When Somali gangsters overthrew their corrupt government and replaced it with a criminal free-for-all, their idea of justice was to steal whatever they were strong enough to steal and to kill whomever offended them. When pictures of what they were doing started getting out to the rest of the world, the war was on. Their claim of justice had met resistance in a figurative trial by combat that would last as long as the stories and the pictures that illustrated them kept fueling American public opinion.

International relief agencies had made a good case that millions of Somalies were being systematically deprived of food. Their pictures of the people at risk cinched it. The world responded with more than enough food to feed them, only there was no civil authority left that they could work with to deliver it. To get the job done, they had to cooperate with the armed factions who had created the famine and were blocking delivery.

Throughout the `92 presidential campaign, right up to the election of Bill Clinton, the gangsters and the gun-wielding teenagers running amuck were having things their way. All of the candidates agreed that we should send food and medicine, but not the combat forces it would take to get them where they were needed. As the pictures kept coming, there developed, however, enough political pressure to force an American military response.

Bush was a lame duck, with his victory in the Gulf looking like the half-measure it was and his Somali relief effort looking like the windfall for the creators of the famine that it was. Our military had proven its efficacy in Iraq and the only thing blocking its use in Somalia, as opposed to Bosnia where Congress would have blocked it, was a decision by the commander-in-chief.

The Bosnian Serbs were winning their figurative trial by combat with their literal one, convincing the Europeans to stay out of it and the Americans to leave it to the Europeans. If anyone was going to take a stand against genocide anywhere, it was going to be us in Somalia where the goal was clear, the prospects of quick success were high and the risks were low. Besides, could the first post-cold war president have left office with "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, man-made famine in Somalia and the most powerful fighting force on earth, back home at Fort Shiny Boots marching in parades?

No way, not with Thanksgiving Day coming. You know what that would have meant: Pictures. Pictures and speeches. Pictures of the happy, well fed Bush family, gathered round a fat Thanksgiving Day turkey and a line or two, perhaps, about peace, prosperity and the new world order. Then the contrast that television could not have resisted: pictures of walking skeletons, hollow-eyed Somali women holding emaciated babies with bloated bellies.

That’s why President Bush sent American combat troops to Somalia.

The urgent need he used to justify the deployment was obvious ten months before to ordinary citizens like me, Cal Morrison and Frank Horenkamp, a 71-year-old Republican with a Masters Degree in History. We agreed on what would be needed to keep Bush’s quick-fix/PR stunt from unraveling when he left office. But all of those practical considerations for long-term success appeared to be secondary to political expediency for Bush and Clinton. We were going in with enough force to secure the situation, hand the residual problems over to the UN and bring our boys home.

UN peace-keepers in place of U.S. fighting men? With the gangsters still armed to the teeth, loot still to be had and no government in place with its own security force trained and equipped to do its own police work? Sure.

Okay, so we were going there to give the humanitarian image of George Bush a face-lift for history, not to take a stand against genocide, which would have set a precedent for intervention in Bosnia. At least some good would come of it. The starving would get the food we’d been sending to international relief agencies more critical of our troops before they arrived than the gangsters they were paying for protection. That part of the debate was now over. Enough doves were changed to hawks to allow our troops in.

Yes, the people speaking for the relief workers had been doves. They spoke in rigid humanitarian vs. military terms, evincing a philosophical position rigidly set against any U.S. military involvement. They were on a mission of peace, laboring heroically under horrendous conditions to save lives. They knew the country and the people. Things had to be done in a certain way and American military intervention was not the answer....

Does any of that sound familiar? It should. It was a mix and match version of what happened in Cambodia in 1975 and again in `79.

