For the Cold War’s first generation of American males, becoming a man meant learning at some point that you had a 6-year military obligation to your country. The law said you had to register for the draft at 18 but you didn’t have to wait to be drafted. You didn’t even have to wait until you were 18. With your parent’s consent, you could join the Armed Forces, as I did, at 17, and wait until you finished school to begin Basic Training.

You could fulfill your obligation in one of 5 ways. You could:

1) Volunteer for 3 or 4 years of active duty in any branch of service. That option gave you a choice of jobs subject only to qualification and availability. It allowed you to do the rest of your time in the Inactive Reserves.

2) Sign up for a two-year enlistment in the Regular Army. That took away your choice of jobs and required a 2-year stint with the Ready Reserves. You spent the last 2 years in the Inactive Reserves where you had only to remain available in the event of a dire national emergency.

3) Join the Ready Reserves for 6 years. That allowed you to shop for a unit near your home or one with a job you preferred in the federal military Reserves, or your state militia, the National Guard. Both required a certain number of hours for training per month at your local armory plus two weeks of active duty per year. Either could be called up for duty by the federal government anywhere, at any time, for the duration of the mission.

4) Get a deferral. It might last long enough to keep you out of the military altogether. If not, you could be drafted into any branch of service.

5) Or, you could do what my brother George, and most other American males did in the `60s. You could register for the draft, go on with your life as though you would not be selected and do whatever the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marine’s lawfully told you to do if things didn’t work out that way.

Then, of course, you could always defy the law and go to jail if you felt that strongly about not serving in the military, or you could go on the run.

In short, you could not sit tight without the risk of having the ground beneath you open up and swallow you whole. And whatever steps you took to avoid that danger could drop you eyebrows deep in do-do.

If you know what happened to our Ready Reserves in Korea, you know why I knew it would be safer this time to become a Reservist than to risk being drafted. It was as elementary as connecting the dots in a little kid’s puzzle book. I believed in our Vietnam war effort throughout my enlistment and the training division I was assigned to in Michigan did its part. Moreover, if something extraordinary had happened to require me to fight, I would not have tried to worm my way out of it. I was just being practical. As it was, I served my full six years in the Army Reserves with a tolerable level of guilt for not having been called into combat.

I got my discharge in 1969, in the year after our media’s first assessment of the communist Tet offensive turned a military and political disaster for them into "a decisive psychological defeat for us." Labeling it a defeat for us of any kind was the premature judgment of media icons like Walter Cronkite and other sires of popular wisdom in America. It was how they characterized the outcome of the offensive, long before they knew the outcome, before they knew how badly the Viet Cong had been mauled and how completely they had failed to inspire a popular uprising against the Saigon government.

The psychological victory they sought was supposed to come from a military victory before Tet at a U.S. Marine base called Ke Son. Ke Son was supposed to be another Dienbienphieu. Instead, they got one of the biggest ass-whippings of all time. Our media called it a draw.

By dismissing the significance of any VC losses and counting every U.S. loss as a tragic waste, they gave us a picture of VC determination and American futility that flipped the enemy defeat on its head. Psychological victory by military defeat was not the plan. It was the product of a gross miscalculation that backfired enough times to work in the communists’ favor, a gift of American TV that would be given again in the battle for Saigon.

In the next two months, the Viet Cong lost tens of thousands of soldiers and murdered untold thousands of civilians without winning a single major objective. They did all of that on the premise that their cause was as popular in South Vietnam as their propaganda and our news kept telling them it was. Because it was a false premise, their death list murders of South Vietnamese officials and their families didn’t help them the way they had envisioned. But those executions got such little press attention that the Viet Cong’s image in America was never hurt by them.

On the other hand, South Vietnam could not have looked worse than it did with the summary execution of one VC officer by a South Vietnamese policeman during the Viet Cong’s bloody rampage in Saigon. Television showed us the policeman, dressed like a soldier, being told something by other policemen dressed like soldiers. He then put a blunt-nosed revolver to the temple of the enemy soldier dressed like a civilian and identified as a "suspect," and blew his brains out. From that day, in `68 during the battle for Saigon, to its fall in 1975, it was the rare citizen who did not see that film clip or the award-winning photo of the bullet’s moment of impact, many times.

