In 1961, as in 1945 and 1950, the survival of liberty in the world was not assured. As a young teen recently converted from pacifism, I was as stirred as anyone by the JFK inaugural address. My head full of propaganda about refugees from the Iron Curtain in Europe and the Bamboo Curtain in Asia, I was eager to do my part for freedom if my generation had to fight for it.

All Quiet On The Western Front sensitized me to anything that even resembled propaganda. But after seeing the fatal flaw in peace as an alternative to war, I was able to see that our government was hardly the only source of it and nowhere near the most potent. We were getting it from all sides, from everybody with access to the media and a political idea to sell. Unless you were getting your information from what I thought were strictly objective sources, like the anchor men for CBS news, it seemed to me that you had to regard much of what you learned from the media with suspicion.

As a Negro who turned black in 1960 after reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy, that was automatic. The stereotypes called to mind by the early American print media’s reference to us by either name stayed with us into the age of motion pictures, radio and television. Those mental pictures were then picked up and carried to every corner of the nation by way of those media until 1966. Only then did the comfortable racist idea that "black is beautiful" replace the sometimes uncomfortable racist idea that black is ugly.

Black is beautiful, which reinforced the primacy of race in American thought, is an expression that JFK never heard. Before our media got hold of it and repeated it as often and as uncritically as a jingle for a soft drink ad campaign, a high priority of liberals was to convince their fellow Americans and themselves that color was irrelevant.

When Kennedy took the presidential oath of office and laid out his vision for America’s future, black people who fit the stereotypes carried over from slavery were as common a sight on TV as the usual cast of characters in cowboy shows and family sitcoms. Those of us who didn’t, which was most of us, were viewed as so different from the "ordinary folks" who watched those shows that we didn’t even show up in the commercials. In a society racially segregated by custom and Jim Crow laws where blacks were less than 12% of the population, you can see what a perception problem that presented to the white majority. It was as potent a propaganda campaign as there can be. I could not, therefore, have been reasonably expected to believe everything I saw and heard in the media.

I couldn’t question everything either. The civil rights movement and the brotherhood movement which preceded it were both given sympathetic treatment on network news. The `54 Army/McCarthy hearings I watched with my father’s wise guidance put thoughtless appeals to patriotism in a sinister new light. And it was through our media that the whole country saw the evil of Jim Crow in the former Confederacy, the Russian invasion of Hungary, the daring flight of refugees from East Germany and the Nixon/Kennedy debates.

All of that, together with all that I had read and heard and experienced for myself, told me that America, with all of its faults, was still "the last best hope for mankind," no matter who said it or why. Kennedy’s liberal views on civil rights and his magic over the medium of television seemed to offer the latest best hope for America.

"Ask not what your country can do for you," our first Catholic president had said in his inaugural address "Ask what you can do for your country." As a candidate, his religion was considered by some to be as big an issue as race is today. As the president, he had to show that his country came first. His first presidential address was undoubtedly delivered with the doubters of his primary loyalty to the United States in mind, as well as the doubters of his strength and courage to lead the free world.

Shortly before that speech, I was riding in a car with three or four other teenagers when a brief world news wrap-up came on the radio. Being with my brother and his friends who were his age or older made me the youngest guy in the group. The news was important to me because staying on top of current events helped me to project a "mature" image. A sizable vocabulary was also helpful and the news was a great source of neat, intimidating words. So, while the other boys complained about the rude interruption in the music, I listened to the news.

One story was about terrorists in Indochina called the Viet something—or-others who machine-gunned a bus load of Buddhist monks, killing all aboard. I had a vague recollection of a name like theirs from listening to the radio program "Monitor" every Saturday with my mother in the early `50s.

Hearing "Viet," the names Souvanna Phouma and King Sihanouk popped into my head, but I wasn’t sure what they had to do with anything. I remembered them only because I had enjoyed the sound of them, and I would find them singing in my head long after my mother had switched stations. How I had associated them with the Viet something-or-others so many years later, I didn’t know.... And what was that new word? Decapitate? Yes, decapitate. What could that be—Oh my God!

The heads of those Buddhist holy men were mounted on poles planted on the side of a country road.

