Somebody famous once said, "Democracy is a letter to the editor." Our republic is as close as we can get in practice to the democratic ideal. The right to vote gives us a small say in the choice of people to speak for us on all levels of government and in all manner of organizations in which we have a special public policy interest. Within our system of majority rule, to check the tyranny of the few over the many, and minority protection, to check the tyranny of the many over the few, we can also take an issue that means something to us directly to the people. In theory, our right to free speech allows us to run our own mass communication medium. In practice, the best that most of us can hope to do is to compose a letter to the editor of such a medium that he or she will publish without substantive alterations.

A wartime commentator’s words delivered on target can mean as much to the outcome of the contest as an infantryman’s bullets or a bomber pilot’s bombs. Depending on how they affect public opinion, they could mark the beginning of a decisive battle, the turning point in one or the coup de grace.

When Wars Turn Stomachs was published before Hanoi had completed its conquest of Indochina. Laos had been in the bag almost since the fall of Saigon with the Pathet Lao in the Vientiane government answering to the Vietnamese government and the Vietnamese military leading the war of genocide against the Hmong. The Laotian Communists and their Vietnamese brethren had secured their hold on power with the most extensive police state apparatus on earth, but the Cambodian Communists, backed by China, weren’t so accommodating. So, Hanoi’s war for Indochina dragged on.

To become the silent senior partner in the Phnom Penh government, the Vietnamese had to defeat the Khmer Rouge in battle. Then they had to win a brief but costly war with China less than a year after they installed the government they wanted in Phnom Penh. Three years later, with the steadfast backing of the U.S.S.R., they were still fighting three different Cambodian armies, two of whom had a chance of winning with outside help. The Khmer Rouge was getting that help from China but, thanks to indifferent public opinion in the free world, Sehinuk’s royalists and the KPNLF, the largest of the anti-communist forces, were more or less on their own.

The extent to which wartime commentaries like Patricia O’Brien’s went unanswered was the extent to which armed aggression, totalitarian rule and everything those things stood for went unchallenged. Her mental images of the war that television left all of us to think with were the ones that helped us decide to abandon our Indochinese allies to the communists in the name of peace. Now, only the Khmer Rouge, backed by China, could pose a military threat to Vietnam’s puppet government in Phnom Penh. Only Vietnam, backed by the Soviet Union, could pose a military threat to the Khmer Rouge. The lack of help from any democratic government for democratic forces within the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front weakened the entire KPNLF organization and made it Hanoi’s prime target for annihilation.

In 1986, the KPNLF crumbled under the final assault on its headquarters near the Thai-Cambodian border by the Vietnamese army. That event, which ended the Vietnam War, went virtually unnoticed in the American press because the American press had already concluded, for the third and final time in 1975, that the war was over.

A line of reasoning which gave the media’s top movers and shakers of the `70s and `80s the highest moral authority went with that conclusion. Like a medieval clockwork universe with Earth at its center, what they reported as true revolved in perfect circular orbit around the idea that the peace movement was right about the causes and cures of war in Indochina. The presentation of any other model for the truth was tantamount to heresy—and you know what happens to heretics.

More was at stake for the communication industries’ anointed and aspiring truth-givers than the truth. As long as they could adjust the "crystal spheres" of news about Indochina to fit the clockwork universe of the peace movement, they would, to maintain the authority of the established order and their positions of authority within it. What is truth to all of that?

One letter to the editor in 1982 was no more likely to have changed those events in Indochina than one more vote in our previous presidential election was likely to have given the United States another president. But how many votes against the Vietnam model for peace would a black Vietnam veteran’s letter to the editor have been worth—a prominently displayed letter to a prize-winning, major metropolitan newspaper?

Before you answer, remember that in 1982 no such thing existed anywhere in the mainstream media. The Patricia O’Brien essay was significant because it stated the tacit view of war, peace and television that every thinking adult to the left of Jefferson Davis was supposed to believe. Though opinion polls put my feelings on the subject in the minority, the absolute number of people who shared them was still over eight figures, out of which six figures had to be Vietnam vets. Had there been an atmosphere of genuine free speech surrounding the issue of the Vietnam War and peace by way of television news coverage, perhaps more of us would have been heard. The challenge before me was to see whether one of us would be.