Rarer still, was the person who learned what the man who pulled the trigger had just been told: A VC death squad led by the man in custody had slit the throats of his godchildren and their mother along with other families of friends seeking refuge from the Viet Cong in the police station where he was captured. The guardians of our Fourth Estate didn’t tell us that at the time—or at any other time before the fall of Saigon. It would have been incompatible with their new editorial direction.

The American media elite, with the sole exception of ABC’s Howard K. Smith, were stunned silly by the scale, the scope and the audacity of the Viet Cong attack and saw in it proof that the communists were unbeatable. Once they latched on to the idea that we could not win, everything they reported was filtered through the prism of that conclusion.

Furious at our politicians who got us into the war, our generals who couldn’t end it in a whole two and a half years of trying, and themselves for not questioning earlier whether they ever could, they switched sides. They took new counsel from old doves who had the same answers to ending the war as the Viet Cong did: "Stop the bombing. Withdraw our troops. End American military aid to Saigon!" The language of the peace movement became the media’s own word and picture language of the debate.

They were now openly and proudly allied with the doves, citing any apparent evidence that they might be right as proof that they were. The Viet Cong’s breaching of the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon during the `68 Tet offensive, for instance, was repeatedly cited as proof that the guerrillas were invincible. The fact that the few VC soldiers who got into the compound did not get out alive was cited as proof of their will and their ability to make unlimited sacrifices for their cause. Hanoi, with its North Vietnamese Army, and the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Viet Cong, were on the side of truth and justice as well as peace. Anything their soldiers did became either praiseworthy or excusable. Their atrocities weren’t even reported as news. American efforts on behalf of Hanoi and the NLF were called "dissent," and Ho Chi Minh’s war for Indochina was called Johnson’s war against the people of Vietnam.

By 1969, "the war," in fact, had become synonymous with "Nixon’s war." "Stop the war" meant "stop Nixon’s war." Demonstrators parading before international TV cameras with Viet Cong flags, chanting slogans like, "HO, HO, HO CHI MINH, NLF IS GONNA WIN!" were called "peace demonstrators" and "anti-war activists." Since our media were simply using more words and more effective pictures to say the same thing, they could hardly call the Americans marching for Hanoi "enemy collaborators."

With Ho’s recent death came a change in his American media image, from an admired adversary, who had generously donated his insights on the war to Western reporters, to something approaching a god. He became the scourge of Western Imperialism. It was being identified as a manifestation of white racism and white racism was closely associated with conservative Republican politics.

By 1969 the assassination of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Martin Luther King Jr., and the election of conservative Republican Richard Nixon to the White House had helped to turn the Vietnam debate into a left/right issue. The media painted the right on the wrong side of the debate and combined their stand on that issue, as Jane Fonda’s future husband, Tom Hayden, had worked to do, with the issue of white racism. Thus, white Americans could no longer speak ill of the communists without risking the label of "racist," and black Americans could no longer take issue with Dr. King’s stand on Vietnam without being labeled traitors to their race.

Members of Congress were turning against the president in numbers that reflected growing dissent in the Harris opinion polls. The polls reflected the media’s image of what enlightened people of conscience, who could think for themselves, were supposed to think. Likewise, the only American servicemen being honored as heroes, though I must admit that I didn’t see the pattern then, were the ones who sang in harmony with the NLF.

All that I had learned since the beginning of the decade about the struggle for Indochina was useless to me in debates I had with friends and co-workers. These were the kinds of hawk/dove debates that people all over the country were having in practically any forum where they could figuratively get their hands around each other’s throats. Since the people I argued against were getting the most up-to-date information that the media could give them, I could tell them nothing that they didn’t think they had a better handle on from a superior source.

From an interview here, a commentary there or a "teach-in" lesson somewhere else, Americans who were now educating themselves about the war through the news media were hearing things that were new to them. Some of it was true. Some of it was not. Much of it was some of each. In any event, Americans who no longer trusted what our hawkish leaders had to say on the subject were accepting what the media’s experts had to say.

