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There is a lyric in a song from the play Miss Saigon which refers to "The movie in my mind". This is the way it is about the memory of Vietnam to me, the experiences play over and over. There is no day that passes that I do not think about it. During my first week in Saigon in December, 1964, a career Navy Chief heading back home told me over a drink that I would never forget being there. His first tour was in 1954 when our Navy helped relocate almost a million Vietnamese from the Communist North to the South. The image in his mind at that time was as clear as if it had occured a day ago.

Bob Greene has a book coming out titled, "Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War". Greene spoke a number of times to Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Greene told Tibbets that he did not understand why his father and many other World War II veterans, considered the War on some level as the best experience in their lives. Nothing that was before or after seemed to contain the same power. The War was terrible and certainly not fun. Tibbets' reply goes on for several paragraphs but boils down to becoming a 'man among men'. In war you are surrounded by men working for the same thing. You are risking your life with others every day and depending on one another. You form friendships that no one in your life will ever match. You develop pride in what you and those around you are doing. I think that may be true of other wars as well including Vietnam. There was 'friendly fire' in WW 2 where hundreds of Americans were lost; it had some atrocities; thousands of men were lost on D-Day and tens of thousands of American casualties resulted from the Battle of the Bulge. The major difference between Vietnam and WW 2 was that television did not exist to bring the war into our homes like it did during Vietnam. If television were around back then, people might have been protesting for our government to negotiate peace with Hitler.

I believe that our cause was right but the strategy greatly flawed. As Senator McCain recently said in Hanoi, "The wrong side won".