In 1975 Cambodia, as in 1992 Somalia, an estimated 300,000 civilians had already died as a result of fighting and mass murder. But who could have argued against the images of war in 1975 that the uncontested killing of five or ten times as many people would follow an antiwar victory? Refugees in a wretched government camp in Phnom Penh were suffering and dying like flies before the eyes of television, and relief workers were blaming it on American military support for the defenders of Phnom Penh. They spoke in rigid humanitarian vs. military terms, evincing a philosophical position rigidly set against any U.S. military involvement. In Somalia’s case the doves lost the debate. In Cambodia’s case, they won.

Shortly after my blowup with Jack in `79 came news of chaos and mass starvation in Cambodia, followed by news of relief workers pleading for food, followed by horrific pictures of starving Cambodians. The world responded with more than enough food to feed them, only there was no civil authority left that they could work with to deliver it. To get the job done, they had to cooperate with the armed factions who had created the famine and were blocking delivery. They were on a mission of peace, laboring heroically under horrendous conditions to save lives. They knew the country and the people. Things had to be done in a certain way and American military intervention was not the answer....

Before the Vietnamese Communists drove their former allies out of Phnom Penh, one way of being labeled a right-wing extremist was to profess a belief in Khmer Rouge atrocities. After Nixon became president, no ally of Hanoi could be accused of such a thing without a right-wing shadow being cast over the accuser. That instant identification with the Nixon White House was the lodestone that drew media criticism away from Jane Fonda’s Indochina Peace Campaign for all of Indochina’s Communists, in 1974. It was the unseen force that allowed them to practice genocide well into the `80s while popular media personalities like NPR’s Susan Stamberg were calling their American backers, "people of conscience."

The first influential American to condemn the bloody reign of Pol Pot was televangelist Jerry Falwell. He based his charges on a book called Murder of a Gentle Land. It detailed Khmer Rouge atrocities later cited in William Shawcross’ Sideshow and in The Killing Fields, by Sydney Shanberg, which won their authors fame and fortune. Murder was written by a nobody who never became anybody, and my best efforts to find it in bookstores failed. What I knew of it before Falwell made it the basis of a special program in `78 came from pans of the book I’d read in a news magazine as an aside to the main story about Western journalists in Phnom Pehn.

Falwell’s leadership of the Moral Majority, a Christian advocacy group with a proudly repressive right-wing agenda, gave an "arch conservative" name to all who agreed with him about "Godless communists" everywhere. Liberals, moderates and moderate conservatives were supposed to believe that the Khmer Rouge victory "ended the agony" for Cambodians, which resistance to them would have prolonged. Since accusing them of genocide was thought to be something that only a right-wing extremist would do, few people to the left of Falwell listened to what he was saying or looked at the pictures his relief workers were sending back. Not until the Vietnamese and their new Cambodian allies invited relief workers and journalists into areas taken from the Khmer Rouge did Pol Pot become a household name.

Overnight, Sideshow became the book on "autogenocide" and Shawcross the authority on the Khmer Rouge. His allegation, supported only by convoluted logic, that Nixon’s strategy of "peace with honor" in Vietnam brought them to power became the explanation for their bloody reign.

Soon, everyone knew horror stories about the Khmer Rouge that only those of us who had sought out news on Indochina from every quarter "after the war" had known before. The Vietnamese were selling an image of themselves as saviors of the Cambodian people and they didn’t miss a trick in pulling it off. Hanoi’s Le Duan and Pham Van Dong, who were running death camps called New Economic Zones in Vietnam, didn’t mind if no one knew their names. They put the media spotlight on Pol Pot and kept it there.

Americans never learned that you don’t need gas chambers to make death camps if you can deny food to the enemy. Though the invaders were using food deprivation to kill their confined internal enemies, and both sides were doing it in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge got the lion’s share of bad press. News of families, once machine-gunned trying to escape from Vietnam by sea, and now forced to choose between expulsion to the sea or deportation to NEZs, was displaced by stories of Pol Pot’s killing fields. The more Khmer Rouge territory the Vietnamese took, the more proof of Pol Pot’s horrors they released to the press and the more food went to starving Cambodians-the ones who came over to their side.