They bought the peace movement line that the vast majority of Vietnamese, North and South, regarded Ho Chi Minh as "The George Washington of Vietnam." They bought the compound lie that Vietnam was bisected by the United States to deprive Ho of his rightful claim to all of Vietnam. They bought the lie that a free election in South Vietnam to decide its future was canceled by Diem and Eisenhower because Ho’s popularity would have won it for him resoundingly had it been allowed to go forward.

These people, who appeared to believe, as I once had, that TV network news was objective were not doing their own homework or their own thinking. They were accepting, as fact, critical distortions of history that could have been corrected with a minimum of research. They were accepting, as wisdom and virtue, contradictory positions on war and peace that would have been rejected with a minimum of thought. They never saw the significance of the fact that the peace movement’s peace terms were identical to the ones demanded by the NLF. They never saw how that, in effect, made the aims of the peace movement and the successes of the peace movement identical to the aims and successes of the Viet Cong.

Jane Fonda was to put that convergence of means and ends into words in 1971, while I was somewhere in Vietnam doing who knows what and she was at the Musicians Hall in Los Angeles giving a speech. The question before her large audience of Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice professionals, united under the EIPJ banner she created earlier that year, went to the heart of things: What was required in Vietnam to achieve both peace and justice? Her answer: "...a victory for the Viet Cong."

Controversy followed Jane’s blunt statement of what she hoped to achieve through the cooperative efforts of her fellow image makers in the EIPJ. But for once, I have to give her credit for being honest. By whatever words her friends in that EIPJ crowd used to describe what they were after, what they would inevitably get if they succeeded was what Jane said was needed, a victory for the Viet Cong.

Though the flow of battle on the home front had been moving steadily in favor of the doves since 1967, and the Tet offensive of `68 had given it a mighty surge, what was to say it could never flow back the other way? As I saw it in the 1969 and 1970 arena of debate, South Vietnam could still survive if our combat troops fought for it at home. They had more clout than anybody. More than the politicians, pollsters, pundits, experts, journalists, students, celebrities or even the families of those who had died in battle, combat vets had the credibility to say that they knew what war was. If they couldn’t say that their efforts in this war were worth it and we were right to help the people who were fighting the communists, no one could.

I don’t want you to think that I’m setting you up here for a noble segue into how I ended up in Vietnam. None of that stuff had anything to do with it. I was just describing the environment of ideas about the war and my place in it at the turn of the decade. The more of it you know, the better you will see where I’m coming from later on.

Let me make it as clear as I can right now that, although I recognize the special power of perception combat veterans hold over the public at large, I do not hold us per se in any higher esteem than any other kind of soldier. What matters is how we performed. Combat is the wrong place for anybody but a professional soldier to want to be. Anybody else who winds up there is just plain unlucky. Those who don’t come through it alive and whole are even less fortunate. Those among them who served faithfully should be honored for their sacrifice. Those who didn’t should be treated accordingly. Bad fortune is not a virtue and it’s a mistake to treat it as one. The good fortune of not having to fight—guilt feelings aside—is not a sin.

I was as proud of my stateside service in the Reserves, as an instructor of military instructors and the Training NCO of the 70th Division, as I was of my big brother as a military policeman in Vietnam. George got his draft notice in 1966 and finished his non-combat duties in Vietnam safe and sound a week before the `68 Tet offensive threw hundreds of soldiers just like him into heavy combat. He was lucky. So was I. The way I planned things for myself, my honorable discharge from the Army Reserves in 1969 was an honorable discharge from my military obligation.

What was it that Steinbeck said about the best laid plans?

My plans went to hell when I got married at 20, had kids, then got laid off from my clay modeling job at Ford. I got another modeling job at Chrysler and quit before I got laid off from there. I tried selling insurance on a commission only basis and ended up in abject poverty with my wife and kids living somewhere else and the Friend Of The Court trying to put me in jail.

My `67 Mustang fastback was my joy and my livelihood and someone or something was putting it out of action at regular and irregular intervals by car theft and police who sometimes hauled it away just for fun. My apartment, on ground zero of the `67 riots, was a litter box; rats and roaches were beginning to move me out and I was way behind in my rent.

