The heat of a million suns shimmered from the ground and bounced off the triple canopy that loomed above and created undulating waves, that blurred a man’s vision. Knap, looking like a ghost weaved his way forward through the rays of heat.

The Vietnam War was definitive in the lives of those who served. But those who made it home, never fully returned. My story was an attempt to find that part of me who remained in-country. Upon the story’s completion, I realized the part I left behind, was perpetually lost.

We were children of the 1950s and John Kennedy's young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with out white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truely the future he had envisioned for us.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

This looks like a real war zone to me. Thirty years ago, I was in Vietnam, and I haven't seen such devastation since then,