Whatever misgivings some Americans may have had initially about the Vietnamese military operation in Cambodia, the majority were seeing it as our cameras showed it. Our best informed were explaining it the way the best journalists in the business—the staff of NPR—were explaining it. On balance, it was a good thing. Food would get to starving people, food we’d been sending to relief agencies more critical of our troops before they arrived than the gangsters they were paying for protection. That part of the debate was decided by the War Powers Act of 1973. Our troops weren’t coming.

The parallels between Somalia and Cambodia are so striking that one might wonder why no politician or NPR commentator or media pundit for any of the networks picked up on them. Why did they all keep searching for parallels to Vietnam instead, and missing the most telling ones that applied?

Roughly six weeks before Aidid’s pivotal clash with the Rangers, four American soldiers were killed in an ambush. NPR’s Bob Edwards used the occasion of their deaths to interview an American ambassador to Somalia under the Reagan administration who had opposed the troop deployment. Edwards, known affectionately as "Bob" to his millions of fans around the world, informed us that his guest had predicted such attacks on our troops.

The former ambassador gave a little "I told you so" chuckle and predicted more of the same, telling our adversaries, in effect, how to get more influential Americans like him on the air to argue for what they wanted. He said that it was a mistake to have gotten our military involved because Somalia was of no value to us. It was a "quagmire," like Vietnam, which would cost more American lives than the entire country was worth.

When Bob asked, incredulously, how many of our soldiers were too many to lose for the lives of all of the people of Somalia, his answer was, "One."

That was the ratio of lost American fighting men to civilians that a hefty percentage of Americans considered appropriate for the people of Vietnam. The pragmatic conservative interpretation of "no more Vietnams" has always outweighed the one most often heard in the media, which gives equal weight to everyone adversely affected by the use of American combat forces. In that idealistic progressive view, the lives adversely affected by not using them don’t count. These were the philosophical arcs that converged in our decision to abandon our South Vietnamese allies in 1975 and every other beleaguered people thereafter who bore too close a resemblance to them.

Both camps predicted disaster in Somalia, on the personal level of one dead GI and his grieving family, if not on the scale of a Dienbienphu. But where is the wisdom in putting the power to make those predictions come true in the hands of the enemy by announcing them over the public airwaves?

Who, honestly, could not have seen some fighting ahead against gunmen loyal to one mob boss or another in Somalia, and the loss of some American servicemen and some Somali civilians? In the event of many American casualties at once or Americans taken prisoner, who could not have foreseen dramatic pictures and the effect they would have on public opinion? We saw it in Lebanon, the only other time since Vietnam that our men in arms were put in harm’s way to make a visible stand against genocide, only to have it said in retrospect that the goal was ill-defined. The first time the enemy could give our media a lesson of Vietnam for our opinion leaders to recite before the cameras and microphones of the electronic press, they did.

It took the dead bodies of 241 marines to run us out of Lebanon in 1983. But from this point in your past it looks to me like it’s going to take the body of only one dead soldier- the one Aidid’s people videotaped for CNN.... Note: Before I had time to finish that sentence, Clinton, with a POW still in enemy hands, announced a date for withdrawal.

I hope you will see in that development the parallel to Vietnam that has to be made if our Armed Forces are to have the credibility to win without always having to kill and die. Or maybe it’s too obvious to see, like the stolen object in a story I heard one of my uncles tell when I was a little boy....

A man pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with something under a tarp was stopped from leaving a construction site by a security guard. The suspicious guard pealed back the tarp to see what was there only to find empty cardboard boxes that nobody wanted. He apologized and let the man go.

A week later, another guard halted the same man doing the same thing, found the man’s own dirty laundry in the barrow, and sent him on his way.

Before long, every guard at the site had virtually the same experience with the man and concluded that he was probably a thief but one they were never going to catch. Sure enough, every time they stopped him, and lifted the tarp, they found nothing incriminating. The scenario was repeated so often that everyone involved was soon able to predict the outcome of the encounter at the outset. For the next 30 years their predictions came true.