Water and popcorn got me through many a day of living on an otherwise empty stomach. At night, I would get calls from my estranged wife telling me what a worthless son of a bitch I was, while I listened to my first-born son crying for me in the background. She wouldn’t let me see either of the boys unless I came up with money I didn’t have. Though the money I spent on popcorn and gas was barely enough to keep me alive and rolling, it was more than enough to work on my sense of guilt. I was doing my best but that wasn’t cutting it for my family or my creditors.

Then I heard about Dennis Hammon.

Dennis was the invisible warrior to whom I dedicated this book. In my query letters to prospective publishers, I wrote about "a paratrooper who should not have survived his tour in Vietnam, but did, and a marine who should have survived his tour, but didn’t." Dennis was the marine who should have survived. He was taken prisoner by the Viet Cong during the `68 Tet offensive but listed officially as missing in action until 1973 because the enemy refused to acknowledge that they had him.

The news about Dennis was too much. I couldn’t handle any more bad news that I couldn’t change. It was time to make some radical moves.

I joined the Regular Army on a two-year enlistment and asked for an infantry assignment. It would have allowed me to make rank quickly so I could do something for my wife and kids. Going Airborne and going to Vietnam would have also given me extra pay, so I asked for those things, too.

My rapid advancement plan was shot down in flames when the Army made me a Combat Engineer. But I did get into Jump School. I scored high enough on the Armed Forces Qualification Test to get into Officer Candidate School if OCS hadn’t been temporarily closed because of an overabundance of junior officers. I wouldn’t have done it anyway for too many reasons to count, though I must say that guilt was driving me to get a lot of things done quickly for my wife and kids—and for a friend listed as MIA in Vietnam.

Yes, I know how stupid it sounds, but the truth doesn’t always sound the way you wish it would, which is why people don’t always tell the truth.

In the line I happened to be standing in after Jump School, I was the first man not to get orders for Vietnam. I was supposed to go to Germany. By whatever process the official orders came down, I was told later in the day that the Army needed one more combat engineer for Southeast Asia and my name was next on the list. As far as I know, that’s how I ended up on 6, January, 1971, in the Republic of Vietnam.

One of the first things that struck me when I took to the field was the endless variety of ways to come up dead. Naturally, I’d thought about it before. But being in the arena of organized carnage that the hawks and doves were debating about back home gave such thoughts the dimension of personal concern that you could perceive only by being there.

For me the worst way of realizing that concern was on a humbug: to climb in a tunnel and have it collapse on you; to have the guy behind you trip over a vine with his weapon set on full automatic and shoot your kidneys out; to fall from a helicopter on a combat assault and break your neck... As I said, the possibilities were endless. Things like that had happened and would happen and could just as easily happen to me as to anyone else.

If getting it on a humbug was the worst way to go, dying in an enemy ambush belonged to the next worst category of bad ways to buy it. A well planned ambush of units small enough to get trapped in a true "kill zone" is much closer to murder than it is to any kind of fight. The ambushers are in a covered and concealed position with the element of surprise in their favor. The ambushees are fully exposed to fire and observation without enough time or understanding of what’s happening to prepare an adequate defense. That’s why they call the place they’re in, a kill zone. Everybody caught inside of one should be killed. Every soldier learns that in Basic Training.

The first hostile action I saw in Vietnam was an ambush. I was an ambushee.

I can say without reservation that I am glad I didn’t die that way. I’m just as glad that I didn’t kill anybody that way. Killing somebody who couldn’t defend himself doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I could have done with a clear conscience, but I wouldn’t have hesitated to do it if the occasion arose. I was lucky that it didn’t. Not everyone was as lucky as I was.

I was walking drag on my platoon when I heard friendly fire ahead. The point man and the slack man, the first and second man in our column snaking along the narrow jungle trail, surprised two half-stepping VC, killing one on the spot. The other enemy soldier fled into the bush leaving a blood trail so thick and long that his survival didn’t seem reasonable. I couldn’t see how anyone could lose so much blood and live, much less run away. It was the kind of thing that you would have to play down, to lie about or to keep to yourself to sound as though you were telling the truth.

Bullets go through leaves without much trouble and more than one man out of sight behind the bushes could have been hit. But I didn’t think of that until I first sat down to write about it 16 years later. In all but one of the fire fights I was in, I couldn’t tell whether I’d hit anybody or not and I truly did not care as long as I could get them to stop shooting at me.