If the Aristotelian cosmos/Holy Inquisition analogy doesn’t draw a clear picture of the problem for you, imagine being visited by a little green man from Alpha Centauri and having that experience taken seriously by the press. We’re not talking the National Enquirer or the Moon People Digest, we’re talking Lou Grant’s alma mater, the Detroit Free Press, a tributary that flowed into the same main stream as the New York Times and Washington Post.

The essential point is that the established authorities, whoever they are, have no tolerance for ideas, whatever they are, that don’t conform to their expert preconceptions of the truth. Think how crazy the idea of supersonic jets or fax machines would have sounded to respected scientists of the 17th century or microsurgery to the most sought-after physicians of that time. In our time, that’s how people who believed what I did about freedom and Indochina were viewed by the media elite—which was no different than how they viewed people who believed in little green men from Alpha Centauri.

To further complicate the problem of a letter to the editor in response to Patricia O’Brien’s piece was the peace movement’s dependence on television imagery and the rest of the media’s use of those images to tell their stories. A reference to the peace movement’s lessons of Vietnam, for which there was a shared image in the public consciousness, was therefore a reference to television war coverage, which also reflected the view of radio and print. An attack on one was an attack on all.

Though it may not sound like it, what I’m describing here is a wartime incident no less descriptive of the fighting and maneuvering in the Vietnam War than anything I experienced in the rain forests of the central highlands. I can’t emphasize that enough. If anything, the fighting that American civilians did in our media resulted in more Indochinese casualties than the actions of our military did because it knocked the American military out of action. It took American weapons and ammunition out of allied hands and gave the Indochinese communists a decisive psychological and material edge.

Yes, I know that I must have said that before in one forgettable abstract way or another at least half a dozen times. Let me say it again in a way that may not be so quickly forgotten. I know I haven’t, and it’s been 23 years now, 23 years and perhaps a week or two....

I spent my first night of guard duty in Vietnam on a lookout tower with a short, stocky, fidgety kid named Black, who had to be at least 18, though he looked younger. The B-movie urgency with which he attended the flares and claymore detonators and starlight scope in our sandbagged roost added to his appearance of youth by reminding me of a boy playing soldier with the best toys a kid ever had. He was one of the GIs everyone I went to jump school with recognized because of his name. We had two Blacks in our company. He was the white one.

I was so taken with the idea that the young man pulling guard duty with me wasn’t mature enough to appreciate the reality of our situation that it took me longer than it should have to see why he was behaving the way he was: He was scared shitless, an expression I would identify in the coming months as apropos to what extreme fear does to the gripping power of one’s sphincter. The way I figured it, the area had to be relatively secure if the multi-tour veterans in the compound felt safe enough to sleep with two green troops watching out for them. By the same token, the same nervous energy that had Black in constant motion on the raised platform probably made him as alert to danger as anyone could have been.

As we watched in the clear starry night for suspicious-looking movement as far as we could see into the far away hills we talked about the jobs we were trained for in the States and what we would be doing in-country. Black was an infantryman who had been persuaded the night before by a frisky, baby-faced, buck sergeant recruiter with several tours of duty under his belt to join the Rangers. Believe it or not, there were some sensible reasons to consider the recruiter’s pitch. Those were the ones Black gave to me for his decision, though I suspected that the coolness of sporting the 173rd Rangers’ black beret and unique combat shoulder tabs had something to do with it.

I had been tempted to join for the same wise and foolish reasons Black did. But I couldn’t get past the idea of sneaking up on somebody’s husband or father or son and slitting his throat. The thought of it made my skin crawl. I couldn’t see myself dispatching another human being like a Mafia hit-man. If I had to kill someone in a fight where it was him or me, I was pretty sure I could, though I couldn’t be sure of how I would feel about it afterwards.