Afterward, one of the guards bumped into the man in a bar. They sat together, drinking and reminiscing about the old days at the construction site. "You know," said the guard, "we never figured out what you were stealing in that wheelbarrow of yours, but you were stealing something, weren’t you?"

The man smiled. "Yep," he said.

"You clever dog!" said the guard, "What was it?"

The man’s smile broadened. "I was stealing wheelbarrows."

Yeah, it’s an old story. If you hadn’t heard it before, you may have guessed the ending when you read the setup. The pragmatic conservative "ambassadors" and idealistic progressive "Bobs" may have, too. But I doubt that they would see themselves as the guards who never thought to take an inventory of what was missing or to review the usefulness of their predictions to a "clever dog" as templates for the shaping of subsequent events.

I could have used the Clever Dog analogy to draw parallels between the guards and Congress, the thief and the peace movement, or the wheelbarrow and our image-making industry. In fact, anyone can use the same story or any element therein as an analogy for anything they wish, which is why anyone can come up with a parallel to Vietnam that seems to mean something at first glance. That’s what the items in the barrow were supposed to mean.

In my analogy, the thief is a symbol of all the physical and philosophical thieves of life, freedom, hope, integrity and spirit of self-sacrifice needed to build a more civilized world. The tarp stands for current events that misdirect the attention of our sentinels of enlightenment to irrelevant parallels to Vietnam. They know in their bones a crime is being committed but they have framed the issue in such a way they can’t see what it is much less what they are doing to encourage more of the same.

The Bobs have got to start taking responsibility for their part in generating self-fulfilling prophesies of criminal success if a world governed by principle is to survive. Our politicians sure as hell won’t, not as long as they can anticipate getting star treatment from the Bobs for protecting our combat forces from combat, whatever the cost to civilization beyond our shores.

The struggle to preserve civilization, as we know it and would like to know it, is the core issue: cops vs. robbers, G-men vs. organized crime, the armed forces of the free world vs. those of its enemies. Like it or not, we need international law enforcers to enforce international law. Even criminal empires and police states have to have their own police if they want to stay intact. Police have to have their own police if they don’t want to be taken over by criminals. If the people at that level do not function in accordance with principle, for the good of the whole, no one and nothing can make them. Like it or not the ethics of power have put the United States in that position.

No, we cannot do everything ourselves. We never have and I don’t suggest that we begin. I’m saying that we must begin to see our place in the preservation of democracy as central to the preservation of civilization and our stands on principle as central to what we can expect from our friends.

There is also an unknown time limit involved that we can’t afford to ignore any more than we can ignore the ticking of a bomb. That bomb could be a nuke. With all of the weapons loose in the world that could be used by threat or deed to cow America into submission, it’s only a matter of time until some clever dog gets possession of one and tries it. Sooner or later, we are going to have to fight. The longer we wait, the greater the chance that more civilians and more American soldiers will be sacrificed to the god of war. Actually, the sacrifice of more civilians, the architects, the builders and the tenants of civilization, is certain. The question is, how many of them in any time we can call "the future" will be sacrificed to protect soldiers "now"?

Good men die every year in preparation for battle because soldiering is inherently dangerous. Their job is to go into harm’s way. Politicians calling for us to keep them out when the ethics of power calls for them to do their job are working for the enemy. The Bobs who fail to point that out in a timely and unequivocal manner are not doing their jobs. And ordinary people are being murdered every day by the Aidids, the Saddams and the Pol Pots we haven’t even heard of yet because of it. To borrow a line from my dream-self in The Authorities, "We have to do something about that!"

What that means to me is a renewed commitment of courage and honor in the defense of basic human rights that can’t be thwarted by a small-time military bully’s threats or deeds. Note: Two days after I wrote those words, a few dozen men waving guns on a dock in Haiti scared away an American warship carrying American and Canadian "peace-keepers." A day after that, a U.S. senator said to the world, "Haiti is not worth a single American life." Before the month was out the men who had scared off the warship began a campaign of killing pro-democracy Haitians.