I suppose I would sound like a great humanitarian if I said something about identifying with the wounded enemy soldier, one human being to another, and secretly rooting for his escape. That’s not how it was. His job was to kill American soldiers. His job was to take the lives of many people who were on the same side we were on, only a small fraction of whom would be going home soon to a land at peace. He was the enemy. The job of our army, our brigade, our battalion, our company, our platoon, our squad and every man in it was to kill the enemy.

I had another job, though, and the whole company was being held up from pursuing the wounded fugitive until I could get it done.

On a grassy rise, just visible through a thin patch of trees and other leafy vegetation not far from the VC body, some anonymous asshole found an unexploded 105mm artillery round. Whenever we found something like that in the field, one of the attached engineers was supposed to blow it up before we moved on. It was my turn to take care of it.

Thanks to the two faulty time-fuses I unwittingly used to set my demolition charge, the damn thing nearly blew me up. Another two seconds of waiting to see whether the short, orange fuses that didn’t appear to be burning from the outside were burning on the inside would have ended my speculation about all things forever.

I won’t go into detail about the business of testing and lighting the fuses or describe the sensation of getting slapped by the blast of an explosion for the second time in as many weeks without getting hurt. The only one who might have been stirred by the man-made thunder-propelled flight of my body through the trees with various other chunks of debris, was the engineer pulling security for me at the base of the rise. He couldn’t have seen me running and diving through the air on my own before the blast caught up with me and tossed me head over heals. It was a new and unpredictable experience for the wide-eyed, chalky-faced young trooper. He thought he was going to see, "...pieces of Garrison everywhere!"

You’ve seen the same stunt too many times on television to make of it anything other than a standard action movie cliche. But because it is a cliche, I know you get the picture.

On my way to rejoining my platoon, I got my first good look at our kill. An ear was missing. So was the top of his head. Most of his brain was gone, too. Looking at dead VC never got next to me whatever the condition of the body. I had only to think of him in a condition to do his job. But I couldn’t manipulate my feelings about the smell of VC blood. I could not separate the smell from the corpse, or the smell of one bloody corpse from another. On this day, in this Area of Operation, it would have been American bodies if our men hadn’t fired first. It could have been mine.

We followed the blood trail through the jungle with ease to a sprawling hootch where several men and at least one woman had departed in a hurry. They left behind food, clothing, some World War II vintage pineapple grenades and a small stack of documents in a waterproof pouch.

One hastily scribbled note inside the pouch was interpreted by a nervous, eager-to-please young NVA defector, the replacement for Nook, our platoon’s last "Kit Carson" scout killed in the ambush that broke my combat cherry. According to the new KC, an ethnic Chinese whose name I never learned, it was a warning to friends to stay away or die. He pointed to one of our men’s shoulder patch with the wing and bayonet of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. With an effective combination of bad English and great pantomime, he told us that the Viet Cong knew who we were and wanted nothing to do with us.

We got a big kick out of that, all of us gathered around the young KC feeling like real bad-asses, based on the old, well earned reputation of our predecessors and the fresh, if limited evidence of our own prowess. So what if we outnumbered and outgunned the enemy in this AO? So what if the oops—you’re-dead style of contact with them was a little on the raggedy side? So what if only two of our men had done all the damage? It was our first contact with the enemy since they had ambushed some of us and a victory, no matter how small, for all of us. It was great for morale.

The whole idea of taking lives in war is to destroy your surviving opponents’ morale so that you can convince him to do what the friends of our wounded prey did—to abandon the field to you. If you can do that without firing a shot, so much the better because battle always carries an unmanageable element of risk. But conviction usually requires evidence (bodies) and motivation (the bodies of people who matter). It can spring full grown from a trusted source, like your own eyes and ears, or the eye of the camera and the ear of the microphone. It usually requires some logic and emotion, but not always and not necessarily in that order.

Decisive victories and defeats are the ones that happen in the mind. When you believe you’ve won a battle, you may or may not be right but when you believe you’ve lost a war, you have. As charged up as I was to fight and win on the twilight of this blood trail pursuit, I knew that the only victory possible was on the indecisive level of physical combat....