Having had my share of knock-down, drag-out fist-fights, I had some frame of reference for battle. But, with a snobbish self-regard that I would later be embarrassed to admit to myself, I couldn’t so much as pretend that I had what it took to be a cold-blooded assassin. For me, that’s what being an Army Ranger boiled down to, if only one time, on one mission that could come up anytime. That’s what I told Black and that’s when he showed me what was wrong with my philosophy.

"I wouldn’t want to do that either," he said, "but I would if I had to."

"How do you know you could?" I challenged, believing that my well-thought-out question would leave him fumbling for an answer.

"Because," he said with a quick assurance that told me he had given the question as much thought as I had, or more, "The guy I’d have to kill could be the one who would have killed you."

I was the one who would have been left fumbling for an answer had I attempted one. Black had come up with a law of warfare as valid as Newton’s laws of motion. The "him or you" twist he put on the age-old "kill-or-be-killed" equation of mortal combat was one I hadn’t thought of. Back in The World, Americans were debating similar questions as though they were great moral abstractions, each side claiming the high moral ground where there was none. Here, in "the arena of organized carnage," what Black said about him and me could, in the coming months, have literally been true. Whether it was me or some other GI or ARVN or ROK, the principle was the same.

The Mafia hit-man analogy was way off the mark because it missed the essential fact that death was the inevitable result of what any soldier in a war zone did or did not do to neutralize the enemy. Somebody was going to be killed in one way or another. The only question was, who? Following the kill-or-be-killed concept through to include all who would be allowed to die at the hands of the communists if they were the only ones doing the killing, you get the basic elements of The Authorities. That was no more a debatable issue than the consequences of running hot and cold water through a shower head and shutting off all of the hot water while letting the cold run full blast.

The peace movement was working to shut off the heat that Black and I were in Vietnam to help apply to Hanoi’s men in arms. We had barely been there long enough to shake the jet lag of our Pacific crossing from Fort Lewis, Washington, so neither of us knew how much heat that we, as individual soldiers, could bring to bear on our enemy counterparts. Before I joined the Regular Army in 1970, television had me convinced that it wouldn’t be much because the Viet Cong were supposed to be so much better soldiers than we were. Our veteran Army instructors wisely taught us not to underestimate the Viet Cong in passing on all they had learned in fighting them. I never thought the enemy were invincible but I did think that they would be much tougher than they were.

The way the U.S. Army was organized, every military specialty was like a self-sharpening razor which was strong enough to accomplish any mission it was assigned and flexible enough to adapt, if necessary, in the process. Combat engineers, for example, could perform any act of construction or demolition called for by the military situation under the worst conditions of weather, terrain or enemy disposition. We were cross-trained in advanced infantry tactics and had at our disposal whatever special weapons, equipment or expertise we needed at any hour to do what we couldn’t. Every other specialty within the Army was organized and interlaced with the same Lego-like adaptability to form and function, as was every branch of the Armed Forces to every other branch. It was, in short, an ass-whipping machine.

All of the men assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade went to a Jungle School conducted by Army Rangers. Every company in the 4th Infantry Battalion I was attached to in the field had at least two attached Rangers, referred to with mock derisiveness as "Ranger Ricks." Every platoon in our company had two "pick and shovels" (engineers), two "band aids" (medics) and two "red-legs" (artillery forward observers) to augment the assigned grunts (infantrymen). The grunts had two RTOs (Radio Telephone Operators) and two M-60 machine gunners per platoon. I even saw a "Sneaky Pete" (a trained sniper who carried an M-14 with a scope).

Around the 40th day of my first "20-day" combat mission, I remember thinking that Black may have been smart to join the Rangers, whose missions lasted four days, unless they were unlucky enough to get attached to a line unit. Four days out and four days in had been one of the recruiter’s big selling points. I recall thinking about that as I tried to catch a few winks in the rain, on a muddy mountain slope where I barely stayed put with the aid of my firmly anchored rucksack and an exposed tree root under my left armpit.