Since television showed us its vision of war in Vietnam, we have made no other commitment of courage and honor in the defense of basic human rights which has long endured. Such a commitment takes a mountain of civilian bodies, on television, combined with villains who look like villains to get our attention. Then, it takes a steady drumbeat by the Bobs and the opinion leaders they choose to interview to prepare us for action. To move us takes a vision of the future that will surely come to pass if we do nothing.

Have you ever seen the white-painted faces of Saudi Arabian prisoners condemned to die by the headsman’s sword? If you have seen them, all bunched together on the eve of execution, you can begin to appreciate what I mean. Now picture those faces with the white death paint belonging to millions of defenseless human beings, guilty of nothing but their own vulnerability, and you have a stimulus for action. That’s when the ethics of power compelled us to act in Somalia, Lebanon and Vietnam. Each time, most of us saw clearly what had to be done and why. Each time, it became as "unclear" as it was to the people who originally opposed it when the bill came due in body bags and white-painted faces of American warriors.

Where courage and self-interest clash—which they always do—clarity is in the mind of the believer. For those who believe that they have seen enough to justify a hazardous course of action, no further clarification is ever required. For those who believe that they will never see enough, no amount will ever suffice. The "poorly defined goal" argument in Vietnam did not come from a careful review of the facts by impartial scholars. It originated with the minority of mainstream politicians and journalists who did not believe that it was worthy of our military efforts. It was popularized by the experts who agreed with them and the Bobs who came to agree with them.

Walter Cronkite, affectionately known to his fans as Uncle Walter, was a Bob. So was NPR’s Susan Stamberg, affectionately known to her millions of fans as Susan. All the other first-string broadcasters on the NPR news team were Bobs, too. I’ll have more to say about why I think the NPR news team is so important in this. For now I’ll just say what it was that they considered a poorly defined objective so you can judge for yourself.

The reason our country sent its warriors to fight in Vietnam was to keep North Vietnam’s warriors from taking over the South. That was the objective.

The reason for pursuing it was to avoid the foreseeable military, political and humanitarian consequences of not doing it. The Stalinist approach to dealing with undesirables was one of those foreseeable consequences. The setting of a bad precedent was another. The free world’s leader and a client of its chief rival were going to tax each other’s values in the currency of battlefield casualties. If we could not demonstrate our willingness to fight a limited war of principle in Vietnam, we would have lost the limited credibility of American resolve that we bought with the lives and limbs of our servicemen in Korea. As long as our adversaries believed that our soldiers were of more value to us than what they were fighting for, they would tax us to find out.

Hanoi imposed taxes for freedom that we were unwilling to pay.

On all of these counts and more, the communist victory proved, as no victory over them could have, that we should have stuck to our original goal of keeping the North from taking over the South by force of arms.

One reason it seems so vague in retrospect is the extent to which the arguments recalled to justify it were confused on the airwaves and in print with the objective itself. Adding to the confusion was the unannounced way it changed in reaction to the `68 Tet offensive. The Johnson Administration, burdened by senior advisors like Clark Clifford, who never did understand that the psychology of the war would decide the winner, looked for new ways to justify our war effort. They spoke less of keeping the North from taking over the South, a goal that Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, now said was unattainable, and more of preserving our credibility as a dependable ally. There was no sense in picking a fight with Uncle Walter, as Nixon was to learn, because no mere president could have won.

Our new aim was to leave Vietnam on its own as soon as possible without making the sitting president look like a loser. By insisting on a West Point-style academy for the South Vietnamese officer corps early in 1966, Johnson was forging one of the keys to putting the future of South Vietnam into its own hands. But the reason for it was consistent with the goal of keeping the North from conquering the South. Following Uncle Walter’s proclamation that the goal was unattainable, it was never again pursued. Our mission changed to agree with our media’s opinion polls, which said, one Korean War was enough; if we weren’t going to fight all out, we should get out and let the chips fall where they may.