Why do that to anybody, I asked myself, especially a bunch of monks? What could anyone hope to gain? Who were the men who did it anyway? What were the authorities there going to do about them—and what would happen if they became the authorities?

I had good reasons for asking myself those questions. It was pure coincidence that the first bunch of severed heads at the foot of my bed and the ones in the news story were Asians. But it was consistent with my current study of Hitler’s rise to power that I would consider what that mass murder in Indochina might have had to do with the principle of freedom. It was the principle, after all, that meant something to the future, to my future and the future of those who would come after me.

Learning everything I could about the terrorists became a passion which lasted into the `80s. I couldn’t hear a word or phrase associated with events in Indochina without zeroing in on the story and trying to arrange the cells of each story into one coherent body of knowledge. It was tough.

I can’t think of a way to make the next few pages entertaining or to circumnavigate the difficulty of using a slew of names and dates. Such data can be as boring and confusing for the writer to deal with as it is for the reader. The most conspicuous errors of fact and logic can go right past you as, indeed, they did with the most celebrated works by the most celebrated writers on the struggle for Indochina. That is why I have to write things down as close to the way they were as I can and hope that you take as much care in reading it.

Until I came back to the re-editing of this chapter and the one before it in April `93, I didn’t realize that the year I had for President Kennedy’s "Ask not/pay any price" speech was wrong. I had apparently used the month of his election as the month of his inauguration, thus necessitating the bending of a few minor bridges of time to support the logic of what I recalled. I was in a hurry to get the book published before we got into another war and trusted that a sharp editor would clean up minor spills like that before they became permanent stains.

The problem is, who can say what "minor spills" will not be cleaned up and what "minor bridges" will prove to be crucial? Right or wrong, large or small, every part of any base of knowledge has some effect on what it can support. That was the reason for writing this book in the first place.

So, here goes....

The people I thought of during the broadcast of that multiple decapitation story, Phouma of Laos and Sihanouk of Cambodia, were related to the terrorists only in the sense that they were Indochinese. The name of the terrorists was the Viet Cong. The name of the group I thought they were was Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh that defeated the French at Dienbienphu in 1954 and formed the nucleus of the North Vietnamese Army.

Beheading freedom-minded Vietnamese was a favorite pastime of the hated French colonialists before WW II. Now that they were gone and the French-created state of South Vietnam, led by the popular anti-French leader Ngo Dinh Diem was trying to remain independent of Hanoi, the Viet Cong were taking over where the French left off. They were assassinating freedom-minded Vietnamese—but on a much larger scale.

In most nutshell versions of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, you will read that the Americans were the ones who took over where the French left off. Those words suggest that we fought the Vietnamese Communists for the same reasons the French fought the Viet Minh: to stifle Vietnamese independence and to impose our will on the Vietnamese people.

That just ain’t so. To be sure, there is evidence to say that it is, and reference materials on the subject that have been treated as gospel by the media didn’t miss much of it. For instance: The Time/Life book series on Vietnam tells you all you need to know to correctly identify the French colonialists as the enemy of freedom for the Vietnamese people. That done, it begins the story of U.S. involvement in Vietnam after the French withdrawal in 1954 with a book entitled, Passing The Torch. The award-winning television series, "Vietnam: The 10,000 Day War," owes its title to the idea that Vietnamese nationalists, lead by Ho Chi Minh, fought a long war of independence against France and the United States. That puts our moral standing in Indochina on the same plain as the French and takes the East/West balance of power out of the equation altogether.

What is left from a thorough study of such accounts is the logic of the peace movement. If there was no legitimate reason for our involvement in Vietnam, it follows that our involvement was criminal. If we had nothing there to fight for, it follows that we had nothing to lose by pulling out.