By then I’d gotten word that a graduate of my Jump School class whom I’d become friendly with in Fort Lewis had been returned to the States without the use of his legs. Better than a body bag I supposed, but not good. He was a slim, soft-spoken PR from Chicago named Hondo who cultivated a sinister gangster image until you got to know him, then alternated between storyteller, philosopher and comedian with equal ease. He once told me that all of his friends in Chicago had come to Vietnam and gotten seriously wounded. He said that he knew the same thing would happen to him, though he did nothing foolhardy to bring it about. He, too, had turned thumbs-down on the Ranger Rick idea after asking a practical question and getting a gung-ho answer that had us looking at each other and shaking our heads.

I tried not to think about what else Hondo might have lost the use of besides his legs. That was partly out of guilt for having heard, far off in the distance, the mortar barrage that wounded him and being glad it wasn’t closer to me and partly out of fear that thinking about it could make it happen. Of all the things I felt about Hondo’s misfortune, anger at the men in the arena who did it to him wasn’t one of them. They were doing what they had to do to stay in the game. Had he not been taken out so early, Hondo impressed me as a guy who would have taken out a lot of them... Maybe he should have joined the Rangers

Black’s law was validated in every life or death situation that arose. I saw it in fields of battle I could compare to sporting arenas to help calculate the distance between me and the enemy. Whether the agent of death was a mortar round from a football field away, a bullet from second base to home or a knife in the corner of the ring, the name of the game we were playing was still kill or allow to be killed. I hardened up fast and came to see, ever more clearly, that the method of dispatch or the space between the killers and the killed was irrelevant to the relative morality of the killers.

The deadliest bombs dropped on Indochina were the political ones launched from across the sea that kept the material ones from being dropped on the enemy. They haven’t stopped dropping yet. Killers like Jane Fonda and the "Bobs" never made the connection between their actions and their kills whom they never saw as their kills in space or time. They even called themselves "people of conscience" for how angrily and straightforwardly they reacted to what they did see.

War heroes like Bob Kerry who were actively campaigning in America for more of those political bombs, were passively killing and wounding American soldiers like Hondo and Black. Of the three of us, I was the only one to get back to The World in one piece. I don’t know how many pieces Black came back in but the last I heard, he did it in a body bag.

The shrink I saw when I had my bout with DSS (or PTSD, if you prefer) was the kind of vet Robert Siegel likes to interview, an ex-Green Beret captain who served two tours in Vietnam and didn’t learn a thing about the war. He blamed it on Johnson, Nixon and Westmoreland, for whom he bore personal animosity. He told my therapy group that he was contacted by Time/Life Books to lend his expertise to its new series on Vietnam. I have little regard for shrinks, Army shrinks in particular. This one couldn’t even admit the truth of his own combat experience. I caught him dead to rights when he did admit to the carnal bliss of a casualty-free firefight on your side and joyously told the group that he killed no one—as I’m sure Jane and the Bobs would like to believe about themselves.

I was in the group because I couldn’t get out of the kill zone. Two of the other five were former helicopter gunners with combat-related problems you don’t want to know about. Another had been a grunt with the 25th Infantry who accidentally killed a woman and two children that the Viet Cong soldiers he also laid low, were using as human shields. He saw the eyes of the dead civilians and began stalking and killing VC the way Crazy Horse killed Crows. He’d lost count of how many. Before he wasted them, he made sure he could see their eyes. His problem was, he couldn’t stop seeing them.

The supersoldier and the helicopter gunners, who may have had over a hundred kills between them, missed the question that leaped to my mind when the ex-Green Beret told us how much shooting he did without killing anyone. I was not only astonished that a man in his professional position of trust would say that, I was angry enough to call him on it.

"How do you know?" I demanded. Unlike Private Black’s reason for believing he could kill, the former captain’s answer to why he was so sure he hadn’t, defied belief. If he did a third of the toe-to-toe bush fighting in his two tours of duty, when enemy targets were thick and numerous, that I did in my half a tour when they were thin and few, he couldn’t have known.