That proved to be a harder and longer struggle than it would have been to stick to our guns and to stick by our allies.

Nixon called it "Vietnamization" which not only reinforced the false idea that we were doing most of the fighting (for only one week in the war did our casualties exceed those of our ARVN allies’) but obscured the question of why we were in Vietnam to begin with. But even that was less important to our mental re-creation of what the war was about than the language of the debate coined and articulated by the Bobs. I was once compelled to tell NPR’s resident Vietnam vet, Alex Chadwick, that "the messenger is the message that counts the most." That sums up both the problem and the problem with trying to address it. If the goal was hazy to the Bobs, they had the power to make America see it their way and to deny anyone who could present a credible rebuttal the opportunity to make their case.

Every time I thought I was getting somewhere in the position paper Jack suggested that I write, somebody would give a speech, publish a book or produce a documentary that co-opted my work. Most notably, when "Vietnam: A Television History" filled in some critical gaps left by "Vietnam: The 10,000 Day War," my revelation of them in the context of why the doves were wrong got swallowed in the context of why they were right.

By the middle of 1982, news about Indochina was replaced by "histories" of the war, including Stanley Karnow’s prize-winning "Vietnam: A Television History." William Shawcross’ prize-winning Sideshow was still the source of information about Cambodia and Jane Fonda’s "Coming Home" was the movie, said by Siskel and Ebert to have brought the reality of the war home. These were some of the best known works of scholarship and art to provide the post-boat-people stuff of thought for well informed Americans. The most astounding thing about their influence was the underlying assumption that the war was over and we had fought the communists without good reason.

You would think that Hanoi’s invasion of Cambodia was evidence enough that it wasn’t over. But you couldn’t say that without also saying that Vietnam’s civil war was only the first big battle in Hanoi’s war for Indochina. And you couldn’t say that without contradicting the experts our media relied on to show us the truth. You’d think that the Indochinese holocaust following the communist victory proved that we had fought them for damn good reason. But you couldn’t say that without turning some of the biggest names in the communication business into "communist dupes." And you couldn’t do that without sounding like a brainwashed disciple of Joe McCarthy.

To many Americans, the truth about Vietnam was what they saw on television. They looked at the fighting and they thought they saw war. They looked at the fall of Saigon and they thought they saw peace. Patricia O’Brien captured the essence of that view on the Op-Ed page of the Detroit Free Press with a July 23, 1982 piece called, "When Wars Turn Stomachs." I’m giving it to you minus the picture which occupied nearly half the space. Not to worry. When you read what she says about "the purposes of any given war," you’ll see the picture. You’ve seen it a hundred times on television.

Washington-War news, nothing but war news. I flicked the dial of the television set, unwilling to sit through one more film of dust-covered bodies of Iranian soldiers on the desert or one more foray of the television cameras into suffering, battered Beirut.

My wish for something lighter, something stripped of grim reality, was granted. I found an old war movie.

As I tuned in, there was the grinning face of actor Tyrone Power on the screen. Dressed in the freshly ironed uniform of a World War II submarine officer, he was about to launch a torpedo against a ship crowded with fat, complacent Germans. The torpedo hit dead center, and the Germans evaporated cleanly into the sky. As Tyrone Power laughed and cheered, every clean-shaven scrubbed American on the submarine looked ready to dance for joy.

I settled back for a retrospective look at a sanitized war, relieved of any duty to care.

What I watched, of course, was a propaganda film, of a kind commonly made during the war years of the `40s, a film where all the men were stalwart and brave, where all the issues were straightforward and simple, and where every submarine flew—even under water—a spunky, brand-new American flag.