Stay with me here and you’ll see why I’ve been so angry and so frustrated for so long over the best known accounts of how and why we fought in Vietnam. I’ve already mentioned the Munich analogy and some pertinent questions of leadership in the "new world order," following World War II. Many of those items may have struck a familiar note. Here are some that you probably haven’t heard before about post-World War II Vietnam:

While the Saigon government was originally conceived and structured by France to be a French puppet with no real authority and not even an army of its own, North and South Vietnam were always independent of the United States. To find meaning in the assistance that Truman gave to pro-Western Communist France to fight the pro-Moscow Vietnamese, one need only to look at the help Roosevelt gave the Russian Communists to fight the German Nazis. It was a choice between two evils where one was certain to prevail. The greatest threat to liberty after WW II was to do nothing as a succession of countries like Indonesia, South Korea, Malaya, Laos and South Vietnam fell like dominoes to communist insurgency and communist aggression.

Another way of setting those dominoes into motion relied as much on winning the propaganda war as it did any strategic battle.

The Viet Minh’s famous military victory at Dienbienphu, in the north of Vietnam, was not enough to win the country for them outright in 1954. It was so costly to them that American intervention, urgently requested by the French during the battle, would not have required a nuke to stave off a French defeat. By the same token, a concerted French counter-offensive after the battle would have probably succeeded and the French were militarily strong enough to pull it off. But, the battle of Dienbienphu was a decisive psychological defeat for the people back home in France who demanded that their government end its presence in Vietnam on practically any terms.

That’s how France came to accept the partition of Vietnam, traditionally divided into three parts, into North and South, pending country-wide elections in 1956 to unify it. Neither South Vietnam nor the U.S. signed the communist proposal since the North was unified under totalitarian control of most votes that could be cast, unless enough people went South before the election to balance the odds. Close to a million people, mostly Catholics, did escape to the South—and escape is the right word considering the many thousands of people who were being murdered in the North for resisting the new communist order. That wasn’t enough to keep Ho Chi Minh from winning in a sham election what he could not win on the battlefield. The stage was set for the war of words and images that would bring the Indochinese dominoes down.

Some people, who should have known better, noted after the fall of Saigon in 1975 that the failure of Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore to also go communist proved the domino theory wrong. But even if you don’t count Laos and Cambodia, which for some reason they didn’t, or the war the British won much earlier for a free Malaysia and Singapore, you have to wonder how anybody could come to that conclusion. Between 1950, when Truman first sent 35 military advisors to Vietnam, and 1965, when Johnson sent the first combat divisions, who could have said what a communist victory in Vietnam would have meant for the entire region?

The answer is, nobody. Nobody knew any better than they did between 1936 and 1939 what the countries falling to the Axis would mean to the world, but you could have made a damn good guess. Guessing was all that anybody could do.

With full knowledge all around of how the old Great Powers and the new Super Powers had behaved before the Second World War, the world’s communists and anti-communists played the Cold War game. Both sides were guessing at the other side’s scope of geo-political interests, ambitions, capabilities and commitment to achieving their aims. Every action, reaction and failure to react appropriately was a message to be heeded or ignored, a test of military and diplomatic intentions, capabilities and resolve to be passed or failed. One miscalculation by the Russians led to the Korean War. Another could have led to the loss of freedom for millions or hundreds of millions, a small war becoming a big war or a conventional war becoming a nuclear holocaust.

Lyndon B. Johnson died in 1973 convinced that American intervention in Vietnam had prevented nuclear war. Looking at the tests of American resolve that he and his predecessors had to deal with from the Soviet Union and Communist China, who can say that he was wrong? He saw a future of nuclear desolation that he could change without surrendering the world to communist totalitarianism, and he tried to change it.

Contrary to the idea that our first Cold War presidents erred in seeing Ho Chi Minh’s war against the French in a Super Power context, looking at it strictly in terms of colonialists vs. nationalists is senseless. Many non-Communist Vietnamese nationalists opposed the French and Ho’s Communist-dominated Viet Minh. Some of them fought with the Viet Minh against the French and with other Vietnamese against the Viet Cong.

Truman, Ike, Kennedy and Johnson knew that the leaders of Laos and Cambodia feared a Vietnam-dominated Indochina. Among other things Ho Chi Minh did to engender those fears was to write about turning French Indochina into Vietnamese Indochina long before his shooting war with France began. No responsible world leader could have assumed that he was not a colonialist himself. Nor could they have assumed that he, a charter member of the French Communist party and the founder of the Indochinese Communist party, was not an ambitious player in the international communist movement.