That how-do-you-know thought came to me around the 40th day of my second "20-day" combat mission when a grunt named Hamblin was wounded in the hand and face during a firefight across a wide river. He had scrambled under his own power with three other men from their exposed position on the beach to the cover and concealment of a sandy bank on the edge of a forest. The fire that the rest of the platoon gave to cover their sprint to safety was directed at whatever spot along a steep rise of foliage on the opposite side of the river looked promising. We used up two or three magazines apiece without ever seeing a human target.

That is not to say we were shooting wildly. I, for one, was relying on every target detection skill I learned in Basic, Advanced Individual Training and Jungle School to spot where the enemy fire might be coming from and squeezing off a short stream of hot lead. In Basic, AIT and Jungle School (where I nearly fired up an instructor shooting blanks), I had detected the target every time. To my delight, every spot I shot into in this "live fire" setting that looked so much like one in AIT seemed to fall silent.

I don’t think that any of us truly believed we could have hit anybody without seeing the evidence until the dustoff helicopter came to evacuate Hamblin. The gong of truth, the whole truth, sounded in my head: We couldn’t see enough at any given time and place to know the whole truth.

In Basic, we shot BBs at camouflaged trainees hiding in the woods. Their yelps and curses told us when we were right. In AIT, trainees shooting blanks from concealed positions on a wooded slope stood up after we sighted in on where we thought they were. And if a reckless Jungle School instructor hadn’t exposed himself the instant I drew a bead on his fire, I wouldn’t have known for sure that he was there, until I shot him.

The VC knew when they were on target because a chopper always came for the casualties. The enemy didn’t have choppers. If we couldn’t see the bodies, we couldn’t know what we’d done.

I was never closer than 30 meters to the only enemy soldier I ever saw during a firefight. It happened a few days after Hamblin got shot. I was in a shallow depression on a high, grassy hill. He was probably in a depression just inside of the tree line in front of me. His was the last of three uncertain muzzle flashes I’d decided to fire up within that many minutes. I don’t think either of us was confident of the other’s whereabouts until I caught the motion of his head ducking back down and put a hole in it on the way back up. Before then, we’d been taking turns shooting and ducking. His fatal mistake was in thinking it was his turn to shoot.

I could stop here without telling an explicit lie, though it would still be a lie because I know that it would leave you with a false impression of what really happened and why. When the "whats" are known, the "whys" are usually assumed, which is where partial truths, like the ones Patricia O’Brien saw on television, derived much of their power to deceive.

It was, for me, the thrilling climax of a fight that had me working on my third magazine, with one fire out for every magazine I emptied into the spot I thought it was coming from. I was having the time of my life. As far as the shooting and ducking was concerned, the only way I could pinpoint the third AK was to ease up into position to see where the fire was coming from before it stopped. I thought about it for a couple of seconds, weighing the risks of doing it against the certainty of losing the fight by not taking the risk. Then I did it, with little doubt that I would be ok and the other guy wouldn’t.

Sure, it was crazy, but only as crazy as a soldier has to be in a fight he intends to win. It was also fun, the kind you might have with your hands straight up in the front seat of the world’s fastest, steepest rollercoaster on the down side of the first big hump. It was always fun when none of your own got hurt.

That’s still not the end of the story.

When I saw the head snap back out of sight, I waited impatiently for more signs of enemy activity in my sector. The company was still in noisy small arms contact with the enemy far to my right and over the hilltop in back of me. But from one o’clock counterclockwise to nine on my left, it was over.

I didn’t want it to be over, so I got up and ran to the other side of the hill where a couple of AKs were lecturing to a silent class of M-16s. If bullets were coming anywhere near me as I rounded the top of the hill, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, I was unaware of them. All I could think about was how good it felt to fight fire with fire and to win. I didn’t worry about getting shot because I didn’t think it would happen. I didn’t think it could.

I told myself that I was doing it for the company or for the new guy who was supposed to be covering that sector. I could have made a convincing case for either of those stories. But anyone seeing my gleeful face as I emptied my magazine into the bush and jumped into the hole with the dirt-hugging rookie would have known the truth. In a "true" screenplay, that’s the part that would have gotten an editing retouch. The truth can be so untidy.

