It’s taken almost a decade to get over it, to think it through.

When I was a boy, growing up in the America of the 50s and 60s, I was taught that this nation’s very name was synonymous with "good" and "right". To be an American was to be a part of that goodness. America was the best of all possible worlds and I felt both lucky and proud to live here.

America was, after all, "the land of the free and the home of the brave," and we didn’t fight a war unless it would serve the cause of justice.

And I believed all that, when I was a boy.

In America, I was told, all young men are willing to serve their country. All real Americans are willing to lay down even their lives, if necessary, to insure that their sons will have the same kind of America that they have. That willingness, they said, was the difference between being a boy and being a man.

And I believed that, too.

We were approaching the height of the Vietnam conflict when my draft notice arrived in late 1967. I wasn’t too upset about it because now I’d get my chance to "do my bit" – maybe even be a hero, just like John Wayne.

I went, I saw, and I was disillusioned.

In World War II, we took on the most awesome war machine ever assembled in the history of man. We stretched our forces all over the globe and, in less than four years, we emerged decisively and utterly victorious.

Everybody wanted to buy a veteran a drink.

Two decades later, armed with machines of death that were only science fiction in WWII, we took on a country smaller than California, fighting against people who sometimes fought back while armed only with rocks and spears. We spent 10 years and 50,000 American lives there before Nixon’s "peace with honor" brought us home.

Nobody wanted to buy a veteran a drink this time – but more than a few wouldn’t mind spitting in the one you were holding.

For the first time, America had been defeated, and by a tiny nation on the other side of the globe.

I was home in bed, staring between my toes at the TV screen, when the news personality said that Saigon was virtually in Communist hands. While he described the frantic evacuation of the American Embassy, a film came on showing Vietnamese refugees hurrying down the road toward the capitol city, their sparse belongings on their backs.

Then the scene changed abruptly to show those same refugees – women, children and old men – blown to bits. One of them had stepped on a land mine.

I was filled with an emptiness and sense of futility so intense that it was many minutes before I was able to cry.

Those people were supposed to have been the reason we had gone to Vietnam. They were dead now. Fifty thousand American soldiers were dead. The American spirit was dead. John Wayne was dead.

Somehow I felt guilty, lying there sobbing while I watched it all happen on my color TV, in my air conditioned home.

I felt unclean.

Only now have I been able to put much of it down on paper. Nobody wanted to talk about the war when I came home. Maybe it was part of a national guilt syndrome, but Vietnam veterans were shunned instead of welcomed home. We were reminders of a national shame.

The same society that told its young men to go to war now told them to keep quiet about it, and many veterans were made to feel guilty about their participation.

TV dramas, which painted heroic pictures of the WWI and WWII veterans, now depicted the Vietnam veteran as villain, giving the public a steady diet of him as deranged drug addict, murderer or thief.

Like many other Vietnam veterans, I drank a lot. And I traveled a lot, bouncing from town to town, job to job, not really caring much what happened anymore.

The disillusionment was total. What I was taught about America and had believed in as a child was proven false during and after my hitch in Vietnam.

Nobody taught me, when I came home, how to fit into a world totally different from the one I had left 18 months before – a world that didn’t want me to say anything about how I felt inside.

I learned that my country – the America I was taught to believe in as a child – was mostly a fantasy. People are what make a nation great or small, and Vietnam was this nation’s smallest hour.

Time heals, they say. It took a lot of time for me to be able to write what I’ve written here. I still don’t feel really comfortable about it; but somehow I don’t feel quite so threatened anymore, either.

Maybe time has healed the conscience of a nation.

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