So, when you hear our media’s favorite experts on Vietnam describe our first Cold War presidents as "unwise for not regarding Ho Chi Minh primarily as a popular nationalist leader," you know that’s bullshit. And you know that they know it’s bullshit.

Every tyrant in the world claimed to be a patriot whose interest in his country, rather than himself, came first. Witness our own Senator Joe McCarthy. What made "Uncle Ho" any different? Only his understanding of how to win friends and influence people in the Western press. He knew them well. He was one of them. He thought and planned many years into the future. He knew that the Western press was a creature of the moment, with no sense of the future and a memory only for big events of the past.

When he invited himself to the treaty talks at Versailles in 1919 to speak for the Vietnamese people’s aspirations for independence, he made sure that he got his picture taken and his name printed in the press. When he appointed himself president of Vietnam in 1945, it’s doubtful that most politically untutored Vietnamese, which is to say most Vietnamese, knew who he was. There is no doubt, however, that the Western press knew who he was. As a wealthy, French-educated, media-wise, self-promoting newspaper publisher, editor, writer and cartoonist, he knew how to make a name for himself. Nguyen The Patriot was his first big winner. That’s the one he used for the "big event" at Versailles.

He was known by important heads of state and identified as a popular Vietnamese nationalist, or communist, or guerrilla leader or whatever suited his audience and his purpose at the time. As an accomplished actor who often played the role of a peasant to fool his friends just for fun, he could be whatever he wanted to be. As a politician he wanted to be absolute ruler of Indochina. He died in 1969 so he had to settle for immortality.

When I graduated high school in 1964, I had a better idea of what was going on in Indochina than most of our political leaders in Washington and opinion leaders in the press. I didn’t realize how much better until I returned from Vietnam in `71 and started hearing about the "Pentagon Papers," Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara’s secret history of U.S. involvement in the war. Their blindness to the foreseeable future was astounding.

With all of the things the more knowledgeable of them did know about the intricate details of who did what and when, they didn’t have a clue about who was driving events where and what forces were driving them. I knew the things they should have known because of one highly accurate forecasting tool they ignored: the basic patterns of history that always repeat.

I knew in 1963 that the United States would be fighting a Korea-style war somewhere in Indochina in the very near future. I knew that it would be precipitated by an "incident," something that could be called an act of provocation by the communists against the United States. I knew that hundreds of thousands of our troops would be committed for three or more years and television would play a vital role in the outcome. I knew that we would see shocking pictures of enemy atrocities to keep us fixed on who the enemy was and why the war against them was necessary. And I knew that it would end when the bad buys got the message that the price they were paying was too high to justify their war effort, they could not win and the good guys were never going to quit.

What all of us, except Ho Chi Minh, failed to see in advance was how our media would adopt the views and language of the peace movement to report those things as "news" and use them to show Americans as the bad guys. The victory and defeat prognoses for good guys and bad guys are standard, Xerox-copy war propaganda. All parties to all wars have always used minor variations on those themes to maintain support for their war efforts and to undermine the enemy’s home support for theirs.

For the stewards of our mighty media to turn that war propaganda around 180 degrees in the middle of a hot war would have struck me as an unthinkable act of treason—which is why I never thought of it. It was inconceivable to me that they would assist a foreign enemy or a domestic peace movement demanding peace terms indistinguishable from the enemy’s. The peace movement could win nothing without the media’s active support. Neither could the North Vietnamese Army or its guerrilla army in the South, the Viet Cong.

It wasn’t necessary to learn a tenth of what I did about Vietnam to know that we would be going there soon to fight. By the end of 1963, thousands of American servicemen were scattered throughout the country, 79 of whom died that year in combat. When I first started keeping track, the body count for the year was much smaller. I was never good with numbers, but I could add and subtract well enough to know that the count was going up. There was nothing to suggest that it would go down and no reason to believe that we would abandon our allies to the mercy of the merciless communists. Only hypocrites and cowards would do a thing like that, and we, as a nation, valued freedom and courage above all else.

