"You gave your body parts -- even your lives. We were taught to respect those in power. Those same officials lied to you and many others." -- from a message left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Christmas, 2002.

-- and from a mother about her veteran son, one of the "lucky" ones to survive, "I am 85 and don't know how much longer I will see him suffering with his pains and nightmares."

I, too, am having nightmares and flashbacks, even though I completed my active duty as an infantry intelligence officer before the war in Vietnam. I can trace them to my ringside seat at the crafting of U.S. policy toward Vietnam and today's feeling of déjà vu, which I cannot shake as I watch the unfolding of U.S. policy toward Iraq.

From 1964 to 1968 I was the principal CIA analyst of Soviet policy toward Vietnam and China. In U.S. government circles the conviction prevailed that the Vietnamese Communists were the cat's-paw of an expansive USSR determined to establish Soviet hegemony over Southeast Asia. Despite the gaping fissures already apparent in international Communism, the movement was still seen largely as a monolith led by Moscow....

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