When the firing turned one-sided in favor of us and stopped, only a fool would have claimed a kill requiring a trip into jungle-shrouded enemy territory to verify. A claim without a body would have sounded like an empty boast. So, I said nothing. But I felt wonderful. I was a warrior!

Being that kind of warrior is what gave me standing eleven years later to do battle with another kind of warrior, the kind who were taking out millions. This is what I wrote, buggers and all:

By her endorsement of television’s war coverage on the Vietnam model ("When wars turn stomachs," Free Press, July 23), I wonder if Ms. O’Brien realized that she was also giving an implied endorsement of Vietnam’s totalitarian brand of peace.

Her words reminded me of Mr. Chamberlain’s vision of war in September of 1938, that motivated him to abandon Czechoslovakia to Germany’s totalitarian brand of peace. He did not know how bad a mistake that would prove to be. But that is precisely the trouble with peace. It comes in so many conflicting varieties that no one can safely predict what form it will take—except for those who are left with the uncontested power to dictate its terms.

In April of 1975, American television made its last declaration of peace in Indochina. Since then, Vietnam has been presented most often as a mere name-tag on an ugly historical event and only rarely as the terrible ongoing consequences of that event.

It’s a place in Southeast Asia where people are still living and dying according to the peace terms Hanoi won in battle—after winning the psychological means to do so on American television. The psychological victories and defeats leading to the physical ones are the purposes of propaganda in the winning of "any given war." Those purposes are bound to get "very hazy" when we see "dead children being hauled out of rubble" in the here-and-now world of television news and compare them to silly American propaganda movies of World War II.

As a warrior, there was nothing I could do against that kind of power to preserve the relative freedom that existed in three quarters of Indochina. As a relatively free descendent of absolute slaves, freedom is more than just a word to me. I’m glad television wasn’t around in September of 1862 to show our imperfect Union its vision of what war was doing to its sons in the blood-soaked cornfields of Antietam to preserve that imperfect Union while ridding it of slavery.

That letter was published a month after it was received by Editor Joe Stroud with the smallest of the ten headings and subheadings on the page. It was arranged in such a way that it appeared at first glance to be the second of two letters under one big headline, "Welfare seekers deserve ticket back home." Moreover, the "warrior" sentence which gave it its authority was deleted.

The Mr. Stroud did other little things to that letter that a smart man in his place might have done on purpose to discourage anybody in my place from writing. They were also things that a busy man with strong antiwar convictions, might have done unconsciously by not giving those things enough conscious thought. Mr. Stroud didn’t know it, but they were the same little things his counterparts at NPR, PBS, ABC, NBC and CBS had been doing consistently for fourteen years. They were ignoring who we were and binding us to people and policies we didn’t agree with. With a little change here and a little deletion there, they were editing our existence out of the chronicles of the 20th century.

Joe Stroud and I would have had nothing to argue about in his editing of a letter from me concerning crime in the streets. I could have spoken from experience of what it was like to be burglarized five times in one year, to have neighborhood children threatened with death for telling what they knew, to have the police do nothing because break-ins were low priority crimes and death threats were not considered crimes at all.

The kinds of thugs that had taken over my neighborhood in the past decade or so were familiar enough to get directly to the point about and thus faithfully recorded for posterity. Those things were already being said as well as I could say them, but there was no tolerance in the mainstream media for a black Vietnam vet to speak harshly of the crime and the criminals taking over the world.

America had lost its sense of honor and its will to wage war on any great evil that didn’t harm most individual Americans directly. Black thugs were taking over black inner-city neighborhoods because the white suburban majority did not find their death dealing unacceptable. Reprehensible, yes. Barbaric, yes. Unacceptable, no. What was unacceptable was the price they might have to pay to fight them. That is what Americans of all colors found unacceptable about the architects of genocide in Indochina.

So, what can one person do in the face of such an evil so much larger than himself? Not much. The power to change things for better or worse can come from anywhere, but it can’t go anywhere without the consent of someone in authority...