The war was in the minds of the folks back home. It was not going to be decided by anything GIs in Vietnam could do to the enemies’ morale with their government-issued weapons. If we were to have a meaningful influence over the enemies’ perception of victory and loss as well as our allies’ and our own, it could happen only in the American press. The peace movement was speaking eloquently for American Vietnam vets, living, disabled and dead, and the Nixon administration was speaking for us. As the Nixon administration was judged, so were we.

So much for my high morale. The words of my estranged wife came to me loud and clear as I stood outside the abandoned Viet Cong hootch feeling as helpless as I had in the kill zone, "All you’re good for is sucking up air." Only it wasn’t her voice I was hearing, it was the voice of popular American opinion. I knew at that moment that we had already lost the war.

The next day something odd and distressing happened to me that would happen periodically over the next 14 years; I smelled blood where there wasn’t any. The odor was so strong and persistent that I assumed I had slept near a large deposit of it. But I couldn’t trace the source. It followed me through the jungle for the better part of the day, just as I had followed it the better part of the day before.

I didn’t figure out what was going on until a couple of days later when we got into a fire fight on top of a hill surrounded by thick vegetation. AK fire spit at us from the bushes and we spit back, taking our best guess at where it was coming from and spraying the area with automatic fire until the AKs fell silent. We suffered no casualties and we couldn’t tell whether we had hit any of them. I didn’t think we did, but the slaughterhouse smell of blood said otherwise. Then it simply went away. That night, when it came and went again for no apparent reason, I knew it was a trick of the mind, an olfactory hallucination, if you will. It had to be.

Things really got strange when the smell would come before somebody got hit. Stranger still was when the Army yanked me out of the field and sent me straight home, telling me that my mother had undergone a cancer operation and wanted to see me. On my way to The World, in the clean jungle fatigues donated by an engineer in the rear, it happened on the plane.

I could never tell what would serve as a trip wire for the phantom odor, so I couldn’t do anything to head it off. What’s more, knowing that it was a product of my mind did not alter the fact that it was also a product of my experience in Indochina. It was a reminder of what was happening in that part of the world, whether or not anyone could see who was being killed.

When I left the Army for good in 1972, most people behaved as though Nixon’s withdrawal plan was really putting the war behind us. His pre-election announcement of a "secret plan" for ending the war was, after all, partly responsible for his success. America was fed up with Vietnam.

All of the evidence for the peace movement’s summery of our involvement there had been reported and repeated exhaustively in the media. Public opinion thus aroused, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been repealed, the draft suspended, American bombing in Laos and Cambodia outlawed, etc. Best of all, as far as most Americans were concerned, our combat troops were coming home. The most emotional symbols of our commitment to the survival of South Vietnam were removed from the table of discussion until three remained: American POWs and MIAs, American bombing and American military aid to our allies in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Hanoi caused a bit of a stir with it’s massive Easter Offensive spearheaded by Russian tanks. When Nixon responded with heavy bombing to go along with his reaffirmation of support for Saigon, the North Vietnamese offensive fell flat. But the heroic role of the much maligned Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in the rout of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was never reported as such in the United States. People here were conditioned to dismiss the idea that South Vietnamese heroes could exist and they couldn’t get worked up over the fighting if Americans were not directly involved. Many could not even distinguish between our ARVN allies and the NVA.

The peace movement got some mileage out of the bombing casualties we saw on television, particularly the one of the little girl who was hit by napalm. If you missed it then, you may have seen it in the mid `80s in an ad for "Life Goes to War." It was the image chosen by the editors and advertising executives at Time/Life Inc. as their representative sample of the Vietnam War. If they thought it would make a big impact on the people in the `80s, you know what impact it must have had in 1972.

From the days of Lyndon Baines Johnson, when demonstrators chanted, "HEY, HEY, LBJ, HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY?" child victims of American bombing had received special media attention. But concern for Vietnamese children went down with the withdrawal of American troops as concern for American POWs and MIAs went up. Jane Fonda’s first trip to Hanoi brought the intensity level of both debates back up. With Nixon’s Christmas bombing, the bombing debate peaked again. When the political pressure on Nixon became as great as the military pressure on Hanoi, the Paris Peace Accords became history.