In the early `60s it was not considered bad form for American journalists to give regular reports of communist atrocities since we the people, all branches of government, and the press were, more or less, on the same side. Allowing for the propaganda value in such reports for our war effort, the pattern of murders revealed by them said that the Viet Cong were following a plan. They were not the loose collection of bloodthirsty psychopaths they appeared to be when they left the heads of their political rivals on bamboo poles. They were more like cold corporate businessmen, aware of our media’s short attention span and therefore willing to accept some bad press in the short run to establish themselves as the only ones to do business with.

They carried the names of influential South Vietnamese government loyalists on death lists and killed them and their families whenever they got the chance. They killed methodically and often and always with a purpose.

So, you ask, what was the purpose of killing the monks? I never found out. They were spiritual leaders and militant political activists in the North. Those were reasons enough. But there was probably more to it than that, like some specific challenge to VC authority in some specific area of the country. The more I learned about them the better I understood why they could not peacefully coexist as a political body with any higher authority.

One thing is sure: They would not have made good communists in North Vietnam’s countryside or its cities. Nor would they have been effective political activists. For that, you need access to news media that serve a population where aroused public opinion means something.

The Buddhist monks were masters at playing to the American press to pressure Catholic South Vietnamese President Diem into lifting restrictions on their activities. Through arrogance, incompetence and a wretched sense of public relations, Diem’s highly placed brother Nhu and Madame Nhu, Diem’s "dragon lady" sister-in-law, did almost as much as the monks to weaken Diem’s support.

The difference was the monks did it on purpose. They timed their demonstrations to capitalize on the Nhus’ poor image, deliberately provoking the government into cracking down hard on them in front of western cameras.

They won a pivotal PR battle in May of 1963 when they maneuvered the government into banning the flying of the Buddhist flag and to arrest thousands of them in the streets. Never mind what the flag of South Vietnam and the war against the Viet Cong had to do with anything. A Buddhist flag banned by a Catholic head of state in a Buddhist country accompanied by ruthless suppression makes news. There is every reason to believe that the monks orchestrated the whole affair to get American public opinion to pressure President Kennedy into dumping President Diem.

The holy men carried signs, supposedly for Vietnamese consumption but written in English, as they marched in street demonstrations and staged dramatic protests guaranteed to draw American media attention. For a while, they took turns dousing themselves with gasoline and setting themselves ablaze or slicing their bellies open and ripping their guts out .

Now that’s entertainment! If stunts like that don’t make an impression...

Well, they did make an impression on the American media and, therefore, on the collective American mind. The first "burning bonz" act hit the jackpot with a photograph on the cover of Life magazine, world famous for its history-making photos. They made the point that it was better to die a painful, grisly death than to carry on without getting what they wanted, which was much more than the right to fly their flag.

That picture, and the infamous "Bar-B-Qued bonz" comment of Madame Nhgo, gave Diem’s government an indelible stamp of "repressive," which allowed the monks greater freedom to demand more for themselves. They had no interest in the effect of their dramatic protests on the war against the communists, whose repression of them was absolute. They had generals to fight the communists who were seeking power in the South. They needed the American press to fight the Catholic who held it.

Less than six months after the flaming Buddhist monk made the cover of Life, the government of South Vietnam crumbled. In November 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were assassinated by Buddhist generals with the tacit assent of his fellow Catholic and fellow head of state, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The war, which had gone badly for Saigon under the last year of Diem’s leadership, went worse under the revolving-door succession of regimes that came and went after his. I remember trying to keep track of them, then throwing my hands up in despair when I couldn’t. I had gone to bed with the name of the fifth or sixth new leader of the young republic fixed in my mind only to awaken the next morning to find that someone else had taken over.

Didn’t those clowns realize that the goddamn Viet Cong would be taking over if they didn’t get down to business? How the hell could we go on supporting a government that changed hands every other day? How could the South Vietnamese keep fighting for it? Those fly-by-night operators in Saigon weren’t worth fighting for, none of them—

Then, my thoughts did a rapid rewind and play... How could the South Vietnamese keep fighting for it? Jesus, what a dumb question. They weren’t fighting for the government; they were fighting against the Viet Cong. They were fighting for their families and themselves, for their freedom and their lives.