Until television brought Vietnam into our living rooms, wars could be wrapped in those kinds of tailor-made messages. Hollywood delivered images of soldiers singing as they marched into battle and men saluted as they went down with their ships, and Americans did what they were supposed to do—they loyally asked no questions. They just dug deeper into their pockets to buy war bonds.

That kind of naivete disappeared forever when television began covering the Vietnam War, and we found ourselves witnesses to nightly broadcasts of death and destruction. We got too smart for Hollywood. War finally became real for those of us who didn’t have to fight.

So now, we watch footage of dead children being hauled out of rubble and the purposes of any given war get very hazy. Israel claims self-defense; England claims protection of territory. We watch the war in Lebanon; we chafe at the shade drawn across the Falklands. All of it is ugly and sad, and sensible people who in another day and age might have sung patriotic songs say they can’t stomach it anymore.

Are we then, better off than we used to be? Perhaps the generals don’t think so. But we are.

The type of propaganda sell that once could solidify a nation’s certitude in war seems to be crumbling everywhere. That hasn’t done much to stop the endless fighting, but it has, thank goodness, stripped war of its fake nobleness.

We know now that a fresh-faced Tyrone Power cheering a bloodless kill is entertainment for a lazy Sunday afternoon, nothing more.

We know also there’s no way we’re going to ever again be able to avoid facing what war really is. That may bring only indigestion; not world peace. But it’s a start.

Jack would have said, "right on!" to those observations about the sad, ugly, senselessness of war, and the silliness of WW II propaganda movies. Like me, and like few men of his time, he recognized the fallacy of assuming that the enemy was somehow less human than we were. Unlike me, he would not have realized that it was the 10th anniversary of Jane Fonda’s first trip to Hanoi where filming civilian bombing victims was the first order of business in TV coverage of the event. Jack would not have been reminded of the peace movement’s victims by the bad dreams that wouldn’t let me forget.

Jack retired from Ford before the O’Brien article appeared in the paper, but we’d talked enough about the things she wrote and the assumptions underlying them that my guess of how he’d react was a safe one. Her piece was a description of the writer as much as an expression of the writer’s views, a piece that Jack, the Free Press Editor, or any of the white, bright, guilt-ridden, liberal Bobs could have written. These were people you’d like, despite their insufferable myopic vision of themselves as "people of conscience" by virtue of their war-turned stomachs. They marched in step with conventional wisdom and seemed to have exclusive rights to media time and space to speak for Vietnam veterans on "the truth about Vietnam."

Alex Chadwick, being a Vietnam combat vet, was a Bob and a half who could speak for himself and did speak for all of us whether he wanted to or not and whether we wanted him to or not. He would have given an "I was there" validation of the idea that TV brought the reality of war home, just as Jon Voight’s character, Luke, did in "Coming Home." Whenever the media turned to organizations like Vietnam Veterans of America for a wise, compassionate veteran’s insights on the war, you heard someone like Alex, a philosophical clone of Luke. I don’t think that the people who do the hiring at NPR discovered him in the flesh until the late `80s, but he fit the profile that listeners to "All Things Considered" had been hearing since the early `70s. We’ve been seeing it on TV since the late `60s, Jack and I, Alex, Patricia O’Brien, the Free Press Editor, the Bobs and Hanoi Jane.

It was no wonder that "people of conscience" in the early `80s thought they knew so much about war from television coverage of Vietnam.

Not once had I come upon a thoughtful rebuttal to what they had to say about Vietnam that was as descriptive of me as it was of my views. Where then were vets like me to find each other? In Vietnam Veterans of America? Not likely. Where were future historians of the "post-Vietnam" era to find documentary evidence that we existed?

Two lines in Patricia O’Brien’s essay told me that I had a shot at getting such a document published. They were the two lines that pissed me off the most because they implied that television enabled her to experience in some significant way what it meant to fight in Vietnam. If Alex had written them, I wouldn’t have had a prayer: "We got too smart for Hollywood," she said. "War finally became real for those of us who didn’t have to fight."