Lately I've been in a Vietnam state of mind. Maybe it's all the rumors of war swirling around our heads like a column of gnats we can't get away from. Maybe it's just the time of year.

October 1968.

That's when my tour of duty began, with a roundabout flight from San Francisco to Anchorage to Japan to Vietnam. I can still remember the incredible heat and the overwhelming smell as I walked off the plane.

I can also remember looking at the young men with old faces and tired eyes who were waiting on the tarmac to go home. One year later I was on that tarmac watching with tired eyes as a freedom bird disgorged another group of wide-eyed newbies in a changing of the guard that seemed to have no end in sight.

The year between those two moments was for me not an unduly harrowing one. I was a radio operator who worked about half of the time in a base camp and the other half out in the field, but not in a combat role.

I never had to shoot my rifle at anyone, and as far as I know no one ever shot at me. We had a steady diet of rocket and mortar attacks, some close enough to send debris and dust raining down on our hooch, but you got used to it, just like you got used to the heat and the bugs and the rain and the dust.

We worked all day, every day, and the days became weeks and the weeks became months until deep into the tour when you reversed the progression on your short-timer calendar from months to weeks to days.

During all that time, little thought was given to the progress or lack of progress in the war. Nobody cared about how we were doing, except maybe a few officers and newbies, because we all knew how we were doing. We knew there was no way we were ever going to win this puppy.

All that mattered was surviving. And survive most of us did, in one fashion or another, but the year took its toll as we lived out our exile from the world.

We were thinner and tanner than we had ever been or would ever be again, our bodies an unwitting reflection of our darkening spirits. We lived with the constant knowledge that dead is as old as you can get, so we tried our best to affect a carefree attitude.

What does it all mean? It don't mean nothing.

But we all knew that our youth was being hollowed out before we had even had a chance to live it. In its place were put memories and feelings that most of us would spend the next decade or so trying to come to terms with.

Our lives would never be the same, just as our country would never be the same. Col. Hal Moore, the author of "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young", wrote:

"The class of 1965 came out of the old America, a nation that disappeared forever in the smoke that billowed off the jungle battlegrounds where we fought and bled. The country that sent us off to war was not there to welcome us home. It no longer existed. ... Many of our countrymen came to hate the war we fought."

In the end it was those countrymen -- those mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters waiting for the next body bag -- who finally found their voices on the streets and in the halls of Congress and forced the leadership to reverse course and begin finding a way out.

Those voices are the same voices we can hear deep inside ourselves today if only we listen hard enough and honestly enough. They a murmuring Greek chorus of woe and warning, struggling to be heard over the strident words of men who missed their war but who want to be sure your children don't miss theirs.

Today's voices are an echo of the voices from that different America that emerged from years of warfare in Vietnam to ask why their children were dying in a far off land in a war we pushed ourselves into.

It took a lot of guts to ask those questions back then, and it takes guts to ask them today.

Is this worth it? Is this worth the death of MY son or MY daughter.

You and I both know the answer to that:

Hell, no.

September 25, 2002

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