In the back of my mind I had harbored a suspicion that we were somehow manipulating the leaders of South Vietnam to fight for us on the front line of a larger war with China and the Soviet Union. The men playing musical chairs with the presidency of South Vietnam were proving to me that they were selfish, inept, shortsighted dolts. But they had also proven that they were pulling their own strings.

Now I knew how Ho expected to win the South after signing the sham 1954 agreement in Geneva with France, China and the Soviet Union to cut Vietnam in two and to hold reunification elections in 1956. With all of the South’s contentious political parties and militant religious sects, some with their own armies, he must have expected them to do it for him. He could not have counted on the people of South Vietnam, as well as President Eisenhower, to back Diem’s repudiation of the election and to fight for their independence from his communist government in the North.

No matter how confused things got at the top, the pattern of resistance to "Uncle Ho" and the Viet Cong stayed the same from top or bottom.

You might think that this kind of political analysis was too sophisticated for a 14-year-old boy. You already know how I was drawn to the subject of Vietnam. I can only tell you that most of my facts were the common knowledge of anyone in the early `60s with my interest in current events. Much of the rest came from one of the few books on the subject that was available at the time, called The Struggle For Indochina, by Ellen J. Hammer. As it was published before the battle of Dienbienphu was decided, it was not tainted with the judgments of U.S. involvement that came afterward. The way in which I drew the facts together went back farther than that.

I’ve had a habit of looking for logical patterns in chaotic situations since I got my first puzzle book as a kid. I liked the connect-the-dot puzzles more than any of the others because they combined the fun of drawing with a wonderful surprise at the end, the surprise of discovering what you’d drawn. It could have been a pony, a crown, a set of drums or just about anything. Finding it was almost as exciting as finding out what Santa Claus left for Christmas. It was every bit as magical, too, until I saw the pattern in all connect-the-dot puzzles that gave away the secret almost as soon as I looked at the first clue, the part already drawn in. The secret was to draw curves.

I had a learning handicap which made it harder for me than most children to follow the proper sequence of numbers next to the dots. I could count as high as anyone my age, but distinguishing between six and nine or five and two on paper was sometimes a problem. In addition to that, numbers with two or more digits would sometimes rearrange themselves on the page like the letters in quite and quiet, sending my pencil off into strange directions.

To avoid that kind of embarrassing misdirection, I had to find a more reliable way of locating the next dot. Instead of going straight from dot to dot, I picked up the curve in the succession of preceding dots and followed it through to the next logical dot. The resulting picture was generally regarded as a sign of special artistic aptitude because it looked so much better than what the other kids did. I couldn’t have told anybody that I was compensating for a handicap because I didn’t know I was seeing things differently than anyone else. I assumed that everybody was better than I was at flipping things around in their heads to appear the way they were supposed to. It seemed only fair that I be better than they were at something else. I never told anybody that I was faking it. I was too ashamed of having to.

Naturally, I had a devil of a time learning to read, but when I figured out how to apply the connect-the-dot trick to words on the printed page, I did fine. It was a trick that didn’t work with unrelated bits of information out of context, like numbers without something concrete attached to them, but it did work on everything else. If you looked at the dots or words or events coming before and after the ones you needed, you could usually fill in the gaps. But if you paid close attention to the curves, you needed only to know what went before, more times than not, to know what was next.

In looking ahead to the wars we would come to know as Vietnam, I centered myself in time between the two world wars. Looking backward at WW I and the Spanish American War, then forward to WW II and Korea, I saw some things that all of them had in common—the clue. I saw a precipitating incident which had nothing in fact to do with why the United States went to war.

I saw a curve of clear signs that the war was coming before the incident and a curve of moves in Congress to avoid repeating the last war’s mistakes. I saw another curve in how our media would form and feed the public’s attitude toward the war for the duration. Adding the "dots" of news and background information I had on the war in Vietnam as of my senior year in high school, I wasn’t making too many guesses about the basic elements of my generation’s war

I could see, in the near future, tens of thousands of American military casualties. I could see terrible acts of barbarism committed by young American soldiers, and I could see a whole mess of draft-age guys running to get into the Reserves and National Guard. I figured it would be a good idea to beat the rush and join the Reserves in 1963, while I was still in high school