When I was in Vietnam, something as basic to me as a bayonet for cutting time fuse had to be secured through unofficial channels because of what people at home saw on TV. They saw American soldiers cutting off ears of dead VC. The practice continued in the 173rd until we packed up to pull out because the troops, who were so inclined, found other ways of doing it. Our officers could have stopped them by making it a more attractive prospect for them not to do it, than the other way around. They didn’t because they had higher priorities. By mid-August 1971, the highest priority of the brigade was to get out of Vietnam gracefully. The details of how to go about it hadn’t all been worked out by the top brass. As it was, they couldn’t have been.

Lower ranking men in the 173rd Engineer Company who had spent a considerable amount of time in the field were fed up with our treatment at the hands of noncoms and officers who hadn’t. We had suffered all of the hardships of combat and received none of the glory. We were being subjected to excessive doses of nonjudicial punishment for minor infractions of discipline. The barbed wire surrounding the compound was there to keep us in rather than to keep the enemy out. It was only a matter of time before troop frustration sought a violent outlet. It was only a matter of luck that I found myself—one inconsequential GI—in a position to stop it, with a letter to the company commander and the permission of the colonel in charge.

Some of the men hadn’t turned in all of the explosives they were supposed to when they came in from the field. They had plans for those explosives. Before I knew what was happening, I was a part of those plans, plotting along with the rest of them to kill the company commander, his executive officer and every noncom above E-5. I thought it was just talk until I found out about the explosives. Even then, I wasn’t convinced until I looked into the cold gray eyes of the man designated to set off the charge and saw a whole bunch of loose screws.

Of the dozen or so men in that group, I didn’t know any of them well, our common bond being the well-packed joints we passed around. How that translated into the kind of trust necessary for conspiracy to murder, I don’t know, but I wasn’t about to say or do anything that would make my loyalty to the group questionable. I volunteered convincing reasons to get on with it, followed by slightly better reasons not to. I didn’t try to persuade anyone to my way of thinking directly. I just gave them the facts and let them make up their own minds—like a good network anchorman would do.

I left them thinking about ways to plug up the holes in the plan, while I worked all night on a letter to the company commander to render it obsolete. When I finished, most of the men who saw it were afraid to sign. I knew the Uniform Code of Military Justice well enough to know that it was perfectly legitimate, but the word "mutiny" kept swelling up on nervous lips and I couldn’t ice it down.

I thought I had failed until the reluctance of all the "straight" engineers to sign caused the four or five radicals to see my letter as a revolutionary document. When they did, they signed. Others, recognizing only the number of signatures, took a chance and added theirs. Signature begat signature until the bandwagon effect gave us enough to carry the letter, our letter, to the commanding officer

The CO proved to be a reasonable man who invited all 200 of us to speak with him about the issues raised in the letter. When our meeting degenerated into a general bitch session, he brought the decision back around to the letter and offered to pass it up the chain of command along with one of us.

With that brave, unselfish act, he unknowingly saved his own life and headed off an internecine bloodbath which would have surely made big headlines in the Detroit Free Press, not to mention, Time, Newsweek, Pravda and the Hanoi Gazette. It may have made history. One of us might have spilled the beans before any of that could happen but not without sending some good soldiers to prison for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Only the first one to tell the story would have been situated to avoid a general court martial and there would have been no guarantees for him.

The 173rd Engineers’ letter to our CO was far-reaching and profound in its consequences without appearing to be either.

Standing before the colonel as the man chosen by the others to speak for all of us, I knew that our letter was a minor detail to him, a small matter that could be disposed of easily, and it was. He listened to my case, not my station, and his indulgence meant big changes for us who fought without recognition for a cause that no one in power gave a damn about. Our day-to-day lives improved drastically and the colonel’s job of getting us cleaned up for our return to The World proceeded smoothly.

One letter started all of that—one timely, concerned, informed, uncensored and imperfect letter written by one lowly, imperfect combat engineer and signed by scores of others. I can’t recall everything I put in our revolutionary document. I do recall the first line. I borrowed a tiny bit of it from something some guy wrote nearly two hundred years before: