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Nobody could have imagined then that nearly 60,000 U.S. soldiers would die in that obscure corner of Southeast Asia. Nor, at that stage, could I have even remotely visualized that I was witnessing the opening shots of the longest war -- and first defeat -- in U.S. history.

Also Visit our Vietnam: 25 Years Later site for more articles like this one.

Today, a quarter-century since its abysmal end, Vietnam still haunts Americans. Colleges offer courses on the subject, and it has been the theme of novels, poems, plays, even a Broadway musical. It continues to provoke fierce debates, as its critics denounce it as a flagrant outrage and its advocates seek to vindicate it as a noble venture. But whatever it represents, it was a tragedy of epic dimensions for the United States as well as for Vietnam, where at least 3 million people, both soldiers and civilians, lost their lives.

Vietnam has also ingrained in Americans a reluctance to become bogged down in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia and East Timor. Their prudence is shared by the nation's top military men, who have cautioned against becoming mired in "another Vietnam" -- the metaphor for an unorthodox war without clearly defined objectives or an exit formula, and in which their regiments, accustomed to conventional tactics, would be snarled in a rugged terrain of dense jungles and impregnable swamps. In an emotional mea culpa published two years ago, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, wrote, "We were wrong, terribly wrong." Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a wounded veteran, sardonically commented that McNamara should have entitled his book "Sorry 'bout that."

Recently, in an attempt to justify the U.S. commitment, a featherweight group of neoconservative think-tankers (few of whom have any firsthand experience of either the country or the war) has begun rattling 30-year-old sabers, alleging that America broke its "word of honor" to its ally, asserting that the war could have been won and reviving the dubious domino-theory thesis that the war was necessary to halt the Soviet Union's global aspirations. This revisionist wave has been successful in landing its exponents on talk shows. It has been far less successful at convincing most experts. This is not surprising, for it has little basis in fact.

Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese communist leader, had been a covert Soviet agent, but he was essentially a nationalist. During World War II he organized a guerrilla force to fight against the Japanese, one of the few Asian leaders to do so; American advisors flew in to equip and train his men. Following World War II, when the French were bracing to retrieve their colony in Vietnam, he wrote to President Harry Truman pleading for help. Yet Truman and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower instead backed the French, whose hopeless cause was shattered in 1954, when Ho's ragtag band crushed French garrisons at the decisive battle of Dienbienphu.

At that juncture Ho expected to take over all of Vietnam, but he was compelled by the Russians and Chinese (who were seeking to improve relations with Europe) to accept a country partitioned into northern and southern zones. As Pham Van Dong, the North Vietnamese prime minister, confided to me in l98l, "We were betrayed by our own comrades." An election was scheduled to take place in 1956 to determine the nation's fate, but the South Vietnamese government reneged when it became clear that the communists were going to win. Frustrated, Ho Chi Minh turned to insurgency.

Next page | The myth of the "domino theory"