a torch, a thing made to be ignited by a spark and to burn ferociously with its own built-in fuel supply.

I was too astonished at first to be afraid and too sure that I had time to bring the fire under control. After all, it had just flared up a few seconds before. As long as I kept a cool head, why wouldn’t I be able to put it out?

The smoke, that’s why.

How the hell do you fight smoke? The noxious fumes were filling the room with incredible speed, causing me to choke before I could take three good breaths. I realized then that the acrid black gas could fill up my lungs as swiftly as it was filling my bedroom—that it might knock me out as swiftly as it was blinding me.

I dropped immediately to the floor, barely able to see the fire, let alone anything else, through the thick, black cloud. Using my shirt as an air filter did little good because there just wasn’t enough breathable air in the room and what there was of it, was going fast. How fast, may have been a question of life or death.

In the instant before I bolted for the open door, I considered what things of value I should try to save: The book I’d been working on for the past two years? My sister Sara’s irreplaceable "Look and See" cards she had collected as a young girl? My old class "A" uniform or my new boots? I couldn’t see any of them. I couldn’t see a damn thing in the room. But what I could see in my mind was the cost of overestimating how much time I had to choose.

For the second time that year I did some time traveling. The first destination was back to Vietnam where I should have died. This one was forward to see how dead I’d be if I stayed where I was for too long, then back again to rescue myself and call the Fire Department before it happened.